Joan Walsh is a regular pundit for the MSNBC Chris Matthews Hardball show. She is also editor for Salon. A committed liberal hack, who is now screaming mad at anyone who points out the HHS failures for Obamacare.
(Salon) — As predictably as night follows day, on Monday the media establishment pivoted away from obsessing about GOP extremism and the party’s alleged “civil war” to the “train wreck” that is, allegedly, the Affordable Care Act.
And liberals helped lead the pivot.
Don’t get me wrong: The problems with Healthcare.gov are real, and disturbing, and must be fixed asap. (Think Progress has a dispassionate assessment here.)
But excuse me if I believe the president knows that without my telling him. It’s like watching the 21st century version of the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council, and I feel the way I did back then: On the one hand, yes, it’s important for Democrats to acknowledge when government screws up, and to fix it.
On the other hand, when liberals rush conscientiously to do that, they only encourage the completely unbalanced and unhinged coverage of whatever the problem may be.
It was predictable that the media would go nuts about this today, given that they’ve spent so much time having their noses rubbed in how insane the GOP has become, after trying so hard, for so long, to ignore it. It feels like a law of nature.
Nature abhors a vacuum; media nature abhors a false-equivalence vacuum. I feel like I saw it start on Thursday, when the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, a writer I like and admire, tweeted something farcical. (read more)
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