Political Cynic as Political Archeologist.

Here is Joan Walsh’s essay from 2002 on Nader’s book “Crashing the Party” that gets lost in her logorrhea.

Headline: The (non-)confessions of St. Ralph

Sub-headline: Ralph Nader’s new book makes it painfully clear that he has no idea how to build a left-wing alternative to the Democrats. But when you’re pure of heart and unsullied by politics, who cares? By Joan Walsh of January 17, 2002

https://www.salon.com/2002/01/17/nader_33/

It’s official: Green Party spoiler Ralph Nader gave the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 by stealing votes from Al Gore. “The Simpsons” tells us so: The Jan. 6 episode featured Homer’s boss Mr. Burns at a meeting of Springfield Republicans, asking what new “unspeakable evil” the party can come up with. One rumpled fellow is waving his hand, ooh-ooh-oohing for attention like a schoolboy, but Burns dismisses him: “You’ve already done enough, Nader.”

Ouch! Sucks to be Nader! The nation’s foremost anti-corporate crusader lampooned by its foremost anti-corporate sitcom? It isn’t fair. But the notion that Nader is to blame for Bush’s presidency had hardened into fact for bitter Democrats even before Simpsons creator Matt Groening made it funny. In his new book, “Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President,” Nader carps about it nonstop; an appendix features the full text of a self-righteous Nation essay by lefty actor, Nader backer (and husband of Susan Sarandon) Tim Robbins, who complains about being attacked at parties by Gore voters who snarl at him: “We hope you’re happy now!” — meaning now that he helped elect (is that the right word?) President Bush. They even harass his and Susan’s children!

These are just the first two paragraphs of Walsh’s 4,175 word meandering screed against Nader. Given the ever present sense of betrayal, the reader might imagine this ‘essay’ as the vivid complaints of Mrs. Portnoy, to her analysts, about her son’s waywardness? Or the toxic effects of Pop Stylist Tom Wolfe? Walsh political shaming of Cornel West is a bit more compact. Yet both are steeped in an utter vulgarized Political Journalism of the present.

Walsh diagnoses West, and his unseemly brush with Anti-Semitism?

This is a downhill spiral even for West, who also spiraled downward after Obama’s victory. He trashed the president he’d endorsed on multiple platforms. Some called it personal: The bellhop at West’s hotel on Inauguration weekend wound up with tickets to the event when West didn’t. Obama stopped returning his calls. I don’t know. But a weird animus seemed to drive his attacks on our first Black president.

West tried to frame his opposition as a universalist defense of poor and working-class people. They didn’t get enough help from Obama’s Wall Street–adjacent administration, I admit. But calling the president “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats” was awful. West went on to claim that Obama was afraid of “free black men” thanks to his white ancestry and Ivy League education. (West was at Princeton then, after stints at Harvard and Yale.)

“[Obama] feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” West went on.

Asked about that by The New York Times, West replied:

It’s in no way an attempt to devalue white or Jewish brothers. It’s an objective fact. In his administration, he’s got a significant number of very smart white brothers and very smart Jewish brothers. You think that’s unimportant?

West told Obama, outright, that he would he would be his most ruthless critic. Party Apparatchiks like Walsh can’t abide a Deviationist.

No more time wasted on Joan, Michael Tomasky opines/denounces the Slackers, Deviationist, And Putin Apologists/Fellow Travelers.

Headline: Democrats, Wake the Hell Up!

Sub-headline: President Biden has amassed a historic record in his first term. Why aren’t he and his party bragging about it?

https://newrepublic.com/article/173904/biden-democrats-wake-hell-up

…

Biden has been a terrific president. The big legislation. The way he played Kevin McCarthy on the debt deal. The global leadership against Putin. The plain human decency restored to the White House after four years of self-obsessed thuggery. Oh—the 13 million jobs created since he took office, which is more jobs in 28 months than created under any other president, in all of our history, in a full four-year term.

…

A nincompoop conspiracy theorist is facing Biden in the Democratic primary. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a right-wing loon who spoke last week at a Moms for Liberty summit.

…

Its impossible for Tomasky to grasp, that the Collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, has rendered the Two Party State into an Age Of Fracture.

And it will probably do the same, to a lesser extent, with Cornel West, who has thrown in with Putin sympathizer Jill Stein (West has denounced Putin’s war in Ukraine, but his campaign website also calls for disbanding NATO, which would effectively free Putin to behave with impunity in his “near abroad”).

…

And yet he’s under attack from four sides (Kennedy, West, No Labels, and the GOP). His age is his age (I’ll have more to say about that in a future column). But he is what stands between us and fascism, and he’s gotten far more done than anyone would have dared imagine. Democrats, get it together.

Political Cynic