The liberal Roger Cohen has an anti-Coat Mosque column which he not only compares builiding the Islamic Center to burning the Koran but also compares Ground Zero to Auschwitz.
Thank FSM only the fringe is saying things like this!
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DonkeyKong
The Boomer Generation really are a bunch of vicious bedwetters.
The Dangerman
Unbelievable. The Right likes to scream about our “American Exceptionalism” and, patriotic though I may be, I don’t know what the fuck that means. Freedom of Religion? Not any longer.
Or, flipping to more tangible metrics, do you we have the best Educational system? No. How about the best Health Care system? No. Best retirement system? No. Best infrastructure? Not any longer. Best social safety net when the economy turns to shit? No. Most equitable tax system? Give me a break.
We do, however, have the world’s best military and we can kick anybody’s ass we want. Yippee.
lacp
What a strange column. After pointing out reasons there is anger at Muslims that have nothing to do with their religion, and thereby showing how irrational the anger and hatred are, he does a double-reverse Godwin and says the community center (“mosque?”) is a bad idea…just because. Also too Auschwitz.
JGabriel
The Dangerman:
Which is why we’ve been losing against cave-dwellers in Afghanistan for the last 8 years.
Wait, what?
I’m beginning to think our military is like our health care system: the most expensive in the world, resulting in the most mediocre outcomes.
.
Moses2317
I’ll explain it to Mr. Cohen really slowly.
Building a Muslim community center in a Burlington Coat Factory in lower Manhattan is a continued recognition of America’s tradition of religious liberty and equality that helps make our country great.
Burning the Qu’aran in a deliberate attempt to inflame hatred is antithetical to those values of religious liberty and equality enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The two things are exact opposites, not the same.
Winning Progressive
vtr
I usually like Cohen’s writing for its clarity and thoughtfulness, but this time I never got past the title of this piece. Apparently most people found the column as bad I I was afraid it would be.
NobodySpecial
Like I said a few threads ago. Thoughts and Roger Cohen? Nah.
Joel
What a coward.
gnomedad
@DonkeyKong:
Generational bigotry fail.
Svensker
@DonkeyKong:
And all Mooslims are terraists and blacks are all good dancers but lazy bastards.
Good grief.
Zipperupus
Roger Cohen just eloquently laid on his back and exposed his belly. That was a repulsive read.
Onkel Bob
As a most reluctant resident in the armpit of the east, I am disappointed that cities that were incinerated within living memory (London, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki) don’t have the same annual celebration of self pity and angst.
I guess it goes to prove the adage, “When you fall through the open manhole, it’s comedy; when I stub my toe, it’s tragedy.
I say count me among the 8.4 million but I never wanted to live here from the start.
Mike in NC
@JGabriel:
We build billion dollar bombers that can’t fly in the rain. Apparently because nobody else can! U-S-A!
Omnes Omnibus
@Onkel Bob: You’re in Newark?
Sly
@The Dangerman:
The modern meaning is “might equals right”. As opposed to might makes right, which is a causal relationship explaining the origin of moral authority in the power to enforce it, the modern adherents of American Exceptionalism equate the two. In other words, America can never do wrong. If it does something wrong, than what it has done has to be redefined into no longer being wrong. It’s Nixon’s “If the President does it, that means that it is not illegal” writ large.
If you go back to de Tocqueville, it basically means that America is the first fully-functioning democratic republic that privileged equality under law over status, and as such is institutionally resistant to many kinds of internal corruption. Conservatives didn’t really co-opt the concept as much as liberals abandoned it as a dangerous delusion following WWII.
Keith G
I would have hoped that Cohen would be able to recognize this variant of the Heckler’s Veto. He is not alone in this astonishing blind spot.
EsotericWombat
Apropos of nothing, you can get arrested for disturbing the peace if your actions serve no legitimate purpose and pose a credible risk of public endangerment.
Not that I’d want to see this pastor enjoined by law, but those equating burning the Quran with building a house of worship may have even less of a leg to stand on than would be immediately apparent.
I think we have to thank Mitch McConnell for being the most prominent Conservative to condemn the burning without taking a cheap shot at the Park51 Islamic Center in the same breath. I wish we didn’t have to thank people for brief glimmers of decency, but here we are.
asiangrrlMN
Every time I say do not get off the boat. When I succumb, I berate myself. What a piece of shit. Even more disturbing, a substantial part of the commentariat agrees with him.
arguingwithsignposts
@Onkel Bob:
There is some kind of nationalistic japanese tea party that held rallies earlier this year on one of those anniversaries.
Linda Featheringill
I’ve posted this before but apparently the world as a whole hasn’t grasped it yet, so here goes again.
The recent controversy in present-day Auschwitz was based on the fact that the ground the Catholics wanted to use as a memorial had been used during the operation of Auschwitz as a dumping ground for the ashes, etc. from the crematoria.
The protesters [mainly Jews] said that the ground still contained teeth and bits of bone, etc. from the people who were killed in the gas ovens. These victims were largely Jewish but a lot of them were gentiles, as the Catholics averred. I would imagine that pieces of a lot of different people are still in that dumping ground.
The protesters wanted the ground left undisturbed, as a graveyard would be.
Are there any remains of 9/11 victims underneath the old Burlington Coat factory? If not, then how does the one compare with the other?
Loneoak
Was our country this fucking stupid before 9/11/01? It’s hard to remember what the world was like before the Bush Decade.
PeakVT
@The Dangerman: I don’t know what the fuck that means
Our country (tribe) is better than all the other countries (tribes). Because.
Small-minded tribalism explains a lot of human behaviors, especially the more stupid ones.
RalfW
@Loneoak:
Yes.
We bought Reagan’s “Cut government to cure inflation” rhetoric coupled with the fastest ballooning government in history.
We accepted trickle-down as economic law (and still, it appears, do).
That all proved to the “leaders” of our nation that we don’t pay the slightest attention and that we can be bought off with free money and the occasional gay/muslim/hate circus.
Frank
So when the hell is it a sensible idea?. They are also trying to build a mosque in TN, where the locals also don’t want it. So that’s also too close to Ground Zero apparently. How far away does it need to be to satisfy Cohen?
BTW – There ALREADY is a mosque 4 blocks from Ground Zero. I take it Cohen wants that one destroyed?
So according to Cohen it is a sensible idea to have topless bars and other seedy businesses near Ground Zero, but heaven forbid there is a community center/mosque in the area. Good heavens!
I don’t recall Mr Coehn ever writing a column questioning the sensibility of building Christian churches near the Oklahoma City bombing.
Finally, does Mr Coehn realize that the majority of the people on Manhattan are in support of the mosque and that 9/11 victim’s families are split on the issue? Does he also realize that this is just a hate issue conceived by people on the very far right such as Palin and Gingrich?
RalfW
@DonkeyKong:
This, also, too.
shirt
It’s called assymetric warfare. The issue isn’t about mosques or ground or god or jesus. The issue is enemies and how best to hurt them. How can our “enemies” best use our strenghts against us? Why not put a maggotty idea in the brain of a loon of a pastor and start bellowing that it’s his “right”. There will be more of this.
Amir_Khalid
@lacp: I’ve said before, in discussing the columns of Ross Douthat, that there seems to be no editor at the New York Times with the duty (or maybe the balls) to tell a columnist that his/her column doesn’t make sense. Over there, making sense seems to be a matter of the columnist’s whim, rather than of professional duty.
@JGabriel: The US armed forces are built to defeat the armed forces of other nations in conventional warfare — to win shooting matches — in no small part by having the bestest hardware on the planet. But the bestest hardware only helps you win shooting matches. It doesn’t help win the hearts and minds of the noncombatant population — the political struggle that makes up the greater part of any counterinsurgency effort. If you’re a foreign power, as the US is in Afghanistan, and your local protege isn’t up to winning that political struggle, the military effort is just a long and ultimately futile game of whack-a-mole. In the end you have to cut your losses and go home, and let things play out as they would have without your interference. Military might is the wrong tool for the job in both Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s why the US isn’t winning in either country.
tomvox1
Talk about undoing all that hard-earned good will from the Iran “Green” columns in one fell swoop. Even this dumb analogy of “the Catholics took down the crosses at Auschwitz” has been used by about a million others with “sensitive good intentions” as justification for capitulating to the “Muslims are a different case” meme. Not only is the column trite and wrongheaded but it’s like he just woke up from a two month-long nap. Jesus, go back to London or wherever, Roger…
batgirl
@Linda Featheringill: Thanks, Linda. Also to compare the surroundings of Auschwitz in Poland to the surroundings of the WTC in NYC is crazy. Someone put up a great walking tour of lower Manhattan and of all the “sacrilegious” buildings and institutions closer than the proposed Muslim community center.
Add to that, that the plan for the actual WTC site is a paean to the true American religion, capitalism. Corporate headquarters and offices, and correct me if I’m wrong, but a big fucking shopping mall.
arguingwithsignposts
@Frank: quoting Cohen:
I prefer the STFU Harvester ™, myself, with some of the Rusty Farm Implements ™ to catch the leftover harvest.
Steeplejack
@Loneoak:
Yes. but we pretty much kept it to ourselves. Then YouTube and reality TV made it okay to be stupid in public.
HRA
@Loneoak:
“Was our country this fucking stupid before 9/11/01? It’s hard to remember what the world was like before the Bush Decade.”
I would say there were certain segments in society that were stupid. The difference is they did not have the communication access of today or the MSM taking them seriously when they should be ignored or either taken to task over their stupidity.
Tweety brings up talking to your friends and relatives when gathering about current political events on many of his shows. It brings me back to those childhood days when after dinner was over and conversation began among the guests at the table. I would sneak back to the dining room and perch under the table to listen. Reminiscences were OK if you did not invoke religion or politics for at our table were those of different religions and a history of other political persuasion in their ancestry. Needless to say my Dad would have been deeply disgusted today and so am I as well.
DonkeyKong
Generational bigotry? Is that another bullshit term like reverse racism?
geg6
I’m so fucking sick of these bedwetters screeching about building this community center, a completely inoffensive and actually community-minded project that, if it could have just been quietly completed as intended, might actually do us some good in the Muslim world. Merkins need to DIAF. Seriously.
Meanwhile, I plan to celebrate The Day The Constitution Died by watching the great D.A. Pennebaker film “Monterrey Pop” OnDemand from the Sundance Channel and trying to forget the last forty years.
DonkeyKong
Each generation can tally its successes and failures. Please gnomedad and Svensker, enlighten me on the Boomer Generation Media, Money and Political class.
arguingwithsignposts
@DonkeyKong: Can I kick Megan McArdle out of my generation?
Steeplejack
@DonkeyKong:
Well, the boomers invented the World Wide Web and the computer you’re using to dick around on it, so there’s that.
kgc16
@DonkeyKong: Nah, anyone of any generation can be an asshole. You and RalfW are proof of that.
morzer
@arguingwithsignposts:
Just so long as she doesn’t end up in mine!
Davis X. Machina
Maybe not generational bigotry, but generational envy. The people who survived the Depression and WWII are leaving from our midst.
There are a lot of neo-Crusaders who au fond are really motivated by nothing more than an unwillingness to confront the decided fact that their lives aren’t harnessed to some larger cause, that their sacrifices — of their living standards, their civil rights, their sanity — aren’t made in the course of getting something better, something larger, in return. Say, a Global Titanic Manichean Struggle against Ultimate Evil.
Instead it’s the 9-5, becoming the 7:30-5, and Saturday if the boss asks, owning the oldest car in the cul-de-sac, driving the soccer bus, all the while getting older, grayer, and more worried. And that can’t possibly be all there is. Not for me. I am unique, wonderful, put here for a purpose. I am not meant for a Global Titanic Manichean Struggle against Male Pattern Baldness.
You wanna be Willy Loman, or Audy Murphy?
The Last Good War — now that was a purpose. But that was 70 years ago, and today there’s nothing — except the Pats on the wide-screen. Now you need a grand Crusade, just to avoid looking into the abyss. Sometimes you have to go crazy to keep from going mad.
Voltaire was right —‘Cela est bien dit,’ répondit Candide, ‘mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’
Not enough, not nearly enough, cultivating of the jardins going on out there in suburbia….
geg6
@DonkeyKong:
Hey, asshole. If you want to talk smack about an entire generation, you’d do better to point your ire at GenX with their slacker culture and King Ronnie fixation. I actually don’t know any wingnut Boomers. And I don’t know any wingnuts who aren’t GenXers.
DonkeyKong
When I talk about a generation I’m not talking about YOU, I’m talking about it’s leadership and the culture it leaves behind.
Trying to have a serious discussion about how this game of “capture the flag” with 9/11 relates to that.
Nick
Oh Jesus, how did a diary about the stupidity of the American punditry to declare that we need to be sensitive to Islamophobia becomes a flame war about generational bigotry?
Violet
@geg6:
Oh, I do. But I live in a red state where there are wingnuts of every stripe. I know a lot of GenXers who aren’t wingnuts, too.
Omnes Omnibus
@Nick: Just lucky, I guess.
arguingwithsignposts
@Nick:
because that’s how we roll! :)
And all you Mac haters can suck. on. this.
Steeplejack
@DonkeyKong:
Golly, in retrospect it’s hard to see how I could have misinterpreted your desire to spark a serious discussion with this:
Talk about comprehension fail. My apologies.
Moses2317
@Linda Featheringill:
Thanks, Linda, for that valuable information.
Of course, as a warning, the crazies on the right have already come up with a morbid response. Apparently, the NYFD made a map soon after 9/11 plotting where victims body parts had been found. Somehow Faux News has gotten ahold of it and is using it to say that the Burlington Coat Factory Muslim community center should not be built because the remains are within 348 feet of the site.
Yet another example of how the right wing has truly gone bat shit crazy.
Winning Progressive
geg6
@Nick:
Because some asshole decided the very first comment to make on the post would be a great place to blame an entire generation for dickheads like Roger Cohen. Because apparently, that’s pithy and clever, I guess.
DonkeyKong
The battle over 9/11 isnt an attempt to restart the boomer culture war, it another never ending chapter.
Well at least til 2020 or so.
arguingwithsignposts
@geg6:
Gingrich is a boomer.
Paul Ryan {spit} is a gen-xer.
Barack Obama is a gen-xer.
Paul Krugman is a boomer.
each generation has its crosses to bear.
Mnemosyne
@geg6:
George W. Bush
Karl Rove
Rick Perry
Mitt Romney
John Boehner
Jim DeMint
Tom DeLay
Rush Limbaugh
Peggy Noonan
…
In fact, pretty much every prominent Republican who brought us the crappy policies of the past 8 years is a Baby Boomer or within a few years (Dick Cheney was born in 1941; Newt Gingrich was born in 1943).
Now, you can argue that it’s only natural that that happen since they were the largest demographic cohort and it has more to do with those demographics than with there being something wrong with Baby Boomers as a group, but you can’t really argue that there are no wingnut Baby Boomers.
gnomedad
@DonkeyKong:
No, kinda like regular racism. Saying “you and your age group / sex / religion / race / nationality are all the same”. In a thread whose topic is anti-Muslim stupidity.
Jeebus, when Clinton was elected, the wingers seemed to think we were all DFH’s. Times change.
BGinCHI
At the end of Cohen’s column it says this:
“This column has been updated to reflect the news.”
Let’s fix it:
This column has [not] been
updated[written] to reflect thenews[truth unless you are a fucking idiot].OK, that’s better.
kgc16
@Nick: Because DonkeyKong’s first thought on reading the article was that all Boomers are vicious bedwetters. Apparently that was supposed to be an attempt to start a serious conversation. I can’t understand how that would be someone’s first reaction. But when someone makes a sweeping nasty statement like that, we aging ruinous Boomer bedwetters get all offended and react. Our bad. I guess.
jinxtigr
He said this? Holy fuck. Sure, you betcha, which is why we did nothing after 9/11, right? Hey, a harvest of anger was in. Some unspecified Arabs were angry at us, so of course the American thing is to be prudent. Right?
Now we have Americans building stuff in FREAKING NEW YORK that’s not quite redneck junction approved- New York! Boy, that’s some white-flightia right there- and all of a sudden we’re all about being prudent because we have our own terrorists and they’re mad? In THIS case we have to encourage our own thugs, arsonists, etc?
This guy’s talking a lame American principle which goes way back- unmitigated stupid bullshit. I’m sorry- a great American principle is tolerating and coping with massive amounts of drama and chaos and it’s never been any different and there’s ALWAYS been racial and cultural anger and it’s likely never going to change into the Small World ride at Disneyland.
To get all faint and fluttery about it now is some complete bullshit. Man up, or I will be more mad at you than the rednecks ;P
Chuck Butcher
Ah, the recurring theme of Gen *Something* which is about as illuminating as a burnt out bulb. Noisy and stupid is noisy and stupid whatever birthdate is involved.
American history is littered with examples of stupidities promulgated by those who ought to know better, maybe Vietnam stands as an example of that for the WWII crowd and Iraq & Afghanistan do the same for the Vietnam crowd. Maybe you’d like to talk about the Constitution and slavery or the Revolution and Anti-Sedition?
You play at this theme and expose yourself as an ignorant asshole with resentment as a driver. Fuck yourself and your stupidity.
Amir_Khalid
@Nick: The stupidity of the punditariat is so commonplace, there’s really not that much left to say about it any more. On the other hand, flame wars are always fun.
Incidentally, are you the guy that says Jews control the media? Someone mentioned that in another thread here.
kgc16
@arguingwithsignposts: This.
BGinCHI
Regarding the generational argument, did anyone else see the Daily Show piece on Staten Island? They got a bunch of mooks together to make a “court” that would hear arguments about Prop 8.
The startling conclusion?
Overturned. Even a bunch of not-too-bright people just thought denying gays the right to marry was stupid. And the reason, I think? They were ALL young people, and just not interested in forcing people to do shit based on irrational fears.
Mnemosyne
@HRA:
I have to say, probably the biggest thing I resent about the Bush years is that it made it almost impossible for me to talk to my dad and brother anymore. We always had political differences, but the Bushies and Fox News have made things so toxic that we just can’t have conversations beyond “How’s the weather?” and “How ’bout them Bears?” anymore because it veers off into insane bullshit about sociaIism and death panels. And that really, really pisses me off.
geg6
@Violet:
Oh, I know lots of GenXers who aren’t wingnuts. But I have an asshole here who apparently never heard of non-bedwetting Boomers like, oh, I don’t know, maybe Barack Obama and I just wanted to let him know that my hyperbole can match his any day. And I really don’t know any wingnuts who aren’t GenXers. But that is, I’m sure, just happenstance.
licensed to kill time
This whole naming of generations and characterizing them as a group is a stupid construct. It’s like astrology, because you happen to have been born within a set of dates that somehow says something about you as a group?
she’s a Leo
she’s got a flat in Soho
she breaks the ceiling
everytime she twirls her mojo
jinxtigr
…because if it’s within 350 feet, the bodyparts will turn zombie, rise up out of the earth and form Voltron??
Whuh??? Okay, what IS the minimum safe distance between muslims and corpses? Never mind that presumably corpses have been picked up already (it is New York, maybe they blended in), what do they think will happen? Random spleens rising up out of the concrete moaning YOOOOUUUUU don’t love jeeesus?
BGinCHI
@jinxtigr: co-sign.
geg6
@arguingwithsignposts:
Fail. Obama is of my own generation, the tail end of the Boomers, often referred to as Generation Jones. Most demographers date the end of the baby boom in 1964.
Edited to add: Double fail, in that I said that of people I actually know. The only one of that list that I can actually claim to know is Obama, since I have met him IRL.
Mnemosyne
@geg6:
Yep, slacker culture had nothing to do with the recessions that kept hitting, massive layoffs, and the fact that good jobs keep vanishing. Nothing to do with the fact that people at my college graduation were putting “Will Work For Food” on their caps since we had the bad luck to graduate during the Bush I recession.
It’s all about those lazy kids who just won’t get off your lawn.
arguingwithsignposts
@geg6:
If you believe the wiki timeline designation for gen-x, the O-man is gen-x (1961), and we’re *not* giving him up (so far)!
valdivia
@Nick:
was wondering the same thing.
But have to agree with @arguingwithsignposts: can we just get rid of her from our generational cohort please?
Anya
Generational bigotry? WTF!
If someone points out that the people who are complaining about the community center are mostly cranks from the boomer generation, is not equivalent to racism. It’s understandable that boomers who grew up in a non diverse world are more bigoted than younger generations. I don’t want to re-litigate the primary wars but many liberal boomers proved this point.
Citizen Alan
@JGabriel:
We’ve been “losing against cave-dwellers” because we’ve been foolishly expecting a military force to perform nation building for which it is utterly unequipped. We’d be better off if we replaced half our current force in Afghanistan with Peace Corps volunteers who’d had specialized training in Afghan culture and languages.
The purpose of a military is to defeat and destroy the enemy. If it were the intention of the U.S. to engage in total war with Afghanistan with the understanding that the endgame was the extermination of the Afghani people, I have little doubt we could achieve it in short order. Thankfully, we’re not quite that far gone yet.
arguingwithsignposts
@geg6:
I take your point, although he’s somewhere in the middle. I think the whole generational thing is pretty arbitrary bullshit to begin with: putting large groups of people into nicely defined boxes so we can talk shit about them.
DonkeyKong
All generations are both good and bad. Er right. C’mon if you read this blog most of the anger directed at various institutions are run by a certain generation, class, take your pick.
The leadership of these institutions make choices good and bad.
Are these choices made in a vaccum?
So over the last 20 years has the country, its culture improved, deteriorated?
The battle over 9/11, economy, the war and civil liberties.
Yes my first comment kicked over the table, but steel your fee-fee’s please.
arguingwithsignposts
@DonkeyKong:
I think you’d get a lot farther with your hypothesis if you focused on the class angle.
Yutsano
Bah. Screw your generational wars. Just vote for the non-crazy person in the next election.
Born in 1972 if anyone is curious.
EDIT: I’m going to go Galt and pretend to have a productive day. Y’all have fun.
arguingwithsignposts
@Yutsano:
Gen-X in the hizzouse!
BGinCHI
Please, please let this be true and take these motherfuckers down:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/us/politics/11chamber.html?_r=1
CoC accused of tax fraud.
Fire up the SuperMax.
Chuck Butcher
@DonkeyKong:
You care to inform as to which Generation’s stupidity and ignorance you represent? No?
NobodySpecial
Eh, this ‘generational’ thing is stupid from the get go. Age-wise, I’m GenX, but I’m also the progeny of a pair of the Greatest Generation (I was kinda late). So which am I? I don’t care, go fuck yourself if you worry about it, it’s as relevant to me as my horoscope or how the colors look to aliens in the Sagittarius Cluster.
EDIT – In case anyone hasn’t been offended yet, here’s the images from 9/11 they don’t want you to see. HT to Garrdor for getting them.
arguingwithsignposts
@BGinCHI:
Sometimes I hate the Masters of the Universe and their useful
idiotsaccountants.geg6
@Mnemosyne:
What I wrote made as much sense as blaming Boomers for everthing that is currently wrong with this country. Based on what I’ve seen of the Teabaggers in these parts, it’s not the Boomers but the so-called Greatest Generation (as their fetishists call them…I certainly don’t) and literally every single Christianist and/or wingnut I know is of GenX.
As I mentioned in another comment, two can play the hyperbole game. Guess some don’t have their snarkometers connected.
DonkeyKong
Born 1970.
Boomers are 76 million
GenX 30 million
The point behind the numbers is that the boomer generation in terms of its place in history (post WW2) and numbers HAS a sizable impact, no?
What is that impact on the institutions of this country and its future?
Simple enough question?
valdivia
not to cast aspersions but since we’re already doing the generational war why not add this bit to the fire?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1310230/Facebook-users-narcissistic-insecure-low-self-esteem.html#ixzz0z3O3DNCe
In other news: water is wet!
Omnes Omnibus
This thread has gone stupid. I’m out of here.
DonkeyKong
I mean, I can get behind a post that just calls Richard Cohen a putz. That..I..can..do!
Kumbaya Generations!
FlipYrWhig
Roger Cohen is a flaming bag of suck. I wonder which he thinks is more offensive to right-thinking people, a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan or Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.
licensed to kill time
@Omnes Omnibus:
So much stupid, indeed!
NobodySpecial
@valdivia: Well, what has the average Facebook user got to feel secure about? Every day, they’re bombarded with images of how they should live that they can’t, they’re bombarded with threats to their person that they can’t do anything about, they’re bombarded with the knowledge that they aren’t satisfied in what they do with their lives and that at any moment forces beyond their control can take it all away and leave them with that sparrow stuck on a curtain rod under the bridge. Oh, and if you try and get yourself a little bit of a safety net, you can’t have it because you’re obviously not putting in the required effort and if you were only good at what you do, you’d be a millionaire just like Joel Osteen.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
Your generation is defined by its worst members. My generation is made up of unique snowflakes and generalizing about us in any way is just like Jim Crow.
I do pity the poor boomers, though. The sting of knowing that somebody out there has noted that the bulk of the teabaggers are boomers is just as painful as being part of a religion whose holy books are burned and places of worship are relentlessly protested simply for existing. No, worse! In fact, it’s the worst bigotry that has ever existed throughout history.
Boomers just can’t catch a break in this country!
Chuck Butcher
@DonkeyKong:
So you’re an example of the failure of the educational system or the outcome of the over-indulgence in drugs? I wait with bated breath to see what disaster some asshole will blame you for in a decade or so.
valdivia
@NobodySpecial:
righteous rant. I guess I am just anti FB because I am very keen on privacy. And I have hoards of people emailing me everyday about how I am an idiot ’cause I haven’t joined.
Back on topic: Cohen is a fucking idiot. Then again he has been an idiot about pretty much everything he has written on since Obama became president.
Mumphrey
I’m just so pissed off these days. All these tiny minded buffoons, to borrow from Wallace & Gromit, shrieking and shivering about every fucking little thing that startles them. It’s pitiful. What do these people do when the wind blows around the corner of the house at night? Where do they hide when the thunder sounds and the lightning flashes? What do they do at the beach when the waves come up toward them? Do they flee screaming to higher, safer ground?
I’m sick of these gutless losers who work themselves into lathers over anything they don’t know or understand. They’re turning this country into a toilet. I can’t say I hate my country, but I sure hate what these racist, xenophobic, police state craving fascists so dearly want to turn it into. They’re hellbent on turning this country into their idea of what a “stong” country should be: one where we cower all the time, where the police can strip search us at will, and where we waste thousands of lives in meaningless, fruitless wars that we have no chance of winning, since we don’t even know what “winning” them would look like. Anybody who doesn’t go out and vote this fall, well, I guess they’ll get the government they deserve. The problem is the rest of us who work to keep the Republicans out of power, and vote to keep them out, well, we’ll be stuck with that same government, too.
I think maybe I’ll go get drunk.
NobodySpecial
@valdivia: Joining’s not that bad, I say that as a very antisocial person. You can set your privacy bar pretty high if you want to. As long as you can learn to ignore ads and Farmville spam, it’s not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. If nothing else, give it a try under a fake name.
Citizen Alan
Generations are shaped by common historical experiences, whether its Woodstock and Vietnam for Boomers or the Reagan Years and the fall of Communism for the GenXers. This creates a common basis of thought among different generations that is not present (at least in the same way) for different racial, ethnic or religious groups. I would think that the differences between how a black Boomer and a white Boomer reacted to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while probably extreme, are not nearly as great as the differences in viewpoint between someone born in 1954 and who was in school at the time versus someone born in 1974 who has always lived in the Act’s aftermath.
The extreme stereotype of a Boomer is that of a selfish narcissist who expects the entire world to conform to his needs. On the right, that philosophy gives us wingnuts. On the left, it gave us Bill Clinton who, despite knowing perfectly well how eager the Right was to destroy him, was nevertheless arrogant enough to think he could have an affair with a 25-year-old intern with no repercussions. It also gave us Ralph Nader, who though deliberately throwing the 2000 election to the Republicans would be good for the country because … well, I guess because it would prove that everyone should have listened to Ralph Nader.
The extreme stereotype of a GenXer is that we (I was born in 1969) are hopelessly cynical and have no faith in any institution that we didn’t have a hand in building ourselves. To the extent that Obama may be classified as a GenXer rather than a late-model Boomer, I wonder if that plays a role in his support for the Catfood Commission. Gen X has largely been conditioned, at least since I was in high school, to accept that Social Security simply won;t be there for us when we retire (whether through bad financial planning or the malfeasance of politicians, the result will be the same). If Obama believes there’s no way to save Social Security, perhaps he thinks he can manage its dissolution in a more effective manner than whatever damn fool idea the Repukes come up with. I think he’s wrong, but his handling of the Commission thus far doesn’t give me a lot of hope.
Like all stereotypes, both of these are grossly unfair to the majority of both generations. But speaking as a GenXer, I’m not terribly worried about hurting the fee-fees of the Boomer Generation. GenX is the first generation expected to be less successful and less financially secure than the generation to come before it and certainly the first generation for whom it is suggested that we are coming of age at a time when American can be described as a “dying empire.” Both these indisputable facts are the result of policies enacted by our elders when we were children and had no say in the matter, and we will be living with the results of Reaganism, Bushism (I & II), Clintonism and Obamaism, long after the last Boomer has shuffled off this mortal coil. So forgive us our occasional snide remarks about the Boomers. Call it gallows humor, because that’s where the stereotypical GenXer expects to end up.
Linda Featheringill
@NobodySpecial:
I am the progeny of a pair of the Greatest Generation and they were both terrible people.
I am too old to be a Boomer, and I still think they were bad people.
You can’t tell a person by the generational label.
gnomedad
@Jrod the Cookie Thief:
Go to hell. It is perfectly true and significant that many (most?) teabaggers are boomers. Nor will you ever catch me whining that “boomers can’t catch a break”. There are a lot of us, so we have a lot of influence. We are also all competing with each other. You win some, you lose some. My fee-fees are fine, thanks; I’m just objecting to horseshit name-calling.
ET
I understand what he is getting at (I don’t however agree) but in the end he only ends of minimizing both. That is is the problem with lazy, ill-thought out comparisons made by idiots, it exposes them as even bigger idiots.
Triassic Sands
In the case of someone like Roger Cohen, simply referring to him as a liberal isn’t very helpful. We need something more informative like “village liberal” or “New York Times liberal.”
I don’t remember the last time I bothered to read anything written by Cohen. I doubt I’ll make an exception in this case. Time is precious.
sparky
nicely done, DougJ! it’s not often that the blog headline can also reflect the contents of the comment thread.
go team!
BGinCHI
@Triassic Sands:
How about “liberal douchebag” Roger Cohen.
Someone call Bill Keller.
arguingwithsignposts
@sparky:
America, Fuck Yeah! Foam Fingers!
Cliff
No, see, the problem is that you’re reading an asshole like Roger Cohen.
Of course he’s going to write asshole-ish things like this. He’s an asshole. He’s always going to be an asshole. It’s practically a law of nature at this point.
If, for some reason, you feel the need to know what Roger Cohen is writing about, simply imagine the stupidest fucking thing you could possibly say and put that in column form. That should scratch your itch.
See also: Brooks, Broder, Ignatius, Kristol and George Will.
Anne Laurie
@NobodySpecial:
__
You may be thinking of Richard ‘Caligula’s Horse’ Cohen (at the Washington Post).
Roger Cohen (NYTimes) is usually smarter than this column.
gil mann
Why’s everybody fighting about the hot Asian Cylon?
Anne Laurie
@Amir_Khalid:
__
When American newspapers decided it was their duty to be “nonpartisan” (starting somewhere between the end of WWI and the beginning of WWII), it was decreeded there should be a firewall of sorts between Real News and Opinion. Columnists are Opinion, and don’t have to play the “on the one hand — , on the other hand — “ game their fellow infotainment producers are required to do. In practice, sometimes the distinction is sternly enforced, sometimes that firewall is pretty permeable. As an example, the Wall Street Journal is famous for reporters who produce great, not-always-corporate-friendly journalism… and notorious for opinion columnists who don’t seem to live on the same planet as those reporters. But now that Rupert Murdoch owns the WSJ, media-watchers complain the ‘straight news’ reporting is less unbiased, and the columnists have gotten less literate while remaining just as crazy/xenophobic/reactionary.
fasteddie9318
Shorter Roger Cohen:
Freedom of religion? Fuck that, we shouldn’t even let these animals have the freedom to do what they want with their private property because it might give some fucktard right winger somewhere a sad.
SiubhanDuinne
I certainly didn’t like Cohen’s conclusion in this column, but honestly, I usually find him inoffensive and sometimes quite good. I’m kind of surprised at all the hate being directed at his entire oeuvre based, apparently, on one piece.
SiubhanDuinne
It occurs to me that maybe some are conflating the odious *Richard* Cohen at the Washington Post with the usually-pretty-decent *Roger* Cohen at the New York Times. The similarity of names puzzled me for a long time until I figured out which was which.
SiubhanDuinne
Aaaaand . . . Anne Laurie got there first (on the Roger/Richard thing)!
Comrade Kevin
@geg6: So, in response to someone saying something dense about boomers, you decided to reply with something even stupider?
FlipYrWhig
Ah, crud, I was probably thinking of Richard Cohen, the guy who said he was a funny guy and Colbert wasn’t.
handy
Donkey Kong was and continues to be my all-time favorite video game.
Al G.
@Steeplejack: “Then YouTube and reality TV made it okay to be stupid in public.”
The U.S. has been becoming a reality show itself for years now. The recursion is palpable, if you watch what passes for news here.