...it looks like you have a rival. Richard Cohen has a column today in which he makes a compelling case for his role as the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.
In florid, breathless prose, Cohen writes about the terrible injustice of the Libby prosecution. Here's an excerpt to give the flavor of the thing:
The upshot was a train wreck....The special counsel used the immense power of the government to jail Judith Miller and to compel other journalists, including Time's Matt Cooper, to suspend their various and sacred vows of silence just so they could, understandably, avoid jail. The press held itself up to mockery, wantonly promising confidentiality, anonymity -- what's the diff, anyway? -- and virtual life after death to anyone with a piece of gossip to peddle. Much heroic braying turned into cries for mercy as the government bore down....Yes, gentle reader, it's true; Cohen is so appallingly stupid that he has no idea what the investigation did show: that Dick Cheney orchestrated a conspiracy to destroy critics of administration policy, using any means available, including but not limited to leaking the name of a covert agent.
As Fitzgerald worked his wonders, threatening jail and going after government gossips with splendid pluck, many opponents of the Iraq war cheered. They thought -- if "thought" can be used in this context -- that if the thread was pulled on who had leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to Robert D. Novak, the effort to snooker an entire nation into war would unravel and this would show . . . who knows?
Cohen is also apparently incapable of distinguishing between genuine sources and government officials using reporters to spread disinformation and otherwise do their dirty work. But then, Cohen isn't alone on that.
Here's some more, if you can stand it:
This is precisely the sort of investigation that Jackson was warning about. It would not have been conducted if, say, the Iraq war had ended with 300 deaths and the mission had really been accomplished. An unpopular war produced the popular cry for scalps and, in Libby's case, the additional demand that he express contrition -- a vestigial Stalinist-era yearning for abasement. No one has yet explained, though, how Libby can express contrition and still appeal his conviction. No matter. Antiwar sanctimony excuses the inexplicable.Where to begin? Apparently Cohen believes that the DOJ investigated not at the formal request of the CIA, but because a bunch of us DFH types demanded it. He seems to think the decision to investigate was contingent on the casualty count. He is convinced that the expectation that criminals show remorse is a symptom of incipient totalitarianism. He sees prosecution in itself as a monstrous violation of civil liberties. He fails to understand that no underlying crime charged is not the same as no underlying crime committed.
Accountability is one thing. By all means, let Congress investigate and conduct oversight hearings with relish and abandon. But a prosecution is a different matter. It entails the government at its most coercive -- a power so immense and sometimes so secretive that it poses much more of a threat to civil liberties, including freedom of the press, than anything in the interstices of the scary Patriot Act....the underlying crime is absent, the sentence is excessive and the investigation should not have been conducted in the first place.
In short, he is completely, fundamentally, irredeemably clueless on every single detail of the thing.
In fairness to Cohen, of course, while his stupidity rival's Feith's in its magnitude, it is far less destructive. After all, Feith engineered our glorious victory in Iraq; Cohen was just a cheerleader.
Update: and once again, Cohen proves that the one thing he's good at is giving cover to the wingnuts. There are already posts at Heading Right and Captain's Quarters titled, respectively, A Liberal Defends Scooter Libby and The Liberal Case for Scooter Libby.
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