A number of you have emailed me to let me know that you think this Richard Cohen article is atrocious and that Cohen (America’s Concern Troll) is an asshole.
You’ll get no argument from me on either account.
by John Cole| 60 Comments
This post is in: Assholes, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment
A number of you have emailed me to let me know that you think this Richard Cohen article is atrocious and that Cohen (America’s Concern Troll) is an asshole.
You’ll get no argument from me on either account.
Comments are closed.
Gus
Who the fuck puts themselves through the pain of reading Richard Cohen?
New Yorker
How much LSD would one have to consume before one sees anything analogous between John Brown and Terry Jones other than that they’re both carbon-based life forms?
beltane
I’ll have to take a pass on that one. If I want to read the work of a stupid concern troll, there are far better options than Richard Cohen. On the other hand, we haven’t complained about him much lately so it might as well be his turn to wear the dunce cap.
GambitRF
Barack Obama did as he had to. His first obligation is to protect American lives — especially troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, somehow in the back of his mind he must have acknowledged a competing obligation to protect American values
Wait, what? Obama didn’t order him arrested, he just want on TV and said that burning the Koran was kind of retarded. How about putting that paragraph in an article about not prosecuting torture or state secrets?
cleek
@GambitRF:
this must be a new wingnut meme. i see in the comments over there that a lot of wingnuts think Obama somehow failed to uphold the Constitution in this situation.
Amanda in the South Bay
What the fucking fuck?
In addition to drawing a rather false and confused analogy between Jones and Brown, the whole article was an incoherent mess.
I’m the one who gets paid jack shit to check people’s groceries out, and Cohen gets paid the $$$ to write shit like this?
In an ideal world he’d be a homeless beggar.
Mark S.
Jesus, just because something is permissible doesn’t mean it’s valued. First Amendment rights are valued; Richard Cohen columns are not. They are still protected by the First Amendment.
Kryptik
I couldn’t make it past the title of the column. I mean…christ.
But oh, we can’t forget that the WaPo is a hopeless liberal rag that has excluded all conservative thought. The WaPo Ombudsman and Howie Kurtz have said so!
fasteddie9318
@cleek:
It’s not new; wingnuts have never understood and probably never will understand what the First Amendment actually means. If they’re not figuring out a way to redefine Islam as something other than a “religion,” they’re bitching that Dr. Laura voluntarily quitting her radio show is some sort of grotesque violation of her free speech rights.
4tehlulz
I couldn’t get past the title.
The guy’s a fucking cancer in the colon of American journalism.*
*I apologize to any tumors that were offended by the comparison.
El Cid
It can’t be helped if libruls are unable to see the parallels between 1/3 of the nation subjecting humans to absolute brute enslavement and a moderate Muslim backing an Islamic community center in a former Burlington Coat Factory somewhat near where the WTC used to be.
jl
John Brown, a possibly mad self proclaimed prophet commits grossly illegal and inflammatory insurrection and murder in a noble cause. Jones, who talks and acts like a slightly off kilter weirdo, commits legal, though offensive, inflammatory symbolic protest for a stupid cause.
Uh, yeah, sure, plenty of parallels there. They were both inflammatory, and both at least a little off balance. And…. ‘something like that’, as Cohen says.
Cohen seems to confuse ‘standing with’ Jones with admitting that Jones has a legal right (in accordance with local fire codes, of course!) to burn a holy book, even if it is an offensive and stupid act.
What a mess.
‘something like that’ characterizes Cohen’s thought processes.
Cohen bringing up the threat of ‘Muslim violence’, as if anyone warning Jones that his protest is stupid and counterproductive is some for dhimmituded coward, is priceless. I suppose he would say the same thing if anyone admitted someone had the legal right to, but warned that it would not be good idea, to burn the Book of Mormon outside the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, or piss on a crucifix outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
phantomist
Well, to be fair, if the Canada prime minister had a Rent boy, I’m sure Jones would propose a naked assault on him.
Villago Delenda Est
Jeeze, talk about your incoherent messes. Cohen must have caught the Broder virus or something.
The analogy is ridiculous, akin to the drawing of a favorable parallel between the anti-slavery movement of the 19th Century with the anti-choice movement of the late 20th Century.
Villago Delenda Est
@jl:
Really, comparing the holy books of white people to subhuman mud people is just so inappropriate.
jl
I forgot to add that this column should be exhibit one for the case that Cohen is an idiot. Sorry to be rude, but what else can you say?
Paul L.
@fasteddie9318:
I means what progressives say it means.
Justice Breyer: No right to burn Korans in First Amendment?
Jo Fish
Shorter Richard Cohen: “The First Amendment covers asshats, I want to have Terry Jones baby”.
Citizen Alan
“I hope I don’t have to explain that I am hardly anti-Muslim,” says Richard Cohen.
This from a guy whose position on the torture and sexual abuse of Muslim prisoners amount to “Well, it’s bad and we shouldn’t do it, but we absolutely shouldn’t prosecute those who ordered it, nor even subject them to the indignity of an official inquiry into who actually did order it, when, and why.”
Richard Cohen is a filthy, loathsome pig.
Paris
Holy sh*t, that is one incoherent column. I’m not sure what he is talking about and I doubt he does either. If hallucinogens were not involved, some type of institutionalization may be warranted.
Silver
I still want to know who told Richard Cohen to stock up on Cipro in 2001.
Who the fuck wanted to save that guy?
jl
@Silver: That advice may have been an attempt on his life. Good chance Cohen would swallow a whole bottle in a panic attack due to, say, perceived white dust on a clever and fiendish jihadi planned butterfly swarm attack, and wipe out his liver.
BGinCHI
Oh. My. God.
I hope Russell Banks finds Cohen and slaps the his mouth full of bloody chiclets.
Anyone who has read “Cloudsplitter,” and other works on Brown and the era will line up behind him.
Cohen is such a fucking idiot.
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen Alan:
I have Richard Cohen mentally pegged as roughly as anti-Muslim as Marty Peretz. I guess I couldn’t point you to specific items on which that opinion is based, but that’s my impression.
Bhall35
@Paul L.: What Breyer actually said:
“It will be answered over time in a series of cases which force people to think carefully. That’s the virtue of cases,” Breyer told me. “And not just cases. Cases produce briefs, briefs produce thought. Arguments are made. The judges sit back and think. And most importantly, when they decide, they have to write an opinion, and that opinion has to be based on reason. It isn’t a fake.”
This has been another episode of: Conservatives Taking Quotes Out Of Context.
(Hint: the Hot Air link was a clue…your argument is invalid, etc, etc.)
http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2010/09/justice-stephen-breyer-is-burning-koran-shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater.html
azlib
Cohen misses the point Rachael Maddow made that Jones would not have received the time of day except we have major players in one of our major political Parties deliberately stirring up Muslim hatred. But Cohen is either too dense or too stupid to understand the bigger issue here. It really comes down to journalistic malpractice to not report on the larger context.
Same goes with the Muslim Mosque/Cultural Center near the old site of the WTC. Why was the lunatic Pam Geller’s idiotic meme fanned into a huge media circus? Again it is because we have Republican politicians using the issue for political advantage. That is the real story here.
Lunatics like Jones or Geller will always be with us. A responsible press or responsible politicians would not give them the time of day.
Mnemosyne
I think Richard Cohen should wear an orange shirt to the next St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York. He can whine about his free speech rights while some drunk Irishmen give him the beat-down he deserves.
(Note: I myself am about half drunken Irish(wo)man, so I get to make these jokes.)
BGinCHI
@Mnemosyne: Brendan Gleason vs. Richard Cohen Texas cage match!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Remember, these are the same people who fail to realize that keeping Michael Steele as the head of the RNC is racist: If he were white, he would have been fired a long time ago. How do you expect them to get the Bill of Rights?
Kryptik
@Bhall35:
If you want to see how obtuse the whole reaction is to it all, just read the comments section there.
Then realize that the majority of those posts are what passes for our majority opinion these days on rights for the sufficiently brown and swarthy, thanks to the media hysteria and idiocy.
MattR
@Bhall35: Breyer stating that he wants to consider the arguments presented to him before making a decision is just further proof that he is a liberal, activist judge.
Bhall35
@Kryptik: Yeah, but wading into most comment sections (with a few exceptions), makes me incredibly depressed after about 2 minutes, and then I really have to get out.
eemom
nothing against stating the obvious, but saying that a Richard Cohen article is atrocious is kind of like saying a hurricane is windy. Is this one actually a Cohen 5? I always evacuate when someone posts a Cohen Watch, so I wouldn’t know.
ETA: I did feel kind of sorry for Roger Cohen the other day though — I believe almost everyone thought he was Richard, but that mosque column was actually pretty out of character for him.
Tom Hilton
John Brown’s body lies a-spinning in the grave,
But his truth just threw up in its mouth a little.
Keith G
On a point that may only be marginally related:
Did anyone catch the bitch slap that Tweety gave Dave Weigel last night? I am not sure what to make of it, or even if Matthews was even partially correct, but Weigel must still be feeling it today.
The segment can be accessed through iTunes.
Bhall35
@MattR: It’s somehow comforting to know that conservatives like Paul L are just phoning it in now, since their strategy has become so predictable.
I realize headlines like Hot Air’s and my recent favorite (sent to me by a wingnut), “U.S. Poverty on Track to Post Record Gain Under Obama’s Watch” from Fox, are meant for people who only read headlines that confirm their biases, but I think more people are catching on. Naive, maybe, but there you are.
cmorenc
Cohen stands “with” Jones because Cohen would have “stood with” John Brown because, um…he supports the right of free expression, even when it is a bigoted symbolic act (Jones), but (???) when it is a murderous non-symbolic act (Brown), because…I sort of lost track at this point of what rabbit-hole Cohen’s mind was trying to jump down at this point, probably because Cohen had no fucking clue either.
FlipYrWhig
@azlib:
Aha, but you have to realize too that the “responsible press” has spent years, decades really, being butthurt that conservatives think of them as Teh Librul Medea. If they ignored these important stories, why, it would prove they were biased! And people would send them mean emails! What could be more traumatic and scarring than that?
Gus
@Bhall35: Yeah, thought I’d give Paul L the benefit of the doubt and check it out. Imagine my surprise to find that he’s full of shit again.
Kryptik
@Bhall35:
Same here. But I force myself through them because it occurred to me not to long ago that they really aren’t so unrepresentative of what gets promoted in our national discourse now. Things are literally that stupid all around.
eemom
I don’t think that triple negative means what he thinks it means.
fasteddie9318
@Paul L.:
Hey, cool website, although I think you might have been going a little over the top when you called McDonald’s “worse than Terrorists.”
On the other hand, I thought it was very open-minded of you to write “I sure do hope Democrats win lots of races in November.” Is that because you saw that clip where John Boehner promised to “ship millions of American jobs overseas”?
Dr. Psycho
@Amanda in the South Bay: “In an ideal world he’d be a homeless beggar”.
My vision of an ideal world doesn’t include any homeless beggars.
I’d rather say that in an ideal world he’d be in a job that is ideal for his talents.
I’m sure he has some….
Older
Have you seen this?
http://amarillo.com/news/local-news/2010-09-12/protester-steals-quran-thwarts-burning
We’ve been forwarding it to friends under the heading:
Amarillo Hosts First Annual “Dude, You Have No Quran” Day.
It’s great. A skateboarder with the absolute minimum infiltration “disguise” ( a shirt on which he had hand-written “I’m in Reprent Amarillo NoLie”) snatched the Quran, and another protester grabbed his lighter.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@Gus:
Sadly, I fell for it this time. This one was out of the same playbook as his Polanski columns, using rhetoric just vague enough to set off all the left bloggers and sucker me into following the link. I was assured that the Polanski columns were apologia for child rape; they weren’t, they were just stupid. Now this one is “atrocious” in some unspecified way; well, if time-wasting contrarianism is “atrocious” then I guess that’s correct, but I’d sooner use the epithet “stupid” again.
I’m going to take a personal vow not to follow any more links to Richard Cohen from the lefty bloggers, but god knows if I’ll keep it.
MikeJ
@Older: One person being a fuckwit doesn’t entitle anyone to steal from them. Pity nobody beat the shit out of the skater.
Steve M.
Richard, you dumb bastard: It’s called the Internet. Use it.
Ripley
I hope I don’t not have to not explain that I am hardly barely close to almost not anti-anti-Richard Cohen. No sir, not by a long shot I don’t.
asiangrrlMN
Every fucking time I say to myself, “Self, do not get out of the boat. It says right there that it’s an atrocious article.” And yet, like Charlie Brown and the football, I cannot help myself. There are some links I will never click–Brooks/Broder, Douthat, any of the MMs, for example–but there are others, like Cohen, who I say, “Well, it can’t be THAT atrocious, can it?” And so, I click. And now, if you excuse me, I must go poke my eyeballs out with a rusty pitchfork. This column was beyond atrocious.
@eemom: Damn it, I do that all the time. Richard and Roger. It’s hard for me to tell one asshat from the other.
Keith G
@MikeJ:
Now that would have been helpful. Still, since this is Texas, if he were a brown person he could have been shot with impunity if that would a made you feel better.
Blotto von Bismarck
Does this stupid shit think that Jones cared about anything other than his fifteen minutes of fame and pissing off Muslims? He didn’t even need to burn the Qu’ran to get his vindictive point across (in the words of chess players, the threat is greater than the execution), and assholes like Cohen keep promoting him. Although Brown was an asshole himself, he did make tangible improvements in the lives of many slaves. Jones is just a bigoted little fuck.
In the meantime, which Cohen column is the absolute worst? I’ll put forth three:
This one really pisses me off, encouraging a kid to quit trying to do well in algebra class by claiming that “algebra is worthless in the real world”, an assertion which he damn well knows is wrong. He’s essentially telling the kid that she won’t amount to anything; coming from Richard Cohen, that doesn’t mean much, but it’s possible that the kid may take his ‘advice’ seriously.
This one tries to make the justification for letting Polanski get off for free. The reference to Holocaust survivors makes no sense in supporting Cohen’s argument unless you view it as an attempt to garner sympathy for Polanski, also an underhanded and vile move.
This one doesn’t piss me off, it’s just hilarious. Tattoos symbolize the economic slump, according to Cohen. It’s great ammo for a spoofer.
Tom Hilton
@MikeJ:
When the thing stolen is something the ‘victim’ was planning to destroy, it’s ‘theft’ only in the narrowest most technical meaning of the word, and not in any ethical sense.
MattR
@Tom Hilton: When the destruction of that item has symbolic meaning to the victim, it remains theft in both the legal and ethical sense. I hope nobody stole my father’s body because we were going to have it destroyed.
Mumphrey
So I have a big ol’ Funk & Wagnalls dictionary, and I swear, I’m going to try this: I’m going to flip back and forth through the pages and choose words randomly, and when I have a few hundred, I’m going to string them together, conjugating as needed, into some kind of vaguely grammatical order, and when I’m done, it will make more sense than anything Cohen grunts out twice a week.
Cohen, I can only guess, thinks of himself as some kind of Fearless Warrior for Truth and Freedom or something, which to guys like Cohen, means nothing more than pointless, ornery contrarianism. After all, if you’re saying something that goes against what most coherent, non-drunk elitists think, and you stand with the gibbering, drooling teabaggers, you must be gutsy, right?
Only, contrarianism isn’t gutsy, it’s just kind of dumb and annoying. I’d have thought most of us over 15 would understand that. I mean, our cat is contrarian. And even he’s better at it than Cohen. When our cat wants to be contrarian, he curls up in a basket of freshly washed towels, and clothes and goes to sleep. He knows we dn’t want him therer, but he doesn’t care. But the thing is, at least it shows a sense of style, you know? It doesn’t really do any harm, and it’s even kind of cute to see him snoozing away there.
Cohen’s contrarianism is more like when one of the dogs gets into the diaper pail for a snack…
Mumphrey
@Dr. Psycho:
I think that in an ideal world, Cohen would be the only homeless beggar.
cynickal
@MattR: So you’ll stand guard against thefts at my next Nativity burning followed by pissing on the ashes day I have scheduled for December 25?
Fabulous, I look forward to you helping out.
Paul L.
@Bhall35:
You missed this part.
Bhall35
@Paul L.: Stop trying to make “fetch” happen.
MattR
@cynickal: Sorry, but I am busy that day. However I will condemn any vandalism that might occur.
Nick
Isn’t this just a case of Stupid Facial Hair Solidarity?