Richard Cohen: wanking about his own wanking

Poor Richard Cohen. It seems that in addition to the 200-plus blogs tearing him a new one over his idiotic Colbert screed last week, 3000-plus folks tore into him via email. And it seems we touched a nerve.

It seemed that most of my correspondents had been egged on to write me by various blogs. In response, they smartly assembled into a digital lynch mob and went roaring after me. If I did not like Colbert, I must like Bush. If I write for The Post, I must be a mainstream media warmonger. If I was over a certain age -- which I am -- I am simply out of it, wherever "it" may be. All in all, I was -- I am, and I guess I remain -- the worthy object of ignorant, false and downright idiotic vituperation.

First, thanks for the shout-out, Dick. Thanks for noticing.

But on to the substance. Have we opened Mr. "I'm a Funny Guy" to the possibility that he might not be the Oracle of Humor after all?

Well, uh, no. Cohen's unchallenged mastery of self-refutation blots out all possibility of self-awareness.

And so Dick changes the subject and shows us how much he dislikes Bush by offering up his own personalized version of Unkle Karl's "agito ergo null" meme. That's right kids, Cohen agrees with his keepers: it doesn't matter what we say, because we are guilty of a crime that trumps logic and facts -- we're angry.

The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble -- not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before -- back in the Vietnam War era. That's when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

The hatred is back. I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations. I can appreciate some of it. Institution after institution failed America -- the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have. Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that's going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice -- once because they couldn't stop it and once more at the polls.

They? They, Richard?

Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise.

Not they, Petzele* -- you.

Repeating our arguments with a snotty tone is not a refutation. Pretending you were not a co-conspirator in fraud on an epic scale will not protect you from an eventual reckoning. And equating criticizism of a wheezing, sclerotic pundit with the tragedies in Iraq and Vietnam only confirms your grandiosity.

Oh, and I'm not quite as decrepit as Richard, but I dimly recall that prior to the 1968 election, Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's War. Bobby Kennedy ran against it, but never made it to the Democratic convention. Nominee and Vice President Hubert Humphrey was unwilling to oppose it at all until it was far too late, and Richard Nixon promised to end it. Blaming anti-war activists for prolonging Vietnam is as dishonest as pretending you weren't for the war before you were against it.

Wank on, Richard. Don't take even a soupçon of blame for provoking our anger (and the deaths of tens of thousands of people). Don't acknoweldge the possibility that anger is the appropriate response to the outrages you enable. You are providing an inexhaustible source of blog energy.


*Petzele = Yiddish, diminutive of putz. Just as "Richard Cohen" is the diminutive of "columnist."