As predictably as night follows day, on Monday the media establishment pivoted away from obsessing about GOP extremism and the party’s alleged “civil war” to the “train wreck” that is, allegedly, the Affordable Care Act.

And liberals helped lead the pivot.

Don’t get me wrong: The problems with Healthcare.gov are real, and disturbing, and must be fixed asap. (Think Progress has a dispassionate assessment here.) But excuse me if I believe the president knows that without my telling him. It’s like watching the 21st century version of the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council, and I feel the way I did back then: On the one hand, yes, it’s important for Democrats to acknowledge when government screws up, and to fix it.

On the other hand, when liberals rush conscientiously to do that, they only encourage the completely unbalanced and unhinged coverage of whatever the problem may be.

It was predictable that the media would go nuts about this today, given that they’ve spent so much time having their noses rubbed in how insane the GOP has become, after trying so hard, for so long, to ignore it. It feels like a law of nature. Nature abhors a vacuum; media nature abhors a false-equivalence vacuum. I feel like I saw it start on Thursday, when the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, a writer I like and admire, tweeted something farcical:

Who will be more discredited this year: conservatives for pushing us to brink of default or liberals for failure of health care exchanges?

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) October 16, 2013

I replied:

C’mon @RyanLizza, are you trying to parody false equivalence? You’re way smarter than that!

— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) October 16, 2013

And he shot back:

@joanwalsh The ACA is the most important liberal project in decades. If it fails, it is a complete disaster for liberalism.

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) October 16, 2013

That seemed premature to me – even a disastrous website rollout can’t be a stand-in for the entire Affordable Care Act — but of course Lizza’s pronouncement was retweeted widely and for days. The Washington Post’s great Ezra Klein then picked up the cudgel, telling the crew at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where every Obama misstep foretells the end of his presidency, that the Health and Human Services Department is covering up a massive “management failure,” because they had enough pre-launch information to know there were going to be massive problems and neither adjusted their rollout plan or prepared the public.

That’s fair, but then Klein took to Twitter and began sharing his experience trying to sign up for healthcare over the phone, and complained about “the lack of hold music.” Twitter replied with a trending hashtag #ezrakleinsholdmusic.