The Swiss got it right. Their refusal to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the United States on a 33-year-old sex charge is the proper dénouement for this mess of a case. There is no doubt that Polanski did what he did, which is have sex with a 13-year-old after plying her with booze. There is no doubt also that after all these years there is something stale about the case, not to mention a “victim,” Samantha Geimer, who has long ago forgiven her assailant and dearly wishes the whole thing would go away. So do I.

Shorter Richard Cohen: “Raping children is OK with me.”

“Maybe? Maybe you should write columns kicking the Democrats in the pants for forgetting who they represent. Maybe you should get angry yourself. Maybe you should remember who you are and where you come from?”

Richard Cohen doesn’t believe that overturning Roe v. Wade would be a problem for poor women. Richard Cohen supported the war in Iraq. Richard Cohen is fine with pardoning Scooter Libby and thinks Democrats should stop complaining. Cohen thinks it’;s too early to judge whether Bush is a bad president.

Richard Cohen has spent the last ten years or more telling democrats to forget who they represent. He should spend the next ten years with a ball-gag in his mouth and his hands securely cuffed and kept far from a typewriter.

This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.

That’s the inestimable Richard Cohen, who is so infernally stupid and willfully dimwitted, he’s got his own category here at Brendan Calling, Richard Cohen Is An Idiot. Today’s column, a lovely cast of Richard’s lower intestine is no different, a wholesale defense of Scooter Libby the felon. As Glenn Greenwald astutely notes,

“That really is the central belief of our Beltway press, captured so brilliantly by Cohen in this perfect nutshell. When it comes to the behavior of our highest and most powerful government officials, our Beltway media preaches, “it is often best to keep the lights off.” If that isn’t the perfect motto for our bold, intrepid, hard-nosed political press, then nothing is.

As Greenwald called attention to the panoply of lies and falsehoods in Cohen’s column, everything from “Scooter wasn’t the leaker” to “there was no real crime” I found myself reflecting on my own correspondence with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Monica Yant Kinney: as regular readers may recall, I was critical of her recent column in which she called out Cindy Sheehan for associating with “Venezuela’s America-hating leader, Hugo Chavez.” That simply isn’t true: as I pointed out, under Chavez’s leadership, Venezuela contributed gasoline to the US in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (something no other country did), and CITGO, the state-owned oil company provides cut rate heating oil to America’s poor, supplementing our own government’s cuts to LIHEAP, even in the face of ever increasing belligerence from our Pweznit.

I didn’t publish our correspondence, but perhaps I should have, because Kinney’s response was telling.

Dear Brendan,
Thanks for the note, but I should clarify one thing: I write columns,
not straight news articles. Hence the choice of words and tone.

Appreciate you reading and weighing in,
Monica Yant Kinney

Does that make any sense at all? “I’m a columnist so I don’t write straight news”? Does having a newspaper column bestow on a writer the right to print lies and falsehoods? I don’t think so, and wrote back to Kinney:

Hi Monica,

I understand that you write columns, not straight news: I think you’re missing my point.

My point is that the words and tone you chose conveyed inaccurate information, and that conveying inaccurate conventional wisdom has clearly led the US to disastrous results in the middle east.

Amazingly, Kinney disagreed:

Dear David,

No, I understood your point. We just disagree.

Chavez is a master showman. He may not dislike our citizens as a whole, but he’s hardly a big fan of America as a country, business or military machine.

Monica Yant Kinney

Besides the fact that my name’s not David, Kinney just won’t accept that she’s wrong, won’t even address it: Chavez is not a fan of the United States military or business interests (go figure: the leader of a Latin American country doesn’t trust the US, I wonder why), thus he hates America. By that definition most of the world, and a good percentage of America, hates America. All that cheap fuel, all that support for the victims of Katrina (more support than our own government provided) mean bupkes. In Kinney’s opinion, Chavez hates America: it’s an opinion born of ignorance, misunderstanding, and acceptance of conventional wisdom: lazy journalism, a failure to check facts, and a refusal to acknowledge that reality should play a part in reaching a conclusion. Monica Yant Kinney says Chavez hates America, and by God all the facts in the world are not going to change that opinion. God help the defendant when Kinney serves on a jury: she can probably identify the guilty with a glance, no need for testimony.

Which brings me back to Cohen, another writer who abuses his real estate at the Washington Post to spread lies and falsehoods under the guise of “opinion writing”. For as long as I’ve read Cohen, he has taken the exact same tactic to muddy the waters, distort the news, and spread rank misinformation. “It’s just my opinion” is a shameless and vile way to evade responsibility for one’s words, which in Cohen’s case helped pave the way to war and the death of thousands of US troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

“I am only expressing my opinion” is one thing when you’re a crank at the end of the bar pontificating about one thing or the other. It is a different thing entirely when you have a piece of real estate on the pages of the Washington Post, the NY Times, or even the Philadelphia Inquirer (aka, the Stinky). You have a responsibility to think out your opinion based on the facts, and you have a responsibility to consider ALL THE FACTS, not just the ones you happen to agree with. Writing a newspaper column does not give you the right to print lies, ie opinions based on deliberate misinformation or opinions that deliberately seek to spread misinformation. But that is what people like Richard Cohen do on a daily basis.

If the Post’s op-ed page had any integrity at all, Richard Cohen would have been given a pink slip years ago (his record of sexual harassment alone should have been enough to send him packing). But the Post’s op-ed does not have any integrity: witness their stable of liars and dissemblers, from Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt’s countless dishonest defenses of the war in Iraq, to the paper’s repeated failure to identify op-ed contributor and “surge” defender Fred Kagan’s role as the architect of that same surge, to the paper’s attempts at jury tampering in the Libby case, and on and on.

There is no sense of responsibility, not even an iota of introspection. That sense of entitlement, the belief on the part of these writers that they can say anything they want in the service of “opinion”, is a major reason that journalists aren’t held in high esteem. To be sure,there are wonderful writers out there committed to telling the truth: however, their reputations are sullied, sometimes permanently, by the lies presented by their colleagues.

Once bitten twice shy: once a newspaper has proven itself willing to “catapult the propaganda”, that credibility won’t soon return. As David Obey pointed out,

The problem we have today isn’t that we didn’t listen to people like the Washington Post, it’s that we listened TOO MUCH. They endorsed going to war in the first place! [waving his hands] They helped drive the drumbeat that drove almost two-thirds of the people in this chamber to vote for that misbegotten, stupid, ill-advised war that has destroyed our influence over a third of the world.

Richard Cohen is, and always will be, an idiot.

Sometimes you read something so dishonest, so weaseley, so fundamentally wrong-headed and just plain wrong, you want to march down to the Cossimo’s pick up one of their finest .38 Saturday Night Specials and take care of business once and for all.

Richard Cohen is nothing more nor less than a liar, an obsequious fawning cockatoo who sucks up to power. That’s literally all he does.

In today’s column, he pretends that no crime was committed in the exposure of Valerie Plame, and that Monica “Loyalty Oths” Goodling is somehow doing the right thing for pleading the fifth (a plea that may not hold up under scrutiny).

I’m not a violent person, but the day Richard Cohen is discovered on the bottom of the Potomac with cement overshoes should be a national holiday.

Here’s the government, the government for crying out loud, deciding on its own when the sun should come up. I mean, it’s bad enough that the feds tap our phones and keep changing the definition of torture so that even the rack would not apply, but now they just come in (without a warrant or anything) and take away an hour of morning sunlight.

Even when he tries to be funny, Cohen is an offensive and stupid.

It’s enough to make a conservative out of a person.

Oh please do, Richard, please do. Those of us on the left threw your sorry ass overboard years ago when you decided war in Iraq was a capital idea.

My next column: The secret sex life of Ed Markey.

Let’s talk a little about Richard Cohen’s secret sex life (pardon the Free Republic link):

Devon Spurgeon is a 23-year-old reporter with movie-star looks and a nose for news.

Richard Cohen is an aging columnist who calls Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, and Bob Woodward his best buddies.

Cohen’s crude conversations poisoned his working relationship with the young reporter in the Post’s New York bureau. It also put the Post’s handling of sexual-harassment complaints on public display.

And after pushing reporters to go after Bill Clinton for hiding behind his lawyers in the Monica Lewinsky affair, executive editor Len Downie consulted with Post general counsel Mary Ann Werner and now offers only “on comment” through aides.
[snip]
Cohen moved from Washington to the New York bureau last year. By all accounts, Cohen expected Spurgeon to cater to his office needs — and get his dry cleaning. She wanted to report stories.

“It’s not that she didn’t like him,” says one bureau reporter, “it’s just that she didn’t have time for him.”

But Cohen had time to engage Spurgeon in conversations that made her feel uncomfortable and threatened. She took her concerns to the other reporters, who agreed that Cohen had crossed a line. Around April 1, they asked bureau chief Harden to file an official report with Downie.

“This is not a ‘he said, she said,’” according to one reporter. “It’s ‘they said.’”

The Post dispatched deputy managing editor Milton Coleman to New York on April 3 and 6. He rented a room in the Essex Hotel and interviewed Cohen, Harden, and reporters Bob O’Harrow, Dale Russakoff, and Sharon Walsh. Cohen hired an attorney. Spurgeon went it alone.

Among the allegations reported to Coleman: Cohen asked Spurgeon to come into his office and close the door, then queried her about her generation’s view of oral sex. Also at issue: a conversation where Cohen said it’s too bad Bill Clinton is the only one who can grope in his office and get away with it. He also is said to have intimidated her with references to his connections with top Post editors, such as Tom Wilkinson, who can hire and fire.

No one said Cohen touched her or hit on her. Still, when Coleman asked the reporters if they considered Cohen’s comments sexual harassment, three said yes.

Yes Richard Cohen knows an awful lot about sexual indiscretions: like the way he was fucking Peter Jennings wife, while she was still married to Jennings.

With every word he writes, Cohen reveals himself to be nothing more than a fool. A blithering idiot who couldn’t win an argument with a dead dog.

We all have time to assess him on that score and glean — and it will be no more than that — whether, like Teddy Roosevelt (42), he is old enough for the presidency or, like Bill Clinton (46), he is still too young.

By “too young”, I suppose Cohen to mean “immature”, a reference to Mr. Clinton’s alter-ego,the Clenis.
I will take this opportunity to remind Richard Cohen, who has his own history of nailing people he shouldn’t, including Peter Jennings’ wife, that Bill Clinton:
** balanced the budget
** left the American people a surplus when he left office
** reformed welfare (for better or worse)
** was highly popular during his two terms, leaving office at 65% approval (and even at his lowest still outpolled the current occupant, who Cohen backed during the Florida recount)
** made apprehending Osama bin Laden a priority.

And the rest of Cohen’s column, in which he takes swipes at black people and Democrats while purporting to speak for both, is little more than backsplash.

I thought the war would do wonders for the Middle East and that it would last, at the most, a week or two. In this I was assured by the usual experts in and out of government. My head nodded like one of those little toy dogs in the window of the car ahead of you.

Translation: “I was already on the bandwagon,people told me what I wanted to hear, and I spewed it forth as gospel truth.”

And from this unimpeachable platform, Richard Cohen has the audacity to attack Hilary Clintoon for not leveling with Americans over her vote for war. Richard Cohen, he of motive pure and intention bold, believes that Hilary Clintoon owes the nation an explanation. But where’s Richard’s explanation? He doesn’t say: that’s “extraneous”. Translated: “That’s uncomfortable.”

Fuirthermore, what would Richard “fool or a Frenchmen” Cohen have said about Ms. Clintoon had she voted against war? Perhaps something along the lines of “the war’s opponents — no longer feel compelled to prove a case or stick to the facts. As with Vietnam, this is becoming an emotional battle between ideologues who, as usual, don’t give a damn about the truth”? or perhaps Clinton “is George McGovern all over again. I do not quibble.”

The fact is Richard Cohen is as culpable as anyone else in the mess we’re in: perhaps he didn’t vote for the war as Hilary Clintoon did, but he certainly wrote reams of columns in its favor, in the paper of record for Washington DC and much of the nation. A related fact is that Richard Cohen has a very hard time accepting that culpability: like Winston Smith in room 101, accountability seems to be Cohen’s “worst thing in the world”, shrieking like the tortured Smith “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

[H]ow come she now says she did not think Bush, armed with a congressional resolution, would hurry to war?

I certainly did. It was about the only thing I got right about the war, which, the record will show, I supported.

Cohen writes the preceding words as if it is some badge of honor to not only have been utterly, tragically wrong on the war in Iraq, a war which he personally advocated that has thus far led to the deaths of some 3,000 and growing American troops, but that in his wrongness, Cohen is superior to Ms. Clintoon because while Ms. Clintoon’s explanations are twisted, his own are nonexistent, explained away as “a lapse in judgement.”

In the same article, Cohen attacks Clintoon for his very own failings. As has been pointed out repeatedly, in the march to war, Richard Cohen ran to the head of parade with his drum majors baton: the very minute the war started, Cohen turned around on a dime, and became a critic.

Is it yet another coincidence that, aside from Obama, all the Democratic presidential candidates from the Senate have also reversed course, arriving at their opinions after excruciating thought, or have they merely put their finger to the wind? In other words, have they changed their minds or merely their positions? It’s hard to know. In Clinton’s case, she is dead center in American public opinion, foursquare for what’s popular and courageously opposed to what’s not. Most Americans oppose a precipitous pullout from Iraq and — surprise! — so does Clinton.

Putting aside that this strange “coincidence” of Democrats changing their minds or positions on the war might have something to do with the fact that the war’s not going very well, the fact is that Cohen’s behavior is exactly the same as that which he condemns. When the war was popular, he was a supporter; now that it’s not, he’s against it!
Our prisons are filled with people whose “lapse in judgement” led to the death of one individual. Cohen’s “lapse” helped cheer thousands to their deaths: before Cohen starts demanding Clinton’s accountability moment, perhaps he’d better make make an appointment for his own.

Too often when a columnist gets a job at the Post, he tosses principle out the window. Yet this is precisely what we want in a columnist — principles and the courage to stick to them. Instead of Cohen criticizing Clinton for saying she had been misled by Bush and his merry band of fibbers, exaggerators and hallucinators, I’d like to hear an explanation of how he thinks he went wrong and what he learned from it. I don’t want to know how Bush failed Clinton. I want to know how Cohen failed his country.

Interestingly Cohen’s defense is that which we’ve been accusing him of for the past six years: “My head nodded like one of those little toy dogs in the window of the car ahead of you.”

A toy bobble-head dog. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

It is as if Fred Hiatt, Len Downie, Donald Graham, Roichard Cohen, and the rest have all forgotten their role in this debacle. That role was “cheerleader.” Cohen was especially execrable in his fawning support for the war, which bordered on fellatio. Hiatt and Downie’s unsigned editorials have on more than one occasion flatly contradicted the news on page one, presumably because they hoped that wishes would turn into ponies. They are feckless, shallow people who believe in nothing.

So Fred, stick your mewling as far up your fat ass as you can possibly shove it. Until you write a signed retraction of your support for Bush’s folly, I really don’t give a tinker’s damn whether you think that torture is bad, and that stifling the tortured is worse: you helped bring us here. Cohen, fuck you AND fuck your Viet Nam analogies. To adopt a particularly nasty turn of phrase from Michael Richards, you should be hanged “upside down with a fucking fork up your ass” for your role in selling this war.

I never thought I would ever say this, but fucking Andrew Sullivan has more credibility than the clownshow at the Washington Post. At least Sullivan actually admitted he was wrong about the war before he began lobbing shots at the Bush Admisnitration. You cowardly fools don’t even have the balls to do that, because it’d probably take you off the cocktail weenie circuit.

Fuck you Hiatt, fuck you Downie, and fuck you too, Richard Cohen: I hope that when you die, you spend eternity in hell swimming in a sea of soldiers’ blood, the soldiers you helped send to die. I hope Tammy Duckworth bludgeons you with her missing legs forever. I hope you wake up screaming, shrieking every night as the ghosts of dead Iraqi children, maimed infants, and raped teenagers with drillholes in their heads torment you until you go insane, reduced to catatonic, drooling vegetables with eyes as empty as a dead cat’s.

Or are you already there?

The execrable Richard Cohen is a liar of the highest order.

Cohen on abortion:

“I no longer see abortion as directly related to sexual freedom or feminism, and I no longer see it strictly as a matter of personal privacy, either. It entails questions about life — maybe more so at the end of the process than at the beginning, but life nonetheless.
[snip]
Conservatives — and some liberals — have long argued that the right to an abortion ought to be regulated by states. They have a point. My guess is that the more populous states would legalize it, the smaller ones would not, and most women would be protected. he prospect of some women traveling long distances to secure an abortion does not cheer me — I’m pro-choice, I repeat – but it would relieve us all from having to defend a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up.”

As I wrote in the previous piece, Cohen ignore the reality that many women cannot afford to drive long distances to obtain an abortion because they don’t even have a fucking car. So yes, Cohen is pro-choice: but only for women who can afford it.

“Not on Iraq?” Richard Cohen explicitly endorsed the war on Iraq,/a>. It was only early this year that he tried to hop on the antiwar bandwagon.

As for Mr. McCain being a man of his word, why is he now embracing the very right-wing fundamentalist Christians like Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones University he condemned in 2004?

Cohen, as usual, has shit for brains.

Hence, my post Open Letter to Richard Cohen, Drooling Halfwit, is prominently linked on Stupid Richard’s corner of the Post’s op-ed page.

Tee hee.