On the advice of the medical professional who monitors my blood pressure, I try to avoid reading Richard “Caligula’s Horse” Cohen, but Trickster preserve us this is Truly Special:
Among the attributes I most envy in a public man (or woman) is the ability to lie. If that ability is coupled with no sense of humor, you have the sort of man who can be a successful football coach, a CEO or, when you come right down to it, a presidential candidate. Such a man is Mitt Romney.
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Time and time again, Romney has been called a liar during this campaign. (The various fact-checking organizations have had to work overtime on him alone.)…
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… I admire a smooth liar, and Romney is among the best. His technique is to explain — that bit about not knowing what was in the ads — and then counterattack. He maintains the bulletproof demeanor of a man who is barely suffering fools, in this case Gingrich. His message is not so much what he says, but what he is: You cannot touch me. I have the organization and the money. Especially the money. (Even the hair.) You’re a loser…
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A marathon of debates and an eon of campaigning have toughened and honed Romney. He commands the heights of great assurance, and he knows, as some of us learn too late in life, that the truth is not always a moral obligation but sometimes merely what works. He often cites his business background as commending him for the presidency. That’s his forgivable absurdity. Instead, what his career has given him is the businessman’s concept of self — that what he does is not who he is. This is what enables the slumlord to be a charitable man. This is what enables the corporate raider to endow his university. Business is business. It’s what you do. It is not who you are. Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.
(Omitted, in consideration of your health, the pander that George Will keeps calling President Obama a liar, and therefore both sides do it!)
Perhaps this is meant to be an example of the “funny” Cohen keeps citing as one of his gifts, on the word of his mom and his third-grade teacher back in the 1840s, but it reads like genuine friggin’ admiration for Romney’s unparalleled ability to look Truth in the eye and still like lie like a finely crafted Persian carpet. Gems like this are why I refer to Cohen as “Caligula’s Horse”. He’s as clueless but basically well-intentioned as any highly-bred beast of burden — the insult to the rest of us is that this trophy horse occupies a position of public visibility that might otherwise be filled by someone competent. The career of Richard Cohen is a seamless decades-long “fuck you, DFH peasants” message from the Media Village courtiers and the “elite” they serve with such dedication.
Hill Dweller
The Romney rehabilitation project has begun.
gaz
Romney should campaign on this.
“Romney/Nameless Peasant 2012!”
“Because America Deserves an Exceptional Liar”
BGinCHI
It doesn’t matter so much to me whether there’s a heaven. I just hope, sincerely hope, there is a hell.
Cuz these people who make other people’s lives miserable with a smile on their faces and a fat bank account need to fucking spend eternity there.
4tehlulz
Mitt better hope that nothing really interesting happens this election, or else this kind of not-actually-disassociating-myself comment will haunt him.
Both sides threaten the president.
gaz
@BGinCHI: I don’t believe in hell, but I’ve met plenty of people with too much money.
Have you ever wondered if the man has any inner peace at all?
The buddhist in me doubts it. =)
Ash Can
I dunno — if the best a Romney fluffer can do is to say “I like him because he’s a schmuck,” it’s not exactly a persuasive case.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That is the first time I have ever heard of Mittens being accused of a being a skilled liar. Gee Cohen, don’t you don’t think that primary were Mittens was in a fight to the death with Rick “my name is doo doo” Sanaturim a sign that even the Right finds Mitten’s lies a bit to obvious?
catclub
I disagree. I know of very few people who will think
that “Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan. ”
is a compliment.
He is straight up saying the Mitt Romney is a liar. It was amazing enough when Rachel Maddow did it.
The problem liars have is that even if they are presently lying on YOUR side, you can never trust them to keep on any side.
Is the right-wingosphere celebrating this article?
How?
PeakVT
Shorter Cohen: I see starbursts every time Mitt lies.
Quaker in a Basement
OK, either Cohen is pulling a Marc Antony speech here and we’re all missing it, or our press corps has reached the point that a senior columnist at a leading paper has just endorsed lying.
Can we start drinking early today?
redshirt
And when he eats live babies, he does so with a gusto and relish that force all around him to declare, “My, what a mighty appetite!”
dedc79
I’m no fan of Cohen’s but I think he was actually out for blood on this. The very fact that even he will acknowledge that Romney is a flat out liar seems to me to be a good sign that the general public (even slow people like Cohen) realizes Romney is full of it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You know,come to think of it, I don’t ever recall an election were the candidates partisans celebrated the candidates’ ability to lie. Cohan is for Romney, right?
jl
Is Cohen a Romney fluffer? Or is the column snark, extra dry?
If Cohen is a Romney fluffer, and if this column is part of a corporate effort to rehabilitate Romney (with whom, though, the wingnuts, or the independents?), exactly who will it sway?
I’m not saying this is a good column. I think for a good column, you need to figure out whether it is serious or not.
If this is an attempt at fluffing and rehabilitation, I hope voters see more efforts exactly like this.
Davis X. Machina
I thought he was, very uncharacteristically, pissed.
RP
Are you people joking? This is not an attempt to fluff Romney; Cohen is flat out calling him a liar. Don’t let your hatred of Cohen get in the way of an obvious truth.
David Koch
PPP Obama leads Mittens in Florida 50-45 – biggest Florida lead, to date.
And the kicker, with Rubio on the ticket, Obama’s lead goes from 5 pts to 7 pts.
Schlemizel
@dedc79:
Thats what I thought but Cohen is such a crappy pundit it is entirely possible he DID mean this to be a compliment. Damn, I were lead to believe this sort of verbal dump ended om 9/11.
Either way though having the fact that Willard is an inveterate liar will have to wear on his image.
Satanicpanic
The saddest thing about this is that Romney is not even a good liar. A good liar is convincing. Romney is an unashamed liar. There is an important difference.
japa21
@dedc79: I tend to agree with you. He envies that ability that Romney has, but that is different from saying he admires it. He is, in fact, almost describing it as a sociopathy (whih it is) to be able to lie in such a manner.
Cohen has a history of not knowing if he is coming or going. I think his real problem is he just doesn’t want to have anybody get upset with him, which results in his writing stuff that gets everybody upset with him.
gocart mozart
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
True. Romney is a terrible liar, a fact which is a bit surprising considering how much time he has spent lying. He should be a veritable Mozart of lying by now.
cmorenc
Cohen is far too often an oblivious ass, unable to comprehend the many clues about public events and figures available before him, instead weaving them together in a colorful impressionistic design he mistakes for actual understanding.
NEVERTHELESS in this case Cohen actually nails Romney pretty dead-on, and Cohen’s purported “admiration” for Romney’s habitual trait of egregious lies is clearly not meant to be taken at face value beyond astonishment at how daringly bold and entitled Romney obviously feels about his entitled ability to get away with it. Cohen’s column is hardly intended a recommendation or endorsement of Romney; the message is clearly scathing disapproval, even though rhetorically it’s framed as an objective character portrait of an important figure who the author acknowledges is one of the very best of his kind.
I agree with an earlier poster in this thread that what’s most important about Cohen’s column is how straightforwardly it characterizes Romney as an habitual liar. A building MSM depicting Romney as a habitual liar is very destructive toward any attempt by Romney to “redefine” himself with voters toward the general election.
gaz
@Satanicpanic: An excellent point, and bears repeating.
catclub
@Satanicpanic: “Romney is an unashamed liar. ”
I think this comes from being the boss in a private company.
“I can say whatever I care to, and you people have to nod and agree.” After a while, why go to the effort of being convincing?
SenyorDave
One of the qualities I really admire is a man who can do agood job of breaking & entering. It takes quite a man to do a real professional B&E. If he encounters someone and beats or kills them, all the better. That’s the sort of man I want running my country. A decisive man!
gaz
@cmorenc: I don’t read the guy so I don’t know.
If you are correct though, the wit of this column would make Jon Swift blush.
RP
Newsflash: Jonathan Swift didn’t actually want the Irish to eat their babies.
jl
@Satanicpanic:
I think Romney is an unashamed, panicky, transparent liar. The smooth corporate tactical cleverness and packaging of many of his lies are convincing, compared to Santorum and Gingrich, so I don’t understand why he lies with such transparent hectoring insistent desperation.
Maybe that is why Romney lives in unreal valley, he seems to sabotage his own pretty good efforts at GOP lying and BSing.
David Koch
PPP 2016: Hillary 57, Biden 14, Warren 6, Cuomo 5, Feingold 3, Warner 2
Blogosphere is gonna hate that. The blogosphere likes to think of themselves as teh base. But these numbers show once again that the Progressive Left is not the base.
General Stuck
Yea, right, Cohen. This is the smooth operator with current record lows of favorables for any POTUS candidate in recent memory. And even in the polls that are generous to him in a head to head with Obama, the crosstabs of those polls paint the picture of a public that views this asshat in used car salesman territory for honesty and having any thing like the courage of his convictions, which change with each new news cycle, sometimes by the minute. Watching Romney get on a tear with one of his patented double talking switcharoos, is like watching that guy who used to do staccato fast talking commercials. He is about as smooth as a well groomed carnival barker on meth. Why does Cohen think that every single wingnut primary candidate was tasted and spit out as a Romney replacement, and the wingers are choking down this shithead like a slug of Castor Oil. Pretty soon, Fox News, and all the cackling drones of the right wing won’t be able to fluff this wraith of a human being. Who only thinks Seamusgate was bad because people found out about it, and THAT gives Mitt a sad. This will be the election that America gets a good look at the silver spoon rich, and hurls in response. Only the beginning.
Watch this clip for a preview of these hideous people who will at least have a shot at the WH.
Hell, even the mean little sumbitch Nixon, had enough sense to do a Checkers heart tugging speech to save his conniving ass. This interview was no Checker’s speech. I never thought this story would have any legs, but now it seems the Romney’s are giving it some, or are trying to.
gaz
@catclub: They never have to be convincing. They simply surround themselves with “Yes men” (or to be PC) “Yes Persons” =)
anyway, I think the idea of “convincing” someone of anything is so far off of Romney’s radar that his never even occurred to him that he’s not always right.
I think he would approach blunt skepticism or challenge to his decree to be nothing short of confusing and astonishing. If that’s changed, that’s only because he has managed to learn at least a modicum about politics in all of his years of campaigning. Not much, but maybe just enough to know what disagreement looks like.
Keith
Not only is lying a sin, it’s in the friggin’ top ten.
Satanicpanic
@jl: At best, Cohen is calling Romney a liar. At worst, he’s like the used car salesman who is calling a fellow salesman a snake loud enough for clients to overhear. I don’t know what Cohen’s motives are, but neither is good news for Romney.
RP
I don’t know about that. Considering the number of lefty bloggers who seem to think that we’d have cold fusion and zero calorie cheeseburgers by now if HRC had won in 2008, I think they’ll be pretty happy with that result.
Narcissus
I really hate these people.
I’m serious when I say somebody needs to dose the village with a powerful hallucinogenic every now and then. Maybe they won’t think so highly of themselves when Peggy Noonan is tossing Tom Brokaw’s salad on Morning Joe while Tom Friedman is chased around the studio by Monsters Only He Can See. Also Mike Barnicle is there for some reason.
dedc79
@japa21: Yeah, my main complaint with his column is that he picked the worst examples of Romney’s lying to make his point. There’s so much better material to work with but Cohen just pointed to the lies Romney told about Gingrich.
Why not mention:
1) romney saying obama hadn’t executed any trade deals when he had in fact negotiated two of them
2) romney saying obama has raised taxes when he’s lowered them
3) the “apology tour” lie
4) the lie that obama has cut back on domestic exploration for gas/oil
There are tons more, these are just the ones that jumped out first.
AA+ Bonds
Well clearly Richard Cohen admires liars because he is a liar himself with no real sense of right and wrong
jl
Romney is like a swindler who has bullied you into signing for a fake loan that will ruin you. As you pen drops down to the paper, he keeps up with the hectoring BS.
Will you sign anyway, your will broken, just to get him to shut up? Or will you tear up the swindle and tell him to buzz off? I think the voters’ decisions on that will do a lot to decide the election.
I think most voters making up their minds will choose ‘buzz off’, but whether they do depends on how desperate they feel on election day, so continuing economic recovery will play a role too.
Edit: Except, Romney might be very bad and foreign affairs BSing: So absurd and transparent and inconsistent, I think even low info voters will sense something deeply wrong.
patroclus
I would have agreed with this analysis prior to Hilary Rosen’s comments…
catclub
The more I read that column, the more all the themes about Mitt that folks here hate and that are generally not getting coverage, shine through.
1. Romney is not a normal human. A normal human, when confronted by a lie that they told, would be embarrassed and admit it. Not Romney.
2. Romney lies all the time – about things he does not even need to lie about.
Until somebody shows where the right wing thinks this is great news for Mitt Romney, I am not seeing it.
Also, the (highly unscientific) BJ poll of posts here is already trending heavily to ‘this is actual criticism of Mitt Romney.’
It started out agreeing with the Parent post, but then changed.
AA+ Bonds
Anyone who writes a column like this should be subjected to a battery of psychiatric tests by his or her employer
Rome Again
Cohen, Cohen… let’s see, where have I heard that name before? Oh, yeah! Aren’t they supposed to be Levite Priests? And this man likes to LIE? For SHAME!
Satanicpanic
@catclub: Being able to lie well is for the little people.
AA+ Bonds
IMO Romney has become a skilled liar among Wall Streeters which only helps him among the sort of people who think Wall Street is populated by supermen
Davis X. Machina
This is what ‘Running America like a business’ means…
No man can get elected by only the votes of people who like their bosses.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@patroclus: What analysis, that water is wet?
The Other Chuck
My goodness. The Very Serious People of the Village are supposed to cloak their cynicism in concerned sober Very Serious mutterings about the Good Of The Republic. Ol Rich phoned it in and went naked today, let his abject cynicism just air out in the breeze for all of us to see.
I predict the Village will simply ignore the fact of the column’s existence, including Cohen himself once he sobers up.
gaz
@RP: I was talking about Cohen, not Romney. FYI
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@RP:
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That’s how I read it too. The problem is that given his past track record Cohen is just about the worst person possible to go with dry-as-dust snark as a rhetorical technique. It is as if Jonathan Swift had spent the prior decade actually dining out every now and then on the corpses of small Irish children before he sat down to pen “A Modest Proposal”. Self-awareness Fail.
But then this is The Village, after all. They couldn’t do self-awareness if their lives depended on it.
Calouste
From the new ABC/WaPo poll:
catclub
@Keith: Which top ten do you mean? Lying does not appear as one of the seven deadly sins.
Pride, anger, lust, gluttony, sloth, greed, and envy.
If you mean it appears in the ten commandments, well, there are not ten in that list which are sins. F’r instance, honoring father and mother, keeping the sabbath holy, having one god only.
The Bible has a very wide ranging view of lying. Consider Abraham in Egypt. No criticism of him at all.
Consider the two workers: One asked to do something, says he will and does not. Other asked, says he will not but then does. Not the same thing. Both have lied.
gaz
@Calouste: LOL. That’s the official low water mark for support. When you are within the MOE of the crazification factor, it’s time to pack it in. =)
Tonal Crow
@Satanicpanic:
Romney is worse that that. He’s an enthusiastic liar. He will implicitly admit that he’s lying, defend his lies, and resolve to lie again, as he did when he defended his out-of-context “don’t talk about the economy” anti-Obama ad:
BTW, even Politifact called that ad “ridiculously misleading”. Id.
Bill Arnold
Come on, give the guy a some credit for trying Swiftian-style wit, reasonably successfully. This is not praise: “Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.”
Also, a “smooth liar” is not the same as a good liar.
gaz
@catclub: To be fair, Romney has had POTUS envy for some time =)
Davis X. Machina
@The Other Chuck: The piece #1 “Most Popular” in the Post today…. I’d love to know who’s voting it up.
gaz
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: lol
JPL
Rove is now writing ads to show that the President lies…
By the time the dems wake up, it will be to late to tag Romney as the serial liar. It’s the way they work..
beltane
@General Stuck: I am not one to praise Richard Nixon, but I don’t think even he was so indifferent to the suffering of his only friend as to tie Checker’s to the roof rack.
Captain Goto
@japa21: THIS.
Arm The Homeless
@Narcissus: Bullshit. Barnicle would laugh that shit up. That dude is so pickled by 6am that I don’t think an ounce of shrooms would throw this guy off kilter. He would be taking pictures and making lewd suggestions to Mika and Andrea Mitchell.
uptown
So Cohen won’t mind if I lie to him, so I can con him out of all his savings? It’s my business plan after all.
catclub
@dedc79: You take what you can get.
Those would take actual research. The ones he picked were during one debate, and could be fact checked within that debate.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
After all, the whole point of snark is lost if it isn’t clear that the sentiments being expressed are grossly at variance to the fabric of the moral universe which both the author and the audience hold in common, and the audience knows it.
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Can anybody tell me what moral universe Richard Cohen lives in, that he has in common with anybody in his usual audience, anybody who doesn’t belong up against a wall that is, because they all too painfully and publically subscribe to precisely the sentiments that he is attempting to parody in this piece?
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This is snark gone bad in the same way that the Soviet Doomsday Machine in Dr. Strangelove was a bad idea: it doesn’t do the job it was designed to do if you don’t tell anyone about it. Apparently this is yet another case of The Premier Loves Surprises.
4tehlulz
@beltane: Oh he loved it! Ann Romney told me so, so it must be true.
Today, I learned that shitting yourself in fear
outside of German sk4t vidyasis a sign of joy.gbear
Unlimited Corporate Dishonesty!
Victory!!
I don’t care what drugs Cohen was on when he wrote that, I’m just glad that it’s out there as is. It’s a beautiful statement about the empty unreality that is Mitt Romney.
catclub
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: “Can anybody tell me what moral universe Richard Cohen lives in?”
No, but he THINKS he is a normal human being, and that Romney is not. Check out what he says he would be likely to do if confronted by a lie he has told, and it contrast with what Mitt does.
Mobile Grumpy Code Monkey
@Calouste:
Okay, somebody’s just fucking with us now.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Mittens and Ann are white.
That’s all that matters.
AxelFoley
The fuck? RMoney’s anything BUT a smooth liar.
A smooth liar doesn’t get caught in lies. A smooth liar will convince you he ISN’T lying.
Bill Arnold
@Mobile Grumpy Code Monkey:
It (27%) certainly pops up in recent polls more often than I would expect.
Any pollsters reading who want to confess, anonymously, a little occasional +1/-1 to make the 27% happen more often?
Southern Beale
Speaking of men of falsehoods: Arthur Laffer was just busted for shamelessly making shit up to a TN state legislature committee about bazillionaire Fred Smith of FedEx. It was a pathetic attempt to justify his crackpot idea that killing the inheritance tax in Tennessee will actually help revenues:
http://www.first-draft.com/2012/04/arthur-laffer-serial-liar.html
Amir Khalid
My impression from that column is that Richard Cohen was trying to make fun of Mitt. Although, to judge by the reaction here and from Charles Pierce, Cohen didn’t quite pull it off.
I do dispute that Mitt is a “smooth” liar. It’s been noted upthread that Mitt is a persistent liar, and doesn’t back down even when called on his lies. But persistence is not smoothness. Calling his lying smooth implies that he does it with ease (he is notoriously awkward in speech, even when not actually lying) or any real success (his lies do get caught again and again, also widely noted).
Sly
Next up, David Brooks tells us that famous author Washington Irving would have warmly regarded Mitt Romney’s felicity with a tall tale.
Linda Featheringill
:-)
Linda Featheringill
@The Other Chuck: #47
[tee-hee] you’re bad.
Egg Berry
If Richard Cohen could write in a clear, or even clever, manner, this comment thread debate would not exist.
RP
@gaz: Sorry…I wasn’t actually responding to you. We just happened to have similar thoughts simultaneously.
RSA
Mr. Cohen, I’ve seen The Usual Suspects, and Mitt Romney is no Keyser Söze.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Egg Berry:
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Somewhere in an alternative universe, Richard Cohen is both clever, competent at his craft as a writer, and a force for good in the world, and we aren’t hav…
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Hahahahaha! That is so funny, I can’t believe I even wrote that. So apparently the Everett-Wheeler Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is totally fucked.
mclaren
Mitt Romney lives by the motto of Garak the tailor in the TV series Star Trek: Deep Space 9:
4jkb4ia
NYT does a very good job on general playoff thuggery. Key point is that the NHL would always say that fighting was down in the playoffs from the regular season. This year, so far, that is not true.
/not even Cole’s thread :)
samara morgan
you should look in on the poll wars over at Allahpundits “hot gas” blog.
heres the part that rocked my world.
Romney needs 65% or more of the white vote to win.
of course, uberleet horserace handicapper Nate Silver says the polls don’t matter.
maybe the polls DONT matter, Nate…..but the demographics do.
dww44
@AA+ Bonds: exactly.
Paul in KY
The Tywin Lannister of American politics (although Tywin actually ran a whole country for awhile).
Craig
At the risk of being pedantic, Romney doesn’t tell lies. He tells half-lies. “A man who tells a lie merely hides the truth. A man who tells a half-lie forgets where he put it.”
Tone In DC
@Narcissus:
MoDo tossing a guy’s salad while she’s ten feet tall?
LULz.