I’ve found ample reason to be disgusted with Richard Cohen’s clownish and self-aggrandizing claptrap many times in the past, including back in January, when I made the following observation:
When it suits him, when it’s convenient, Cohen could perhaps be described as left-leaning. But between his stances (on war, on Israel, apparently on torture) he is as effective a mouthpiece as any neo-con crackpot. Indeed, he is even more effective (and harmful) because he is ostensibly writing, as a “liberal”, in an ostensibly “liberal” paper (Washington Post). Of course, this canard is easy to deconstruct, but in the shorthand illogic of our times, he is, by default, a liberal by virtue of even being a member of the MSM.
And that is where we find ourselves today, with Cohen’s risible (yet oh so predictable) take on the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer dust-up. I was shocked, shocked to discover that Cohen (one of the few MSM columnists to even address the issue, it should be noted) is making sure he devotes space to defending not only the Wall Street scumbags, but, of course, his comrades (and by extension, himself) in the MSM. How on earth could they have been expected to see this coming?
Indeed, Cohen’s lame and unbelievably solipsistic rationalization is that he too was hoodwinked by AIG. Instead of offering up a tardy mea culpa, Cohen doubles down under the pretense that, hey, if he was taken in by his own greed and myopia, how could he be accused of being…greedy and myopic? Not to mention derelict in his ostensible duties as a journalist. What he doesn’t seem to get is that in his self-serving justification, he is proving that it’s impossible for a writer in bed with the very system he is supposed to police to…police it. Cohen, of course, is the ultimate inside-the-beltway insider, and every time he attempts to armor his delicate integrity, he betrays how invested he is in the status quo. Not only won’t he, like so many of his brethren, dare rock the boat, he goes out of his way to castigate others (Stewart, Colbert) for doing so. This goes beyond cowardice and approaches the putrid state of aiding and abetting the powerful. “The big shots also believed,” he writes, as if that absolves them from criminal culpability. The big shots also walked away very rich, Richard. And that does not even take into account the work he is doing to diminish an egregiously overdue examination of the failed policy and backward ideology that created (indeed, guaranteed) the mess we’re in.
That he continues to find it necessary (not to mention possible) to carry water for Bush/Cheney’s worst misdeeds is bad; that he is actually doing it to protect his own miscalculations and timidity is much, much worse. It proves, yet again, that the only thing that truly outrages media types is when media types are taken to task. Then, and only then, is it time to circle the wagons, and dismiss as mere “entertainers” or “bloggers” the people who are pointing out their opportunism and hypocrisy. When you read the insufferable rants from folks like Krauthammer and Kristol, you know that in the heart of their blackened hearts, they know how full of shit they are; what is so distressing about Cohen is that his weakness and dishonesty is at once so transparent and so, apparently, genuine. As we saw more than enough of the last eight years, there is seldom something so dangerous as a person who consistently gets it wrong while being certain he is always right.
