The Passion of the Dersh
By 
I must concur with this salute to the reporters who persuaded their bosses to fund a nice trip to cover America’s least important story:
Talking your editor into assigning you to go on vacation to Martha’s Vineyard to report on Alan Dershowitz is a really A+ grift.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 4, 2018
And he’s still whining!
So you’d think Dershowitz would be able to take some blowback from former political allies in stride. But no: In an op-ed for the Hill last week, he publicly whined about his terrible persecution by denizens of Martha’s Vineyard, the island off Cape Cod where many rich and famous people (including Dershowitz) spend large portions of every summer, saying he had been subjected to “shunning” from “old friends” who are “trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard.” He then invited derision by comparing this treatment to “McCarthyism,” as though his social discomfort is equivalent to the catastrophic loss of careers and even liberty at the hands of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.
Believe it or not, the Dershowitz war with Martha’s Vineyard is dragging on into a second week, as some of his Spanish Inquisition–style persecutors take to the fiendishly radical medium of email to torment him further, as reported by the Boston Globe:
Walter Teller, a prominent Los Angeles entertainment lawyer and longtime Vineyard resident, sent Dershowitz and others in their circle an e-mail explaining the sudden estrangement….
“You proudly announce where you have dined and with whom, going so far as to send out pictures of the menu of your meal with Trump at the White House,” Teller wrote. “And then you complain publicly when you are not invited to dinner.”
Dershowitz fired back with his own email, and he also mixed it up in the presence of a cc’d group with Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. It does seem, however, that Trump’s new friend isn’t simply crouching in his summer home, subsisting on catered meals and fearfully awaiting the fateful knock on the door:
[R]eached Tuesday night, Dershowitz was on his way to the annual soiree hosted by designer Kenneth Cole and his wife, Maria Cuomo.
“I was never lamenting or whining about the fact that people are trying to punish me,” he said. “I was exposing it. I stand by my principles. I’m very proud of it. I challenge them to have a conversation with me.”
Maybe Fox and Friends can carry it live.
I am ashamed that America is repeating the same mistakes of McCarthyism, in which suspected communists were invited to slightly fewer Martha’s Vineyard dinner parties and received the occasional acerbic email.
Obligatory:
omfg alan dershowitz is on national tv right now relaying stories about what people have told him other people at martha's vineyards parties are saying about him and there aren't enough lulz in the world for me right now pic.twitter.com/10SFVIp0WE
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) July 6, 2018
Anyway, this is all a setup to this joke from stepped pyramids:
Mark Penn, Dick Morris, Lanny Davis, Doug Schoen, and Alan Dershowitz walk into a bar. Then someone boards up the door and they spend the rest of their lives arguing about who was left behind by the Democratic Party more. The end, no moral.
It’s funny because it would be awesome.