Mirror, Mirror

You'd think the left would be celebrating non-stop since the last election. They've got the White House and run the House and Senate by large margins. It's their dream come true. If they haven't been able to get everything they want, it's because so much of what they want is opposed by the majority of the country. Besides, no one ever gets everything they want.

Yet I've been seeing a number of pieces from the left whining about how poorly things have turned out. (This is before the November elections. Can't they at least wait?)

One of the longest pieces comes from Eric Alterman in The Nation--"Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency Is Impossible, for Now." It starts thus:

Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment.

You might think such disappointment would lead them to look inward. Could it be we've gotten so little because what we want just won't fly? Or maybe we've got some bad ideas? (Or maybe we've gotten a lot and just don't appreciate it?) But Alterman lashes out at everyone else, starting at the top.

It's possible that [Obama] fooled gullible progressives during the election into believing he was a left-liberal partisan when in fact he is much closer to a conservative corporate shill. An awful lot of progressives, including two I happen to know who sport Nobel Prizes on their shelves, feel this way, and their perspective cannot be completely discounted.

Oh, I think they can be completely discounted. (I love the Nobel touch--as if winning one, no matter in what category, means we should take their personal political beliefs more seriously). And I think the counter-narrative, which Alterman is fully aware of--that Obama sold himself as a moderate and has been nothing of the kind--is far more supported by the facts than this progressive purity test of Alterman's.

But the piece is too endless to go over line by line. Let me get to the most interesting part. A lot of the blame belongs to the....right wing media!!!

Yep, you remember them. The guys who were so powerful that the Dems took back the Congress in 2006 and Obama was swept into office in 2008, along with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. But somehow, this same group has managed to put the hoodoo over people since then, convincing them to fight against their very elected representatives. (By the way, there was no "right-wing media" as we understand it when Reagan won in the 80s, so what could possibly be the explanation then?)

When you start lashing out at the media, it's usually time to go home. I've always felt the right spends way too much time obsessing over how left the media is, but the left obsessing over the right-wing media is, if anything, more absurd.

My favorite line in Alterman's piece is one he borrowed. Quoting (and arguably misunderstanding) Charles M. Blow, he calls the right-wing media "Apostles of Anger in their echo chamber of fallacies." I felt I'd heard that before. So I checked.

Sure enough, John Lahr, in The New Yorker, thought this embarrassing phrase so brilliant he also quoted it.

So those on the left keep referring to Charles Blow's line to help make harsh yet questionable arguments about the right. Apostles of anger? Check. Echo chamber? Check. Fallacies? Check. I can see why the phrase resonates with them.