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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / Post-racial America / Fuck You, Richard Cohen

Fuck You, Richard Cohen

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Ferguson and Benghazi’s troubling parallels – The Washington Post

Why can’t allegedly educated people grok the difference between A.) THIS ABSOLUTELY 100% DID NOT HAPPEN and B.) THIS CAN NOT BE PROVEN TO THE STANDARD REQUIRED BY LAW?

Oh, that’s right. It’s not in their interest to even make an attempt to recognize that distinction- it gets in the way of their financial interests and preconceived biases.

I also don’t understand how someone can argue that the DOJ report on racial injustice in Ferguson is completely unrelated to the Michael Brown shooting. That’s the fucking stage on which this tragedy was performed. Sweet ever loving Jeebus.

That’s a safe link via donotlink.com

*** Update ***

Should have refreshed, because Zandar got their first. I see Goldie Taylor and I had the same response. Must be a military thing.

Reader Interactions

79Comments

  4. 4.

    JustRuss

    Words cannot describe how horrible Cohen’s piece is. Well, they could, but it would take a hell of a lot of them, and I gotta go to work.

  5. 5.

    trollhattan

    He’s there mostly to make Krauthammer resemble a human being. The Grahams must be powering half the Eastern Seaboard from their whirling gravesites.

  6. 6.

    kc

    1. Using donotlink.com for WaPo is childish.
    2. Richard Cohen sucks.
    3. No one read the DOJ report.

  8. 8.

    beth

    I love how he just yadda, yadda, yadda’s over the conclusions of the Benghazi commissions that were published. Seinfeld would be proud.

  10. 10.

    BGinCHI

    @kc: What? Fuck off.

    Every time you click over to that shitrag they are validated in printing that crap.

  11. 11.

    MattF

    @trollhattan: I’d add George Will, Robert (“Don’t blame me, I”m not an economist”) Samuelson, and Marc Theissen. There’s a few others who are bad, but are still at least arguably human.

  12. 12.

    srv

    @BGinCHI:

    Every time you click over to that shitrag they are validated in printing that crap.

    Well, I’ll Show You – I’m going to go buy something from that other site Jeff Bezos owns. Oh, look, there’s a convenient button right up there on the left for me.

    Derp.

    You people give hypocrisy cancer.

  15. 15.

    Elizabelle

    When I see something as dumb as the Cohen column, I wonder if the WaPost went for it for clicks and for trollbait.

    Do you think the late, great Ben Bradlee would have let such a dumb column appear (believe he had much better op ed page editors)? I don’t think he would, but I don’t know.

  16. 16.

    max

    Must be a military thing.

    I don’t think so – four guys killed in a terrorist attack in Libya is nothing like a cop shooting a civilian in the US. Benghazi is salable to people looking for a scandal. Ferguson is a highly contested and disputable event.

    Richard Cohen, however, is just doing a ‘compare & contrast’ (as my 10th grade English teacher was always on about) because he needed to write a column and didn’t have one. So he made some crap up. There we go, wouldn’t expect much better from Cohen. Guess he didn’t want to write about Bibi.

    max
    [‘Well that was an adventure in stupid.’]

  21. 21.

    RepubAnon

    Ah, the Church of High Broderism strikes again. In Benghazi, there was no evidence supporting the accusations. In Ferguson, there was conflicting evidence. By the principle of “we must accuse both sides of doing it, least we appear (gasp) partisan”, obviously the two are equal.

  23. 23.

    Cervantes

    @Elizabelle:

    Do you think the late, great Ben Bradlee would have let such a dumb column appear (believe he had much better op ed page editors)? I don’t think he would, but I don’t know.

    Under Bradlee in (I think) 1981, the Post won a Pulitzer for a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict in DC. Trouble is, the story was fiction — and the Pulitzer had to be returned.

    And let’s not even mention Sally Quinn.

  24. 24.

    Cervantes

    @srv:

    Oh, look, there’s a convenient button right up there on the left for me.

    Well, but that’s different.

    Or something.

    Presumably.

    No?

  25. 25.

    Belafon

    @Cervantes: Wanting to keep Cohen’s article from being bumped up due to page linking is exactly the same as getting a little bit of money from Amazon.

  28. 28.

    srv

    @kc: We will never be free until the last Broder is strangled with the 1-Click purchase of the last gliberal blogger.

  29. 29.

    Cervantes

    @Belafon:

    Wanting to keep Cohen’s article from being bumped up due to page linking is exactly the same as getting a little bit of money from Amazon.

    Is it?

    In any event, I was thinking more about money flowing in the other direction.

  30. 30.

    Elizabelle

    @Cervantes: Oh, yeah. I remember the Janet Cooke saga.

    I used to like Sally Quinn’s articles, before she left to be on the CBS morning news. They were entertaining. I thought she was a lively writer. Now she’s some kind of parody creature.

  31. 31.

    kc

    @Belafon:

    Ah, OK.

    Well, I still personally think it’s silly (for a site the size of WaPo) but it’s not worth arguing about.

  33. 33.

    dubo

    Cohen wrote “it makes sense for retail stores to ban black people” and “i’m shocked that Gone With the Wind’s portrayal of slavery may have been inaccurate”

    In Cohen’s case, don’t mistake open white supremacism for Broder-esque contrarianism

  34. 34.

    Keith G

    I like reading columnists with whom I disagree. It is very important to get well-reasoned observations from many, even oppositional, points of view.

    Since “well-reasoned” is a cutoff, Cohen seldom makes the cut. In fact, his reliance on racist and neocon tropes undermine even the few rational statements that he does type.

  35. 35.

    Tenar Darell

    I couldn’t bring myself to read the whole thing. I’m getting enough second hand dirtbag smoke from you and rawstory.

    I always wonder why not a single one of these dumb clucks on the Op Ed pages connects the fact that Wilson probably would never have run up on Mike Brown in the first place, if his job wasn’t totally dependent on writing tickets with fines on every single brown person in that community. Wilson was looking for a finable offense, whatever was provable after the shooting in a court of law!

    ETA Blood pressure prevents me from giving Cohen or the WaPo clicks on this. But IMHO he’s a sh*tty writer too.

  36. 36.

    Bobby Thomson

    @srv: clicking on Amazon button = Cole gets money; Bezos gets money. Directing traffic through Cohen = Cohen doesn’t get fired because he generates buzz. But you knew that.

  38. 38.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Fucking outrage bloggers. Couldn’t be bothered to read to the end to see Cohen’s disclaimer, John?

    Now for a blogger alert: Please note that I do not think racism is no longer a problem or that campus rape has not been an unaddressed horror. I know better. But I also believe that distorting the facts can impede progress. The dead of anywhere — Ferguson or Benghazi — do matter. And so does the truth.

    All better now.

  39. 39.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @max:

    I think Cole meant the “military thing” is that he and Goldie Taylor were both in the military, hence their identical reaction.

  40. 40.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The case against Darren Wilson cannot be proven to the standards required by law because the Ferguson gang in blue did everything in their power to make that so.

  43. 43.

    Aleta

    Cohen doesn’t even bother to conceal the clue that this article “wrote itself” for him. The viciously dishonest talking point claiming that the number of black people killed by police means nothing because others in the same community have been killed by non-police.

  44. 44.

    Kay

    It is a town of only about 21,000 — a bad day at Yankee Stadium — and yet it has repeatedly been the lead story for many news organizations.

    “Stop talking about that! Talk about what I want to talk about!”

    Maybe it would be easier to start with how much of the available time and space he thinks he’s due, and then we’ll carve up whatever’s left for the stuff he isn’t interested in.

  45. 45.

    scav

    Hewing to and proming above all else “The Truth” about a teeny detail in a messy situation does seem rather akin to the “it was cold today: thus climate change is disproved because they called it global warming, so there!” line of attack. That little boilerplate comment at the bottom leads me to belive even he doesn’t find his screed that convincing.

  46. 46.

    Kay

    @Aleta:

    We would have had a discussion about police practice without the Ferguson activists getting it all wrong! Any day now we were all getting ready to “tackle that issue”. In fact, it would have been better if pundits were directing it.

    Luckily he’s here now to show them how it’s done.

  47. 47.

    Mike in NC

    Ever since the reprehensible Bob Novak was called home to Satan, Richard Cohen has been trying to fill the void.

  49. 49.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    Not that anyone here needs a reminder, but this is why squeaky-clean, NAACP chapter secretary Rosa Parks was chosen to be the one who would go to trial for refusing to move to the back of the bus. In this country, you’re not even allowed to talk about racial disparities and racial bias unless you can show that the victim was 100 percent pure as the driven snow.

    Cohen’s one (1) throwaway line about how this doesn’t disprove ongoing racial bias in Ferguson shows that he’s perfectly willing to ignore the reams of evidence for that bias as long as he can say that Michael Brown wasn’t a saint.

  52. 52.

    Kay

    @SatanicPanic:

    There is a high bar of proof for certain people to claim injury or inequity. Obviously, neither of these “special interests” has met it.

    Let’s talk about entitlement reform!

  55. 55.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Cohen’s crimes against common decency are many. I’ll let someone else dig up “Zimmerman had a point about hoodies” and “well, girls aren’t good at math, so what’s the big?” This, his after the fact justification for his support of the Iraq War, should have been the end of his career:

    On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing — the fighting — were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.

  56. 56.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I don’t like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don’t know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.

  58. 58.

    muddy

    @SatanicPanic: I just about died at the last line of his column.

    The name is Cohen. Richard Cohen.

    hahahaha I’m dying here! What a dork. No wonder he’s freaked out by this:

    He does not woo women; they just come on to him.

    Obviously women coming on to him is not something that happens in his world. No wonder he’s so pissy.

  59. 59.

    Calouste

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m sure Mr. Cohen is going to volunteer to be on the receiving end of some prudent, therapeutic, use of violence? I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere along the line one of a Czar’s advisors would have described pogroms with very similar words, with almost exactly the same meaning.

  62. 62.

    muddy

    @dubo: Oh gods, I remember that. No, it’s too much, my belly hurts! Poor Richard Cohen, his output is a series of “now watch this” episodes.

  63. 63.

    mainmata

    @Elizabelle: It’s Fred Hiatt, the Op/Ed editor who has been pretty awful. That said, the two young women on the opinion page, Catherine Rampell and Alexandra Petrie are both pretty good. The third woman, the always hopeless Jen Rubin seems to be beyond embarrassment.

  64. 64.

    Iowa Old Lady

    Between this and that white genocide video on TWIB, BJ just cost me a bunch of brain cells.

  65. 65.

    TaMara (BHF)

    When people stop by, thread after thread to complain, call the rest of us names and generally spread bile, I no longer pause and consider their opinions might have validity. I just scroll on by and shake my head in sadness. Wondering what must be going on in the rest of their lives.

    Then there are the trolls, who at least entertain me…

    And then there is Richard Cohen…I wish there really was a mission to Mars and like some bad reality show we could vote who goes, D!ck Cheney and D!ck Cohen would make great pod mates.

  67. 67.

    geg6

    @Elizabelle:

    Don’t know about that. He married the dumbest columnist that ever lived. So, not so sure about his “greatness” as you are.

  69. 69.

    brendancalling

    @JoyfulA: thank you! It has been a long two years. I lost interest for a while, went through a wrenching breakup and some months of blind rage, and now I’m a lot better. Less anger, more laughing at. And as I have my archives, I’m able to sift through and get the good stuff, while leaving the more regrettable outbursts to the ethers.

    That said, I DO intend to re-post my open letter to the NYT Editorial Board, calling for their collective suicide in the wake of Iraq.

  70. 70.

    tybee

    @brendancalling:

    I DO intend to re-post my open letter to the NYT Editorial Board, calling for their collective suicide in the wake of Iraq.

    now that’s an open letter i can endorse.

  72. 72.

    Tree With Water

    Hurling abuse at Cohen (“Fuck You, Richard Cohen”) is like shouting at a harmless neighborhood old guy who wanders around in his pajamas muttering that he is too funnier than Stephen Colbert. Some people are best left to themselves..

  73. 73.

    PIGL

    Speaking of Ferguson and this sort of thing, has anyone else noticed what a racist, sexist, classist, hippie-punching fucktard James Howard Kunstler has become lately….or more precisely, always was? He had one or two good insights, which he has been peddling for the past 20 years because they seem to support his real political preferences. In his “world made by hand”, there will no wimmins libbers or hippies to prevent the judeao-christian squirarchy which he favours from running the world countryside and small towns to their liking. And black people simply don’t exist, unless hanging from a telegraph poll. He is nothing but an arrogant, stuck up, pompous, self-important, pseudo-intellectual face-in-need-of-severe-punching (I forget the German word for that). But at least he has no oped pages in the respectable press. I regret buying one of his books, and when I find it, I will wrap it in the most obnoxious dog droppings I can find, and mail it back to the creepy little fuck.

  77. 77.

    bago

    I don’t post here too often this days, as the site crashes my mobile browser, but y’all gotta remember that ‘ol Dicky “dick” Cohen is a funny guy, who thought Colbert was terrible, and inter-racial marriage still makes him queasy.

    I also need to throw some shade at srv, because they are apparently ignorant of site analytics. If his article gets hits, he moves ad impressions, and cash strapped newspapers love that sort of thing, and makes his tired racist old ass an asset to the company. Amazon click throughs are a straight swap for promotion, and don’t affect the ad inventory at all. Nobody gets paid if nobody buys anything. Eyeballs are worthless for a clickthrough-and-purchase contract.

  78. 78.

    WaterGirl

    @bago: Glad to see you here. Someone mentioned last night that the mobile site is better, maybe it will be better for you, too?

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