The Joe Lieberman of columnists

Digby has a list of mostly newspaper types who are calling bullshit on Rummy's latest you're-with-us-or-you're-Chamberlain nonsense (the one Olbermann smacked down last night). But there is one ink-stained wretch the Administration can take to the bank when it comes to Pavlovian responses to fear: my old pal Richard Cohen.

The column is, as Ygelsias and others have pointed out, a complete mess -- no thesis, no real argument, no nothing. Well, nothing except cover for the foam-at-the-mouth rhetoric the Adminstration has glommed onto as its campaign pitch for 2006.

There is endorsement of the most absurd and inflammatory language:

When George Bush used the term "Islamic fascists," he had a point.

No, Dick, he doesn't. Calling stateless anti-industrial fundamentalists fascists is simply stupid. It is like eight-year-olds calling each other queer -- using as an epithet a word you obviously don't understand, but seems Very Bad.

And there is, of course abundant pseudo-historical cover for Rummy's appeasement accusations.

And finally this bon mot:

Now, by default, the leadership of Europe has slipped to France.

Yeah, Dick, by default. As in, "De fault for de unwillingness of most of Europe to send troops into the Middle East about now lies in no small part in the disaster in Iraq." Which, come to think of it, by default belongs to you, Dick.

Your liberal press, ladies and gentlemen.