As an aficionado of Richard Cohen stupidity I can’t believe I didn’t see this earlier (MM via Atrios):
What Jon Stewart needs is Jon Stewart. He could use a droll comedian to temper his ferocity and correct him when he’s wrong, as he was about the financial media, particularly CNBC and its excitable analyst Jim Cramer. They didn’t cover up the story of financial shenanigans. They didn’t even know it existed.
[….]If these people kept their money in these companies — financial and insurance giants they had built and knew from the inside — how was even Jim Cramer to know these firms were essentially hollow?
I give you one other name: Richard Cohen. He who writes this column had some of his (extremely) hard-earned retirement funds in AIG stock. This was because I was a cautious investor, and what could be safer than an insurance behemoth? Who knew that in faraway London, a division of AIG was fooling around in stuff that virtually cratered the whole company? Not my broker. Not me. Not even Greenberg.
So many cliches in so few paragraphs. Media celebrity defends other media celebrity? Check. No one could have predicted? Triple check. Reference to how hard reporter works? Check.
This is awfully close to parody.
Paul in KY
Shouldn’t Cohen’s fucking broker have known?
Anyway, the excerpt is BS because Jon hammered the screaming fool on what his real job is: Get idiots to trade stocks so the stockbrokers can make money off commissions. Doesn’t really matter which stocks & whether the trade made money for the investor or not, it made money for the brokerage house.
Dennis-SGMM
Hours and hours spent tending an overheated Cliche-o-Matic. Oh, the humanity!
NonyNony
Gods, Richard Cohen is such a dumbass.
We don’t know that they weren’t covering up financial shenanigans – in fact if he’d actually fracking WATCHED the interview with Cramer, Stewart showed how Cramer himself ENGAGED in financial shenanigans. So already Cohen is wrong – it could well be that a number of these guys knew that AIG/Bear Stearns/WaMu/whatever were likely cooking their books and were flogging bad info hoping to sucker the rubes and earn their friends a profit. Without an investigation, we’ll never know.
But, just to be able to smack Cohen around some more, let’s assume that Cohen’s right about this. Let’s assume that they actually didn’t know about the financial shenanigans that these companies were engaged in. Let’s assume that they missed what should be for a financial network the story of the millennium. They’re the ones people are supposed to be watching for analysis and events and they MISSED IT COMPLETELY. This means that they’ve FAILED as a news organization and should be ignored by anyone who is looking for somewhat accurate reporting and analysis.
Stewart was making a strong case that CNBC is a useless network that doesn’t do anyone any good because they don’t report they just repeat to their audience what the CEOs of the companies want to tell them. He was making the case that the network shouldn’t exist at all if it isn’t going to be able to investigate stuff like this. Cohen missed the entire goddamn point of Stewart’s anger over this stuff – no surprise, though, since Stewart makes the same goddamn points about the political coverage our "journalists" and "pundits" do and Cohen misses that point too.
Gods, Richard Cohen is such a dumbass.
Hugh
Perhaps Cohen wouldn’t have lost his money if Cramer and his ilk had done some actual journalism.
Dennis-SGMM
Posted this vintage Cohen insight two threads ago:
Richard Cohen, 2/6/2003
He has much to be modest about.
kid bitzer
"how was even Jim Cramer to know these firms were essentially hollow?"
uh, by doing some investigative reporting?
Zifnab
@Paul in KY:
No. No one should have known. No one could have known. This was entirely unpredictable and completely unforeseen. Just like 9/11 and the damns bursting during Katrina and the bizarre weather patterns over the last decade (that have nothing to do with Global Warming, Al! ~ George Will) and the budget deficit and peak oil and whatever fuck up next comes down the pipe.
The notion that people can just "predict" things by analyzing data or employing investigative reporting is absurd. All you can do is keep your head firmly wedged in the sand and hope your ass isn’t the one that gets fucked.
schrodinger's cat
Why does Richard Cohen still have a column? Is he too big too fail?
Joey Maloney
Apropos of nothing, I would like to point out that if you fill your crockpot with sliced onions, 1/4 cup of water, and a couple of dashes of Worcestershire sauce and let it cook for about 12 hours on high until the onions are dark brown and thoroughly caramelized, you will have produced a potful of delicious onion soup base. You can then freeze it in one cup portions to keep indefinitely. When you want some soup, mix it 1:2 with beef or vegetable broth, a pinch of salt, and a generous splash of dry sherry, and simmer.
The result will be, at minimum, more tasteful than anything Richard Cohen has ever written or will ever write.
TR
Which is exactly what Stewart was complaining about. Throughout the drama of the past decade, they sat there like cheerleaders, not reporters.
That line from a gushing Maria Bartiromo — "All these CEOs are telling us their companies are in great shape!" — spoke volumes about their approach. They were gullible to the point of malpractice.
And that’s just when they were inquiring about the status of these companies. Most of the time, the network comes off like "Us Weekly" for Wall Street. "Was it cool seeing Kid Rock perform at your event?" "Is it fun being a billionaire?"
They may not have been responsible or complicit in any wrongdoing — though that video of Cramer suggests he’s guilty of something, at least — they failed in their job description.
And so, of course, has Richard Cohen. We all know you’re a fucking tool, Cohen; you don’t need to keep reminding us.
EdTheRed
Knowing that Richard Cohen lost a lot of his "hard-earned" money on AIG stock gladdens my heart.
Punchy
I second this. It’s perfectly normal–and never has any later repercussions–for people making $30K to "buy" houses for $500K, and for that house’s "value" to triple in 5 years time.
All exactly congruous with a tempered, conservative economic model suggesting savings and modesty.
How could ANYONE have forseen that this was unsustainable?
Dennis-SGMM
@Zifnab:
No one could have anticipated that the sudden generation of titanic amounts of cash with no change in the fundamentals of the economy was in actuality a bubble inflating.
Balconesfault
And Cohen’s employer, the WaPo, which really didn’t seem to see fit to actually do any investigative reporting on the financial debacle as it was created, now finds for not being able to instantly clear every crappile Bush left on his doorstep.
The Other Steve
How much more of this failed Obama Presidency are we going to have to put up with?
When do we get Sarah Palin as President?
Cat Lady
Methinks Jon Stewart has a large vein of media ass-hattery to mine for years to come.
MikeJ
Jon Stewart is fat.
Napoleon
I seem to recall Cohen either was especially offended by Colbert’s White House Correspondence Dinner beatdown of Bush and the media a few years ago or sniffed that it was not funny or something like that.
chrome agnomen
he needs a couple of friedman units in solitary.
rock
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong but I thought the Stewart’s take was that CNBC is fake-journalism and in reality it’s a propaganda network to get people to funnel money to financial institution. If CNBC was what it claimed to be, it would have had presented information other than "buy,buy,buy" at the height of the people. I fail to see how Stewart was wrong.
I for one am tired the "NO ONE COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING" bullshit from the American media:
1. People did see it coming but their views were marginalized in the media, if they made it into the media at all.
2. The people that "didn’t see it coming" seem to suffer not at all for catastrophic failure.
Point 2 is really, I think, where Stewart’s anger resonates with me. Unionized autoworkers are expected to give up benefits IN THEIR CONTRACTS (but we have to pay AIG). CNBC jackasses explode at the thought of a government program reduce mortgage payments "for losers". But the corporate elite and the media which abjectly failed in their task suffer essentially not at all.
TR
Check out the comments to the column. Cohen is getting destroyed.
Andrew
Doesn’t Cohen have some employees to sexually harass?
aimai
I look forward to reading the comments (TR at 21) but I believe the end result will simply be the closing of the comments and the closing of Cohen’s mind on the subject since it just demonstrates what a Yahoo Stewart and his followers are. I can intuit this because a) it was the response of the ombudspeople at both the Times and the Wapo every time their columnists were called on their idiocy and also b) because its the reverse of the press’s attitude to the dittoheads and the christian right headbangers who astroturf their complaints to congress and the press. Next stop? Leave Richard Cohen alooooooone.
aimai
oy
Don’t look now…
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1885668,00.html
El Cid
So, because a certain influential and well-paid pundit is an idiot who couldn’t ever possibly have anticipated something, it clearly stands that therefore no one could have anticipated anything.
argh
1. People did see it coming but their views were marginalized in the media, if they made it into the media at all.
2. The people that "didn’t see it coming" seem to suffer not at all for catastrophic failure.
That is so beautiful, Rock.
Punchy
Holy Mother of All Hyperbole
Check out this lede paragraph. Jesus Christ on a stripper’s pole this is pure idiocy:
Got that? Being pissed at AIG may completely undermine public and Democratic Congress’ support. Also. WTF?
chrome agnomen
also; cohen never ‘hard-earned’ any money in his worthless dogdamned life.
MR Bill
Here’s the definitive Cohen:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/18/AR2007061801366.html
Remind me to never get in a real estate deal with Cohen, and to pray for his sex partners, if any.
Contrast with Justice Brandeis: "“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
–Justice Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It, 1933.
Walker
The blogs knew. Maybe if Cohen spent less time bad-mouthing them and more time reading them, he wouldn’t have lost so much.
Jen R
If only there had been some kind of financial news organization that could have told them about it!
Jesus Christ.
eric
Dean Baker preached about the housing bubble for YEARS. Not weeks; not months; not a year; but years before the bubble burst. You might think that his insights today would have some relevance to the ongoing analyses in the MSM. SATSQ.
NonyNony
@TR:
Some of those comments are things of beauty – gut-punchingly beautiful as they carefully show that Cohen’s column is factually wrong and then proceed to shred what little argument the man has. Beautiful. Much better than I would have been capable of posting – I would have resorted to namecalling right from the start.
Of course, Cohen will never read them. Even if he does, he probably couldn’t understand the criticism. Because Richard Cohen is a dumbass.
Zach
Assuming Cohen told his broker that he wanted to tread cautiously (and given that he’s 56 and approaching retirement), he should’ve had around half of his wealth in low-risk investments and shouldn’t have been exposed more than 10% to financial equities and certainly not near that much of a single stock. He’s either lying, stupid, or horribly ill-advised.
cleek
yeah, who coulda known…
Oct 06:
…
Dec 07:
…
that was 5 minutes of Googling.
who coulda known that AIG, which was over its head in CDS could be looking at possible trouble ?
i’m no market analyst, and neither his Cohen, so maybe we wouldn’t have known. but competent brokers knew. traders knew. regulators knew.
Napoleon
OT, but the owner of Cole’s favorite pro football team will be O’Bama’s Ireland envoy.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/03/steelers_owner_rooney_picked_to_be_ireland_envoy.php
bayville
This is par for the course. No surprise. It’s not like a reporter is supposed to uncover anything – especially high paid ones.
Another example. This is WaPo reporter Ed O’Keefe from one of those infamous WaPo chats – 2 weeks ago"
Nancy Darling
If Cohen is truly "down and out" he can come to NW Arkansas and work for food. I’ll hitch him up to the plow.
JackieBinAZ
Mistakes were made.
Bulworth
@schrodinger’s cat:
Heh. Almost had my early morning caffeine go through my nose at that one.
TR
It’d be natural work for such a jackass.
Bulworth
@kid bitzer:
I don’t think anyone’s under any impression–at least not now–that Cramer is a "journalist" or that CNBC is any sort of "news" organization. It’s a propaganda outfit. A PR firm. About the equivalent of the "fake news" segments the Bush team was found to have put together and the "journalists" and commentators it was found to have paid off to regurgitate the administration’s lines.
dr. bloor
How ironic–Freddie Prinze also relied on the signature line "Eez not my job, man."
Unfortunately, O’Keefe probably won’t do us the favor of shooting himself in the head.
joes527
Yeah yeah, dissing Stewart gives juicy quotes, but the comedy gold is deeper in the column. Cohen goes on to argue that traditional media has absolutely no impact on anything. (oops)
Folks like Tucker Carlson and Cohen don’t even understand what Stewart is. They see him as a new demagogue (essentially a liberal Rush)
That isn’t what Stewart is AT ALL. He is the little dog Toto, pulling back the curtain. Carlson and Cohen oblige by flaring the torches and shouting "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!" You couldn’t script them better.
MSM is busy whining that Stewart is getting all the acclaim. If they would just DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS he would be relegated back to making funny faces and fart jokes.
Michael
There are people who would pay handsomely to see film like that. wink, nudge.
Anyway, I kind of like the whole "the CEO says all is great, and he stands to gain the most by false confidence – we won’t stand in his way" thing.
Sarcastro
We’re not evil, we’re just morons? Check.
Michael
This one was a thing of beauty.
All hail the Punditocracy!
brassiere magic aka dollar general spice
The pearl-clutching over Stewart’s interview with Cramer is getting really, really old.
georgia pig
I believe Cohen has just surpassed Doug Feith for the title of Stupidest Fucking Guy on Earth. The " He who writes this column had some of his (extremely) hard-earned retirement funds in AIG stock" really makes me want to puke. As if putting out this drivel is any more work than wanking off in the subway station. Has anyone ever done a detailed study of these dorks, where they came from? Why are we blessed with the likes of Cohen, George Will, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, . . . you get the idea. Didn’t Stuart do a gag on pundits along the lines of "Who the fuck is that guy and what does he know about anything?"
blogenfreude
"When Warren Buffett bought Gen Re, the large re-insurer, five years ago, he presciently made the decision to reduce their exposure to credit default swaps. It took them four years to reduce the number of contracts from 23,218 to just 197 at the end of 2006.
"We lost over $400 million on contracts that were supposedly ‘safe and properly priced’ and we did it in a leisurely way in a benign market," says Mr. Buffett. "If we had to unwind it today in one month, who knows what would have happened?" (The Wall Street Journal) ."
Yeah – nobody could have predicted ….
slag
If only Jon Stewart had asked Cramer how it felt to be a billionaire when he was on the show, Richard Cohen would have been satisfied with Stewart’s performance.
Brachiator
I am at a loss to understand why Cohen and others so desperately need to come up with excuses not only for Cramer’s hackery, but also for the laziness, stupidity, and incompetence of CNBC and other business news organizations.
The ghost of Edward R. Murrow must be weeping to read a reporter bleat about how hard it is to do their freakin’ job.
I’m also getting tired at the phony outrage of Cohen and his ilk that a … mere comedian… would dare, would have the nerve, would be so presumptious, even, to deign to do the work that great God Almighty has set aside for JOURNALISTS to perform. Even though journalists apparently can’t do it, either, because it’s so hard.
bayville
OMG. The comments to Cohen’s column is now 36 pages long.
The negative-to-positive ratio of the comments is about 100-to-0.
MikeJ
Cohen has certainly done his job. Spewing stupid shit generates page hits. He’ll probably point to this column when he needs to renegotiate his contract.
Martin
Let them protest too much.
Chris Andersen
And this is the fact he uses to say that he know what he is talking about? The fact that he got bamboozled?
Trust me! I’m a schmuck!
Ella in NM
10:00 am, MDT. Caption running under the opening teaser on MSNBC:
…Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locamotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s SUPERMAN!….
Great. Now he literally has to have the powers of a fictional character to be doing his fucking job.
I simply cannot watch TV news anymore.
Warren Terra
Cohen is pretty much the ideal Sensible Liberal, and his entire job is to stand up and say "I’m a partisan democrat, but you’ve got to admit (this Republican guy is right/this criticism of a Republican is wrong)."
As was pointed out upthread at least once but not nearly enough, among the many of his columns that have inspired derision in blogtopia, the most widely mocked one was his denunciation of Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, which Cohen thought was unfunny and unfair to all those hardworking journalists.
How is it possible that the Washington Post’s OpEd page is so crappy?
Ricky Bobby
All these rope-a-dopes by the conservative financial types regarding the "who could have forseen?" line is just transparent bullshit. The whole question is moot. These are Masters of the Universe or Captains of Industry, and they have been telling us for years that they know exactly what they are doing and the reason that America is America is because they are so fucking good at business and would be even better if these nasty regulators would get even further out of their way.
So the question should be, not: "Who could have forseen?" But instead: "Why the fuck DIDN’T you see?"
They have lobbied long and hard to explain to us poor plebes in language that we can understand just how smart they all are, so WTF? Drop the ball much?
Funkhauser
Then Greenberg deserved to be fucking fired. Because it was his job to know.
Hint: he knew.
Chris Andersen
@Brachiator:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." ~ Upton Sinclair
Chris Andersen
@MikeJ:
He’s probably hoping Stewart will make a joke at his expense and thus elevate his standing within the village.
Stefan
I give you one other name: Richard Cohen. He who writes this column had some of his (extremely) hard-earned retirement funds in AIG stock. This was because I was a cautious investor, and what could be safer than an insurance behemoth?
TIPS. Treasuries. Muni bonds. Vanguard’s Total Bond Market Index. Money markets. Cash.
If you’re truly a cautious investor, you wouldn’t have had exposure to individual financial equities in the first place — you’d be in a mix of index funds, bonds and cash.
r€nato
you know, there must be something about consuming too much right-wing media propaganda which damages one’s ability to think critically or perceive reality like the rest of us who are not brainwashed by it.
I’ve been having a polite but earnest exchange with a good friend who thinks Stewart was simply blaming Cramer and holding him up as the bad guy in all of this, and that Stewart is simply part of the evil liberal media getting back at Cramer for his criticism of Obama’s economic recovery plan.
I don’t know how one can watch that exchange between the two and walk away with that impression, especially since Stewart made it VERY, VERY clear that this was not about Cramer, and not about ‘left-right’ politics. If Santelli had had the cojones to sit down and do that interview, if Cramer would have not fired the first shots at Stewart, Cramer would never have been in that chair.
Paul in KY
Zifnab, I bow to your superior reasoning :-)
Cal Gal
Stupid a__hole doesn’t even read his own paper.
The WaPo’s series on AIG, starting late December, plainly pointed out how AIG’s Greenburg didn’t understand any of these derivatives. And how when the guys who DID understand them left, Joe "Casino" Cassano, who ALSO didn’t understand them, was put in charge of them.
BTW, when AIG finally "fired" Joey Casino, they then put him under contract at ONE MILLION per month, to "unwind" these contracts. He didn’t understand them to begin with!! HOW IS HE SUPPOSED TO UNWIND THEM!!!
Sorry for the shouting, but all this crapola about paying bonuses to these guys to retain them so they can unwind these contracts is such b.s. that it stinks from London all the way to California.
The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
Wow, reading that was painful. How could he lack such basic comprehension and reasoning skills and still have a column at WaPo? I find this especially ironic given his his previous statements on reasoning:
I stopped watching TV news to minimize my daily idiocy intake. But alas, the more I try to get away from it, the more the idiocy fills up in other ways.
Persia
@bayville: Has anyone suggested that maybe he should’ve paid attention in algebra class after all?
Emma Anne
@eric:
Krugman too. I feel sure Cohen was busy calling him shrill.
YellowJournalism
And when he’s really pissed off, he’ll bite you in the ass, too.
Comrade Baron Elmo
A very telling nugget of "brown gold" from Cohen’s column:
Sins that Cohen himself eagerly committed, again and again. (Indeed, the dictionary definition of "credulous media" should be accompanied by Richard’s grinning mug.) Sins for which, I hardly need add, Cohen has never atoned. Indeed, he’s always been willing to step up to the plate in defense of his own ignorance, as this latest hunk of rancid tripe from his pen makes all too clear.
God, I wish Jon Stewart would attack this douchenozzle and his transparent humbuggery. Watching Cohen the Dick get eviscerated on The Daily Show… just thinking about it warms the soul.
(Not Tucker Carlson, though. Let that jackass bray until he ruptures himself – he doesn’t warrant Jon’s attention.)
rumpole
As "proof" that these he lists the following names of CEOS that were wiped out by the loss of equity in Citibank et al: Hank Greenberg, Sandy Weill, Richard Fuld. I wish I could get wiped out like this.
Hank Greenberg, in 2004 was one of the richest men in the world, with a net worth of roughly $3.6 billion.
Sandy Weill, as of 2001, was cashing out of his stock options to the tune of $196 million, and that socialist rag Forbes tagged him as "wildly overpaid." (I doubt that the run-up exactly hurt him).
Between 2000 and today, Richard Fuld received $484 million in salary, stock options, and bonuses.
Comrade Baron Elmo
BTW, how does one access the comment page at the Post’s webpage? This has been a frequent problem for me. Whenever I click on "View all comments" it takes me to the "Post your comment" page, where no goddamned comments are to be seen. Call me ig’nant, but I’m flat-out stumped.
bago
Palin 2012.
The world’s sposed to end anyway.
Shell Goddamnit
@Comrade Baron Elmo: Um. Click the link that says "see all comments here". I believe it is right above the comment box.
Karen
Because Richard Cohen has the attitude that rich people are good people and poor people deserve it.