Richard Cohen's Burning Questions

Like I said last week, if we flipped Richard Cohen to the side of the angels, it would just mean we'd have one truly muddle-headed pundit embarrassing our side. But since he and most of his readers think he's some sort of librul, I guess he already does that. So never mind.

But that brings us to Cohen's column this morning. He's got questions he's just dying to ask the candidates if he were moderating one of the debates. A few of them are decent questions, but boy howdy, do they get lost amidst the fluff. Here's some of the questions he'd ask Obama:

Senator Obama, we all know that lobbyists are not the problem in
Washington; it's the incessant need of politicians to raise campaign funds. Yet
you broke your pledge to accept public financing for your campaign. By doing
that, didn't you contribute to this problem? And a follow-up: If you broke your
word on this, how can we be sure you won't break your word again?

Senator Obama, given the problems facing our country -- a worldwide
financial crisis; a looming recession; the prospect of nukes in Iran and North
Korea; and Pakistan, which already has nukes, coming apart -- isn't it reckless
of you to think that, at your young age, with your limited experience, you can
manage it all?

Senator Obama, did you ever tell Bill Ayers to his face that what he did
was wrong?

Senator Obama, you are sooooooooo cool. Can you tell us, please, the last
time you lost your temper and what about? You have two minutes.

Senator Obama, do you ever wake up in the middle of night for anything?

Senator Obama, have you ever been in therapy? If so, how did it make you feel?

And here's what he'd ask McCain:

Senator McCain, reportedly you have been told to avoid looking at Senator
Obama during debates because he infuriates you and you could lose your temper.
Is this because of Obama's age or his manner or something else entirely?

Senator McCain, ... given your age, isn't [the Presidency] all too much?

Senator McCain, I have a question regarding Sarah Palin: How could
you?

Senator McCain, do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and wonder
if history will forgive you for Sarah Palin?

Senator McCain, you are 72 and have had skin cancer several times. Given
that -- not to mention the usual exigencies of life -- how could you pick a
running mate who is so dismally qualified for the presidency? And please, for
the sake of your own reputation, not to mention your mortal soul, don't say
anything about the Alaska National Guard.

To be fair, Cohen did ask some substantive questions. But they were the exception.

Flipping Richard Cohen (Why Bother?)

Richard Cohen actually has a half-decent column in today's WaPo:

In spite of it all, much of the media saw a credible performance. I could quote the hosannas of some of my colleagues, but I spare them the infamy that will surely follow them to their graves. (The debate's moderator, Gwen Ifill, used the occasion to catch up on some sleep.) Many of my colleagues judged Palin simply as a performer and inferred that her performance would go over well in homes with aboveground swimming pools.

A perfect example is the Wall Street Journal, whose (conservative) editorial page has been absolutely fixated on a strict (Scalian) reading of the Constitution. Did it wonder what in the world Palin meant by the authority she found in the Constitution to increase the role of "the vice president if that vice president so chose to exert it in working with the Senate"? What? Oh, never mind. The Journal chivalrously ignored the matter. Palin is excused from knowing the limits of the office she seeks.

In effect, columnists, bloggers, talk-show hosts and digital lamplighters have adopted the ethic of the political consultant: what works, works. It did not matter what Palin said. It only mattered how she said it -- all those doggones, references to her working-class status (net worth in excess of $2 million), promiscuous use of the word "maverick," repeated mentions of "greed and corruption on Wall Street" (Who? Be specific. Give examples. Didn't anyone here go to school?) and, of course, that manic good cheer.

Although he can't completely lay off the Kool-Aid:

I will end with its conservative columnist of years past -- the estimable William Safire. In 1996, he called Hillary Clinton "a congenital liar." It was a head-snapping characterization that, alas for Clinton, has defined her for the ages and that she stubbornly vindicates from time to time.

Yeah, we know about the sniper fire in Bosnia. But if Clinton's said as many whoppers in public since 1992 as Palin's said in her 15 minutes in the spotlight, I'd like to see the evidence. Yet even Cohen's not calling Palin a "congenital liar" - just an underachiever who's been graded on one hell of a curve.

The point I'd like to make is, if Cohen were suddenly to turn into the liberal he thinks he already is, this is as good as it gets. He's still a muddleheaded writer and thinker, as are so many of his colleagues on the WaPo op-ed page - Broder, Will, Samuelson, Applebaum, Gerson (who is also a partisan hack, plain and simple), and of course Hiatt. I'd be embarrassed, really, to have them on my side in a debate of any consequence.

Flipping any of these people to the side of the angels doesn't produce any real gain: it just turns muddleheaded conservatives and center-right people (whether they think of themselves that way or not) into muddleheaded left-of-center people.

They really all simply need to be gone. If they want to share their opinions with the world, they can start their own blogs, and see how long anybody bothers to read them. But their lack of intellectual clarity is frankly more embarrassing to their philosophical allies than it is an intellectual threat to their opponents.

This Wasn't In the WaPo, But...

From the Politico:

"If you're a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face," Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics "were born too late, because they would have been great Communists."

As Markos said, "Remember, Richard Cohen is supposed to be one of the Washington Post's 'liberals'."

Richard Cohen Wants To Be a Realist

Yeah, I know. Let the snark begin. :)

Scowcroft was asked about the first Bush administration's decision to look the other way as Saddam Hussein's attack helicopters slaughtered Shiites in the south of Iraq. He seemed unmoved. It is not for nothing that he is called a "realist."

There's nothing wrong with being a foreign-policy realist. What's wrong, of course, is giving idealists reason to believe you're going to back them up, and then turning all 'realist' on them.

In the wake of the first Gulf War, when we'd bombed Iraq for six weeks, then kicked the Iraqi army out of Kuwait in four days, of course Kurds and Marsh Arabs and Shi'ites were going to rise up against Saddam when Bush I encouraged them to do so. Surely he'd have their back, or he wouldn't have said such things, right?

Yeh, right.

And it's the same thing every time - if you're the United States of America, and you make promises you aren't willing to keep, someone else may wind up dead due to your duplicity. Bay of Pigs 1961, Hungary 1956, Iraq 1991, Georgia 2008, wherever, whenever. Being a realist isn't something you want to be for a day, like Cohen does, but rather all the time. You might ask questions like "Do the people of South Ossetia really want us to ride to their rescue? How about the Ukrainians?" (That would be no, and no.) "Are we already actively engaged in that part of the world?" (No, not really.) "If Russia can move into Georgia that easily, does it mean Ukraine's next?" (No. Ukraine's got 10 times as many people, and 8 times the land area, of Georgia. Besides, the people of Ukraine already desire good relations with Russia; they just don't want a Soviet-style ruler.) And "with all our troops tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, what could we send to Georgia?" (Nothing.)

There's an argument to be made that if we hadn't gone into Iraq, then maybe we should have invited Georgia into NATO and been prepared to come to its aid - not including its two breakaway republics. But that's the thing about realism: it forces you to recognize limits and face choices. Staying in Iraq meant no more land wars, no more projection of force at the level where it really counts, until that was done.

Realism is good. This Administration, and its cheerleaders such as Cohen, could have used a continuous dose of it. Unfortunately, few wanted to administer the medicine.

Richard Cohen Still Wants You To Get Off His Lawn

Shorter Cohen: I like books. I like bookstores. I hate Amazon. I hate Kindle. I'm a grouchy old man, and I don't like all this newfangled stuff.

It's not quite as bad as his recent column griping about kids these days and their tattoos, but it's the same basic theme.

Oh, and he's not sure how he'd pick up girls in a world without bookstores.

I buy from actual bookstores, if I can. You go there and people are browsing or having coffee or staring into open laptops and pretending they're writers or something. If I were younger, I'd go there to pick up girls. I'd look over their shoulders and say, "Oh, 'The Prophet,' a book of eternal truths" -- or some such tripe. (It used to work.)

As Springsteen would say, the girls in their summer clothes pass him by.

Of course, young people always know where to pick each other up; the only problem here is that Cohen can't see what his place would be in this brave new world if he were young again. Hell, neither can I. But it doesn't matter: time's a one-way arrow; neither he nor I will ever live in the world of the young again. That's life.

I am now reading "Her Privates We," a book about World War I by the nearly unknown Frederic Manning. It's a bit of a masterpiece, a glorious piece of writing -- obscene and filthy as a trench on the Somme, and smart as hell. (Ernest Hemingway said, "It is the finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read.") I asked a bookseller in New York to recommend a brilliant but unheralded book, and he went through his shelves and picked out several, none of which I had ever heard of. "Her Privates We" was one of them. The Hemingway blurb sold me. No digital anything can do that.

Sure, it can. For nearly a decade, I've been an active participant in an online message board that's got a lot of pretty damned bright people who post there. We debate politics, we talk sports, we recommend books, movies, and music to each other. I hate to burst Cohen's bubble (scratch that: I love to burst Cohen's bubble), but Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune, also about World War I, has been recommended multiple times there.

Of course, Richard Cohen would absolutely be sliced and diced in the political-debate fora on that message board - but that's just another way in which change is good.

Outsourcing Richard Cohen

Or rather, outsourcing the slicing and dicing of his column this morning. Gawd, what an atrocity.

Sir Charles of the Cogitamus blog has his ginsu knives well-sharpened, as does Matt Yglesias.