Hi Barrett,

 

Would love to read it, could you send it along? Thanks!

Sincerely

Will

 

 

Hi, Will-

This is Barrett Brown; I write for Vanity Fair, Skeptic, and a few other publications, and I'm the author of Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny, as well as another book on the failures of American punditry which is set for release next year.

I wanted to see if The Daily Beast might be interested in a piece that I originally did for Vanity Fair but which they declined to publish due to the target being a friend of the magazine. It's a critique of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen in which I examine some of the more foolish and self-contradictory things he's written over the past couple of years. It runs at 1,800 words and may be found below.

Let me know if this interests you.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

Richard Cohen Versus Everything

 

Back in April, Washington Post mainstay Richard Cohen expressed some concern over America's ongoing debate on the subject of torture, a discussion he worried had been “infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not.” Those silly-billies who believe that it does not work, the longtime columnist tells us, are simply being gloomy gusses. “Of course it works – sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is ticking, that may just be the one time it works,” he hypothesized, or something.

Fair enough; there are quite a few commentators who believe likewise, and Cohen is certainly entitled to his opinion. In fact, he is apparently entitled to two of them; in a more recent column on Cheney's latest declarations in defense of such things, Cohen suddenly goes from confirmed Jesuit to open-minded agnostic. “I have to wonder whether what he is saying now is the truth – i.e., torture works,” Cohen ruminates. Perhaps his earlier certainty that torture does indeed work had simply slipped his mind at this point; two weeks is, after all, a long time in which to hold a very strong opinion, or even to remember that one holds it. More likely, he was at this point hoping to suddenly cast himself as undecided on the issue in order that he might portray his end-of-column contention that torture may indeed work as something he's come to suspect just recently, and only after having given due consideration to some new and very convincing insight that should presumably convince the reader as well.

If we go back to the April column – perhaps we are nostalgic - we find that Cohen makes another odd assertion in the course of dismissing those believe that torture is “always ineffective.” On the contrary, he tells us, “nothing is always anything” - or, put another way, Cohen is telling us that it is always the case that it is wrong to characterize something as always being the case. We would not need to bring in Wittgenstein to demonstrate the self-contradiction inherent to such an assertion, which is probably just as well since Wittgenstein is dead, and, worse, Austrian. But if we dig further, we discover that Cohen is actually okay with the term “always” as long as he's the one employing it; in the midst of a 2007 column wherein our dear pundit opines on Hillary Clinton's history as a political chameleon who's not quite to be trusted, he proposes that the real concern we should all have about Clinton “is not whether she's smart or experienced but whether she has – how do we say this – the character to be president... In a hatless society, she is always wearing a question mark.” Always, mind you – unlike in the case of torture, there is no “ticking time bomb scenario” exception in which Clinton can be found to be a known quantity.

Throughout 2007 and 2008, in fact, Cohen had plenty else to say about Clinton. She “would, it seems, rather be president than be right.” More damningly, “She is forever saying things I either don't believe or believe that even she doesn't believe.” All in all, he tells us, “She is the personification of artifice.” Fair enough, and we may even agree with Cohen on this - but if we do, we're in for a rhetorical beating from Cohen himself, who has more recently decided that those who'd previously claimed that “Clinton had no integrity, no character,” and “lied about almost everything and could be trusted about almost nothing” are guilty of having perpetrated “a calumny, a libel and a ferocious mugging of memory itself. But it was believed.” By, uh, Cohen, who in this case is very much akin to a narc who hands you a joint and then arrests you for having it, except that the narc is doing his job, whereas Cohen appears to be suffering from some sort of strange amnesia or something. Anyway, I'm not a psychologist.

Luckily, Cohen is. He is, in fact, such a talented psychologist that he can diagnose the motivations of tens of millions of American citizens with absolute certainty and without bothering to consider any possibilities other than the one he has already decided on. When Lewis Libby was indicted on half a dozen counts of wholesale malfeasance, for instance, Cohen knew this to be simply a manifestation of the left-wing id. “An unpopular war produced the popular cry for scalps and, in Libby's case, the additional demand that he express contrition - a vestigial Stalinist-era yearning for abasement.” Indeed, Stalinism reigned supreme in the dark days of 2007, when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald stalked the land in search of new victims with which to fill his minimum-security gulags. “At the urging of the liberal press (especially the New York Times), he was appointed to look into a run-of-the-mill leak,” summarized Cohen, who occasionally gets “the liberal press” mixed up with “the CIA,” that being the entity which actually requested the investigation in the first place. After the dust had settled, Cohen wrote, Libby was “convicted in the end of lying.” Actually, Libby was convicted on one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and another count of making false statements to investigators, but then Cohen was probably just trying to save space.

Still, Cohen wrote, “This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics.” The problem, one may suppose, is that both Fitzgerald and the jury were unaware of the little-known “dark art of politics” clause whereby anything that can be characterized as such is perfectly legal. It's a shame that Nixon is dead or he could have been brought in by the defense to explain all of this on an amicus curiae basis.

Better yet, they could have brought in Cohen himself, who has the uncanny ability to determine the guilt or innocence of a given party simply by virtue of being Richard Cohen. Amidst the 2007 investigation into whether or not Justice Department officials had been practicing the dark art of politics in conjunction with the suspicious firings of several U.S. attorneys, among other things, Cohen explained to his readership that Alberto Gonzalez, Karl Rove, and George W. Bush had “unforgivably politicized the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys – and Congress is not only right in looking into this but also has an absolute obligation to do so.” But “looking into this” is where the “absolute obligation” should end, explained Cohen, who worried that anything more substantial than peeking could result in something unthinkable, like jail time for someone who works in the non-black neighborhoods of D.C. Justice Department deputy director Monica Goodling, for instance, having already been in danger of having to answer to Congress for crimes that she may have either witnessed or conducted herself, had just then opted to take the Fifth. At the time, Cohen noted that “some thought has to be given to why Monica Goodling feels obligated to take the Fifth rather than merely telling Congress what happened in the AG's office.” Many of those less astute than Cohen had assumed that Goodling had plead thusly in order to escape potential incrimination for crimes she had committed, in the same sense that one might bring an umbrella outside on a rainy day. But Cohen knew better; Goodling, as he explained with the same degree of certainty he'd felt about Clinton's dishonesty (before later concluding that she was honest) and about the obvious utility of torture (before later pretending that it wasn't obvious after all), was completely innocent, but still at risk of having her life destroyed in some Stalinist purge of the sort that had already brought down the likes of Lewis Libby and... well, he was the only one. As Cohen concluded, “She's no criminal - but what could happen to her surely is.”

Contrary to the conclusions of Cohen's non-investigation, Goodling did indeed turn out to be a criminal; after Congress agreed to grant her immunity in exchange for information, she herself told the nation that she “may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions, and I may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions,” adding that she had “crossed the line” in these and other respects. And so by her own admission, she had violated the Hatch Act, which makes it a federal crime for civil servants to take political affiliations of aspects into consideration when making hiring decisions; this was also the conclusion reached by a later Department of Justice investigation, which failed to consult Cohen on the matter.

But Cohen's concern never seemed to hinge on whether or not any crime had been committed. Rather, he worried aloud about the chilling effect that would result from the possibility that Very Important People could be punished for violating something as irrelevant as federal law. “Now,” he wrote, “only a fool would accept a juicy federal appointment and not keep the home number of a criminal lawyer on speed dial.” Worse still, “ordinary politics - leaking, sniping, lying, cheating, exaggerating and other forms of PG entertainment - have been so thoroughly criminalized that only a fool would appear before Congress without attempting to bargain for immunity by first invoking the Fifth Amendment.” Cohen knows foolishness, having studied the subject since at least 2003, when he proclaimed that Colin Powell had recently proven “that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them," and that "Only a fool - or possibly a Frenchman - could conclude otherwise.”

Conveniently enough, this brings us back to where we began, with Cohen ruminating on the possibility that Cheney is right about torture's utility. Being a left-of-center columnist, though, Cohen feels obligated to attack the former vice president a bit first, recognizing that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. “Cheney is a one-man credibility gap,” Cohen wrote. “In the past, he has said, 'We know they (the Iraqis) have biological and chemical weapons,' when it turned out we knew nothing of the sort.” By “we,” Cohen is presumably referring here to fools and Frenchmen, and not to Cohen himself, who knew all of this just as well as Cheney did. But Cohen has as much contempt for Cheney as he does for those who once deemed Clinton to be untrustworthy. “As a used car dealer,” Cohen quips, “he would have no return customers.” It's hard to see why not; The Washington Post still has subscribers.