The British have a great phrase for expressing the fact that someone is undergoing a particularly angering derangement syndrome. They simply say that someone "has a cob on." Well, Joan Walsh has had a massive cob on since early April, dating, specifically from the moment the President announced he was going to seek a second term in office.
Joan, being an unreconstructed PUMA, harboured hopes that Barack Obama would gallantly step aside after four years, so Hillary Clinton could step up to the plate and save America from a fate worse than death: a Dominionist-led Republican party intent on forming a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. The President could have been forgiven for doing just that, with the amount of vitriol coming from the so-called "Progressive" end of the Democratic party, criticizing his every action and parsing his ever word.
Joan, like Bill Maher, identifies with this tranche of Democrat, but often, like Bill Maher, she betrays herself as a dedicated follower of political fashion, a Madonna wannabe who, more often than not, revealed herself to be pragmatic and with an abundance of good common sense, based on a solid working class upbringing. In fact, as if to prove her Progressive credentials to people whom her mother would probably view as dubious company at best, she's often accused the President of "punching the hippy."
That's a pretty oxymoronic description of Progressives, who like to think of themselves as the natural successors to the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, considering the fact that these self-proclaimed successors are designer-clad, drink the finest wines, holiday in exclusive resorts, fly by private jet and employ people, some even illegally, for pathetically low wages, whilst pumping up their own credentials as spokesmen for the middle class. Besides, Joan's a few years younger than I. She was a little kid in elementary school, when I was in junior high and actually knowing some bona fide hippies who tuned in, turned on and dropped out of mainstream society.
