Why does everyone hate Richard Cohen?

The poor man is inundated with hateful email. People don’t like him, they’re angry at George Bush, they accuse him of being Bush’s lapdog (a charge he denies, but Digby provides the evidence—hatefully, no doubt), and he just can’t understand why (at least I can answer that one: it’s because he’s not very bright).

Cohen can whine all he wants about the fact that people don’t like him, but here’s the charge to which I must take strong exception:

But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble — not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before — back in the Vietnam War era. That’s when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

Oh, yeah—don’t be angry, you’ll lose! And please, please don’t throw me into that briar patch, Br’er Fox!

I despise George W. Bush, and I’m extremely angry at the direction the Republican party has taken my country. That, it seems to me, is the appropriate response; why would anyone with my best interests at heart suggest otherwise? We’re in the middle of a morass of a war that was started by those assholes on the basis of an error (charitably) or pure venality and stupidity (most likely), our people are dying, the Middle East has become more unstable, and what are we supposed to do? Nod pleasantly at the nice oilmen, sit back and enjoy our high fat diets and cable TV, and try to be placid? That’s insane. We should be angry. We should be fighting back. We should be standing up with veins throbbing at our temples, shouting at the tepid Democrats who want our votes that they damn well better wake up and oppose the status quo. Cohen himself says that “Institution after institution failed America—the presidency, Congress and the press”…and we’re not supposed to be furious about that? We’re not supposed to demand change?

As for the Vietnam War—I remember that. I remember the demonstrations and the college campuses lighting up with howls of protest. I remember the dead every night on the television news. That’s also a war the people wanted to stop, and we screamed at the top of our lungs until they heard us. We were so loud that Nixon had to promise “peace with honor” and to “end the war and win peace” to get elected. In the 60s and 70s, that vigorous opposition had even the Republicans admitting that they somehow had to end that wasteful war; have you noticed how quiet the campuses and city streets are now, and how no one in power is admitting their failures yet? The message of Vietnam is that we need to mobilize more anger and stir up more strenuous, vocal opposition.

It’s the lapdogs of the administration, the tools of the destructive status quo, whose job it is to quell the angry mob. Rise up and scream, people, ignore the lackeys of the Right who want you to be ashamed of righteous fury.

Bill O’Reilly: Pinhead in rose-colored glasses

Bill O’Reilly is upset that little kids are using profanity, and he has a ludicrously sentimental vision of small town America.

OK. That happens every day, all day in the public schools here in New York City. And I know it happens in Chicago and Los Angeles and Boston and Washington, D.C. In any major urban center. It doesn’t happen in the small towns; it happens in the cities. I live in New York. I’m not gonna have my 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-year-old go to a school where they’re saying that stuff in the hallway and the teacher doesn’t do anything about it. You know, private school, that does not happen.

Oh, brother. I grew up in a small town in the 60s and 70s—Kent, WA, population 14,152 (we lived on the edge of town, right near the city limits sign, and I caught the school bus every day right under that message)—and my fellow children were obscenely profane all the time. I now live in an even smaller place, population just a hair over 5,000, and if you want to hear some hair-raising language, walk by the elementary school playground. Heck, I’ve been startled a few times while walking past the Catholic school yard in town. I don’t have much experience with private schools, but I would be very surprised if human nature was much changed by the imposition of tuition (and, come to think of it, some of the most casually explicit chatterers I remember from the old school days were the most well-off kids).

Here’s what real small town America is like: petty, irrational hatreds, intolerance, and vicious smears of anyone who is the slightest bit different, leavened with far too few more charitable individuals. My daughter and several of her friends have been joining in the “Gay? Fine by me.” campaign—basically, they just express support for people with different sexual preferences in a very low key way. How do you think other fine, upstanding Middle American school kids react?

Today was the second Gay-Day. A bunch of us wore our “gay? fine by me.” T-shirts to school. Funny that the first time people didn’t react, but then they went boom this time. It was the standard moronic bashing. Flicking us off in the hall, calling us fags, asking if we were gay, asking why we liked gay people, saying that gay people should be shot, that they aren’t real people.

Bill O’Reilly, bigoted blowhard that he is, probably thinks that kind of thing is just fine, as long as they don’t use the “f”-word*. Personally, I’d rather see kids cussing like sailors as long as they were tolerant of each other’s differences. I’m afraid, though, that small towns aren’t exactly shining beacons of idealistic American values…those progressive values, no less, that are the antithesis of what O’Reilly promotes.

*Falafel!

Cohen misses the point

You know I’m no fan of Richard Cohen. He’s not the person I’d go to for some sharp insight or even for the ability to recognize humor, so it should be no surprise that he failed to see the humor in Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Comedy is a matter of taste, so that Cohen didn’t find it funny is no big deal…but this comment shows off Cohen’s typical obliviousness and tin ear.

In Washington he was playing to a different crowd, and he failed dismally in the funny person’s most solemn obligation: to use absurdity or contrast or hyperbole to elucidate — to make people see things a little bit differently. He had a chance to tell the president and much of important (and self-important) Washington things it would have been good for them to hear.

Huh? What would have been good for them to hear? I heard pointed comments about the war, the economy, Bush’s unpopularity, privacy and civil rights, and most importantly, the spinelessness of the Washington media. In fact, that’s exactly what Colbert did: he used absurdity and contrast and hyperbole (which Cohen did not find funny, but so what?) to point out a great many hard truths. Even if he wasn’t funny to some people, he used his opportunity to tell these guys some important things. He met his “most solemn obligation.”

Oddly enough, Cohen did not say what he thinks would have been good for the audience to hear. Which fork to use for the salad? A joke about airline food? A riff on the uselessness of algebra?

Cole vs. Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is one of those guys who sometimes takes your breath away with his strong writing, but then a moment later you want to retch as he goes haring off on some sodden militaristic crusade. It’s with some sadness that I see that he deserves to be minced by Juan Cole. Although when Cole has him writhing on the ground and turns around to put the boot in…well, maybe that’s a bit harsh.

Nah, he deserved that, too. Kick him again, Juan! Harder!

Three years ago today

i-db9fbd54f38f46602055f92fc1d4e693-mission_accomplished.jpg

I’m on the road again for a big chunk of today, so let’s just contemplate this icon for a failed, dishonest presidency—not only was the Iraq War a failed endeavor, but we have here an administration that relied entirely on propaganda and illusion…and they were incompetent at even that.

While you’re considering that, you’ve also got to wonder how Chris Matthews can look himself in the mirror every morning. Why do these men still have their jobs?