The Left Eats Their Insufficiently Progressive Own

Poor Lena Dunham, after performing exceptional lip service in support of President Obama's get out the vote efforts -- literally offering her all in the service of his reelection -- the poor empty-headed progressive can't escape the harsh scrutiny of the school of Marxist literary/film criticism.

Instapundit links to The Daily Beast's article: ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ Lena Dunham, ‘Django’: Stop Politicizing Everything!. The article notes Lena Dunhamn's show Girls is getting flack for being insufficient in color content:

The latest and highest-profile target is Girls creator and star Lena Dunham, who, if you listen to her critics, might very well be Brooklyn Heights’s own Orville Faubus. A brief recapitulation of the story so far: It all started when Jenna Wortham, a New York Times reporter, writing for a blog call The Hairpin, reported that upon seeing a promotional poster for Girls her “heart dropped and I swallowed once, hard. Girls. White girls.” In response, America’s culture critics got to work sifting through the evidence of Dunham’s subterranean racism.

When Dunham said the all-white cast was “a complete accident”—she wrote about her friends, and these were her friends—a New Yorker writer responded that this was “maybe so” and allowed that the lack of black characters was “perhaps inadvertent,” two weasel words that left open the possibility the show was scripted and cast by bigots. Atlantic Wire writer Elspeth Reeve suggested that, if the show was indeed a reflection of Dunham’s social life, “she should expand her circle” of friends.

In response to the expanding controversy, Girls writer Lesley Arfin tweeted sarcastically, “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” This too was deemed racist (she later deleted the tweet), as were a number of other things she had previously written. The narrative was established: the girls of Girls were rich, privileged, and, if the critic was feeling charitable, deeply insensitive.

Poor Dunham. Even after a public display of enthusiastic electoral jungle fever, she gets accused of racism by of all terrors, a New York Times reporter - in a blog, not even in the paper of record itself.

Being a good leftist and hewing to the dictat of her tribe, she and the show's writer, instead of telling this nobody to take a hike and quit inventing controversy where none exists, immediately confessed their thought-crimes:

In the face of this ferocious stupidity, Dunham performed her ablutions. “I take that criticism very seriously,” she told NPR. “As much as I can say [writing four white main characters] was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, I hear this, and I want to respond to it.” The new season of Girls assigned her character a black boyfriend, who also happened to be a Republican (a sly joke, perhaps, about tokenism). Arfin too offered a po-faced confession, adopting the language of her accusers: “Without thinking, I put gender politics above race and class. That was careless.”

Of course, in the leftist mind, all things are political or in service to progressive political goals. That means that "artists" like Dunham are always under a cloud of suspicion race and gender identity politics. Dunham, even while self-identifying as a leftist and being of service to the left found out her show fails to meet the latest in progressive performance requirements.

After all, it's hard out there being a vapid progressive.