Backassword

Shorter Richard Cohen: "Hate crime laws are the real hate crimes."

Cohen Ready for Closeup, Mr. DeMille

Shorter Richard Cohen:

Michael Moore Barack Obama is fat fit.

You see, this is Richard Cohen's life! It always will be! Nothing else!

No. More. Wire. Hangerrrrrzzzzzzz!!@1

If Cohen Dearest has told us once he's told us a thousand times: clean up your Dirty Fucking Hippies, or I will clean them up for you! Here's the heart of today's installment:

Blogger Alert: I have written a column in defense of Dick Cheney....

[C]an we also find out what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it?...

...If even a stopped clock is right twice a day, this could be Cheney's time.

Honestly, Richard. Next time just show us your panties and be done with it.

Inside Edition

Shorter Richard Cohen: "Senator Obama, I've interviewed Joe Biden. I know Joe Biden. Joe Biden is a friend of mine. Senator Obama, Joe Biden is no Lloyd Bentsen."

P.S. Yes, this shorter is lame -- just like the Cohen column. Bentsen was every bit the "gentleman" that Cohen feels Biden is, yet he got off probably the most famous attack line in VP debate history. Biden will be gunning for similar glory, and even if he fails there, he's well poised to work the GOP body hard and inside.

P.P.S. All of which proves I'm a communist.

Summer of Love

Who better to kick it off than Richard Cohen?

...McCain, who wakes up every morning being as decent a person as there is...

Note that this is an actual quote, completely unfucked-with by any blogger.

Willful Ignorance: Bug or Feature?

Tom Maguire takes exception to Richard Cohen's column praising Obama for not wearing a flag pin. It's a stupid and trivial column, all right...but that's not what Maguire sees as the problem. What he objects to is that it's insufficiently anti-Obama. His closing:

I am trying to imagine Cohen delivering this column with "McCain" substituted for "Obama" throughout. E.g., the conclusion:

Still, it is bracing to see a presidential candidate recoil, for the most part, from the orthodoxies of pandering. In this regard, the lack of a flag pin has become an important sign of [McCain's] desire to think for himself. For all it says about [McCain], I salute it.

Yes, it's hard to imagine Richard Cohen go on and on about how John McCain is a saint...oh, never mind.

And of course that's just one of many big wet sloppy kisses Richard Cohen has planted on St. McCain. Anybody who has been paying attention at all knows that Cohen, along with the rest of the Washington press corps, loves McCain to pieces. They perceive McCain's virtues as integral to his character, and dismiss his vices as momentary aberrations. Everyone knows this.

Everyone, that is, except people who don't want to know it.

Which apparently includes Tom Maguire. Because if he took the thirty seconds to Google it he'd find out his whole premise is completely wrong...and we wouldn't want that to happen, would we?

Racerhead

Shorter Richard Cohen: "Obama's still a black man '(one out of every nine is in criminal custody).'"

Narcissus Blooms

Shorter Richard Cohen: "Give war a chance."

Cohen's argument today really is that insipid. He takes the publication of novelist Nicholson Baker's pacifist book about WWII as yet another excuse to try to justify his cheerleading for the disastrous war in Iraq. He dispenses along the way with both the actual details of Nicholson's WWII argument and the consequences of his own Iraq war. What we get instead is a standard paean to the awful necessity of war:

What's worrisome about the Baker book is that the attention it has gotten -- much of it critical -- is not just a testament to his reputation as a writer but also to the questions he has raised about war itself. Is any war, outside of direct self-defense, worth fighting?...

One casualty of a bad war such as that in Iraq is the growing feeling that no war is worth the cost....

The most horrible weapon in any arsenal is the madness of men. We see this time and time again, and sometimes the only way to stop them is by war. "War is an ugly thing," John Stuart Mill wrote, "but not the ugliest of things." Far uglier, he wrote, is the feeling that nothing in life is worth fighting for....

But probably the ugliest thing is to write such a line, like Mill, never having gone to war. Or maybe it's, like Cohen, to consign others to death in an adventure nearly identical to the one you yourself once wrote of rejecting:

It was only later, when I myself was in the Army, that I deemed the [Vietnam] war not worth killing or dying for. By then I [...] no longer felt it was winnable, and I did not want to lose my life so that somehow defeat could be managed more elegantly.

Poor Richard Cohen. He should have quit while he was ahead.

Strangelove

Richard Cohen is soaking in it: "McCain, in fact, oozes national security."

Cannot Tell a Lie

Shorter Richard Cohen: "John McCain is too too good for this fallen world."

Deus ex non sequitur somnium

Richard Cohen rides a painted pony lets the spinning wheel spin:

How such a feat can be accomplished -- how the electoral college can be won and how an independent can govern with a Congress composed of Democrats and Republicans -- is not the issue for the moment. Instead, what animates and energizes the hope of a Bloomberg candidacy is the utter failure of the current political establishment to deal with, not to mention solve, the immense problems facing us.

And he's all School of Rove on congressional Democrats. Such a serious thinker.

Three-Card Cohen

Shorter Richard Cohen: Your cynicism over all the bullshit we've fed you these past seven years is entirely George W. Bush's fault. And you're hurting our country.

In Through the Out Door

Shorter Richard Cohen: Sen. Larry Craig is such a hypocrite on gay issues death penalty appeals.

Richard Cohen Misses His MoveOn Moment

Richard Cohen is being Richard Cohen, slamming Hillary Clinton for failing to condemn that MoveOn ad that got the wingnuts in such a tizzy. Cohen's description of the ad:

The swipe at Petraeus was contained in a full-page ad the anti-war group MoveOn.org recently placed in The New York Times. It charged that Petraeus was "cooking the books" about conditions in Iraq and cited statements of his that have turned out to be either (1) not true, (2) no longer true, (3) possibly not true, or (4) like everything else in Iraq, impossible to tell. Whatever the case, using "betray" -- a word associated with treason -- recalls the ugly McCarthy era when, for too many Republicans, dissent corresponded with disloyalty. MoveOn.org and the late senator from Wisconsin share a certain fondness for the low blow.

It was a stupid ad, but really--Joe McCarthy? I'll let Steve M handle this jaw-dropping bit of false moral equivalence, and move on to the question everyone must be asking: how on earth can Cohen make the MoveOn ad--an ad produced by private parties with no connection at all to Senator Clinton--reflect poorly on her?

The obvious answer: it's the 'character', stupid.

The issue with Hillary Clinton is not whether she's smart or experienced but whether she has -- how do we say this? -- the character to be president. Behind her, after all, trails the lingering vapor of all those gates: Travel, File, Whitewater, and other scandals to which she was a part only through marriage. In a hatless society, she is always wearing a question mark.

Yes, Hillary Clinton is forever tainted by scandals that were cooked up by Republicans for the purpose of destroying them. For Richard Cohen, a question mark is a question mark--even if the question in question happens to be the schoolyard bully's classic: "Why do you keep hitting yourself?"

And as with the pseudo-scandals of the past, the fact that this one was created out of whole cloth by the wingnuts all but escapes Cohen's attention. Here's all he has to say about that:

Certain Republicans, particularly Rudy Giuliani, have attempted to exploit the MoveOn.org ad for their own political purposes, even wondering if the Times violated election law by selling the page at a (standard) discount. This is silly.

That's in the seventh paragraph.

But none of that matters to Cohen. For him,

The MoveOn.org ad was the moment for Clinton to rise above hackdom.

And when will Cohen seize his own moment to rise above hackdom? I'm not holding my breath.

Update: See also Ezra Klein on the unbearable triviality of Richard Cohen.

Magical Mystery War

Taking time out from a column in which he uses the thinnest of pretexts to compare Rudy! to JFK, Richard Cohen complains of George Bush's "magical thinking" about "a happy outcome in Iraq." In contrast to our dreamy president, Cohen the hardened realist harbors no illusions about what must occur next in this war that he strongly advocated:

...[T]here's an agonizing war in Iraq that needs to end in a fashion that will not turn a mistake into a debacle -- for Iraq, for the region and for the security of Americans here in the United States.

That's all there is to it. The war "needs to end," note the passive voice, in a triple backward Salchow hat trick hole-in-one threepeat. As for where we might find this pony, Cohen has neither magical nor practical ideas to offer. In ending the war, as in starting it, he simply leaves the details to the devil.

Update: I just realized this is yesterday's Cohen column. But the war goes on.

Ridiculous Quote of the Day

Richard Cohen, on Fred Thompson's lies about lobbying on behalf of a pro-choice group:

Lest you think I am some sort of partisan hack, I have similar misgivings about John Edwards and his $400 haircuts.

Cohen proceeds in this vein for four paragraphs, culminating in the most tortured Clinton/Monica reference you'll ever see. He's written some doozies, but this might be his creepiest column ever.

Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

Shorter Richard Cohen: "They hate us for our principles, which are superior to those of Russia, China and Cuba."

Richard Cohen and Pete the Greek

Richard Cohen, 12/6/04:

Outing an undercover agent...could be dangerous for the agent.

It turns out, though, that it has been much more dangerous to the press....

As one who once was on the receiving end of a subpoena demanding that I reveal my sources, I can tell you what happens in these cases: Your phone goes dead. No one will talk to you. As for the public, it is deprived of information....

It's not clear why Cooper was subpoenaed. It's not clear why Miller was subpoenaed. It's not clear if Novak ever was or, if so, what he did about it. What is abundantly clear is that somehow a targeted investigation has gone wildly off track, with reporters apparently being asked to account for stories they have not even written....

Maybe if Fitzgerald were a politician, like Ashcroft, he would appreciate the value of a leak and how it has become an intrinsic part of our democracy. He might even feel compelled to explain himself to the public -- anonymously of course, to reporters he can trust.

My number's in the book, Pat.

Richard Cohen, 10/12/05:

As it is, all he has done so far is send Judith Miller of the New York Times to jail....

I have no idea what Fitzgerald will do. My own diligent efforts to find out anything have come to naught....

Whatever the case, I pray Fitzgerald is not going to reach for an indictment or, after so much tumult, merely fold his tent, not telling us, among other things, whether Miller is the martyr to a free press that I and others believe she is....

This -- this creepy silence -- will be the consequence of dusting off rarely used statutes to still the tongues of leakers and intimidate the press in its pursuit of truth, fame and choice restaurant tables. Apres Miller comes moi.

Richard Cohen, 4/9/07:

In fact, the compulsively compulsive Patrick Fitzgerald not only knew early on who the leaker was but also that no law had been violated. No matter. Fitzgerald valiantly persisted, jailing Judith Miller of the New York Times for refusing to reveal her sources....

Richard Cohen, 6/18/07:

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....

For some odd reason, the same people who were so appalled about government snooping, the USA Patriot Act and other such threats to civil liberties cheered as the special prosecutor weed-whacked the press, jailed a reporter....

But a prosecution...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.

Richard Cohen, 6/20/07:

I'll say that the ability of the press to ferret out information and use anonymous sources and to guarantee to those sources that they'll remain confidential has been shredded by this case. Reporter after reporter was compelled to give up their sources. This has been a very bad case for the American press and for the American public and it's all about nothing. A leak.

Graham Greene, 1938, in The Lawless Roads¹:

...I went to Pete's bar and had a brandy and Coca Cola highball. Pete was a Greek and had been in America for thirty-seven years, but he couldn't speak enough English for you to notice it. Germany was a fine country, he said; America was no good at all; Greece wasn't so bad - his opinions puzzled me till I realized that he judged every country by its drink laws - I suppose, if you are in the business, that's as good a way as any other. We writers are apt to judge a country by freedom of the Press, and politicians by freedom of speech - it's the same, really.

Emphasis added. Hat tip: me.



¹Greene, a recent convert to Catholicism, proceeds to judge Mexico entirely on how terribly they have persecuted the poor persecuted Catholic Church. I see this passage as his apology-in-advance for the entire rest of the book.

Move Over, Doug Feith...

...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....

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cohen on Gore

The thing about Richard Cohen is that even when he's right, he just can't help saying something egregiously stupid.

Today's column praises Gore as "a man who did not quit," who "accepted defeat graciously and tried to unite the nation, who returned to the consuming passion of his earlier days, the environment," and who "gives us all a lesson on how to live one's life." All fair enough, if overwritten, and it should be good to see Gore get his due from a member of the Pundit Class.

And yet...

This is the bit that made me tear my hair out:

It's a joke, isn't it? I mean, it was Gore who was universally seen as the flawed man, uncomfortable in his own skin and, therefore, in this TV age, incapable of uniting the nation. He was caricatured by some of my colleagues as a serial exaggerator, a fibber, a pretender -- the guy who invented the Internet, who was the model for the novel (and movie) "Love Story," who applied one too many coats of passion to that kiss he delivered to his wife, Tipper, at the Democratic National Convention in 2000. There were so many reasons not to vote for him -- none, in retrospect, much good.

Shorter Richard Cohen: I wasn't mean to Al--it was those other kids.

This would be the Richard Cohen who, in 1998, was claiming Gore gave too little to charity; in 1999, deriding Gore for dressing more casually and hiring Naomi Wolf; in 2000, helping feed the "unlikable" narrative; and in 2004, saying Gore stabbed Lieberman in the back.

"Some of my colleagues", my ass. Cohen was part of the problem (on Gore, as on Iraq), and his refusal to acknowledge that makes him still part of the problem.