Richard Cohen: Apologist for Felons, and Total Moron. Also, a Meditation on Responsibility
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.
4 Responses to “Richard Cohen: Apologist for Felons, and Total Moron. Also, a Meditation on Responsibility”
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June 19th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
chavez hates bush just like 75% of americans do. venezuelans hate bush too, even the ones who hate chavez. they like americans though, as long as they hate bush.
that was my experience with every single venezuelan i met in my 3 months there. pretty much the first thing you’re asked is whether you like bush. when you express how much you hate him, you’re like old buds.
i imagine it’s the same world over now.
as to the rest of it, i find the “i’m just a columnist so i don’t have to base my columns on fact” position to be pretty neat-o. why stop there? just make all the shit up like the wingnuts.
June 19th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
as to the rest of it, i find the “i’m just a columnist so i don’t have to base my columns on fact†position to be pretty neat-o. why stop there? just make all the shit up like the wingnuts.
Richard Cohen’s column does just that: the whole thing is nothing but lies.
June 19th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Dear David,
Even pontificating bar flies know a little bupkes now and then.
June 19th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Kinmo, I can always count on you.
Love,
David.
“DAVID”?? Where the hell did she get “david” out of “Brendan”?
Actually, I have to go back and read her final response. I totally ignored it, cus she was just so willfully stupid.