Subject: RE: Richard Cohen vs. Everything |
From: "Doig, Will" <Will.Doig@thedailybeast.com> |
Date: 7/7/09, 15:32 |
To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
Hi Barrett,
Sorry it took so long to get back to you
on this. Unfortunately this particular piece isn’t quite right for us. However,
we are very interested in beefing up our religion coverage, so if you have any
ideas for timely religion stories, please do let me know.
Sincerely
Will Doig
From: Barrett Brown
[mailto:barriticus@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, July 06, 2009 1:09
PM
To:
Subject: Re: Richard Cohen vs.
Everything
Hi, Will-
Just wanted to check and see if you received the Cohen piece we discussed last
month. Let me know if you'd be up for other queries in the future.
Thanks,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302
On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Will-
Did you receive the Cohen piece?
Thanks,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
wrote:
Howdy-
Thanks for getting back to me. I pasted the piece into the body of the last
e-mail; here it is again, below my tagline. I've also attached it as a Word
document in case you prefer that.
Thanks again,
Barrett Brown
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
Throughout
2007 and 2008, in fact, Cohen had plenty else to say about
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 recently 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
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 6:46 PM,
Hi Barrett,
Would love to read it, could you send it along? Thanks!
Sincerely
Will
From: Barrett Brown [mailto:barriticus@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 6:34
PM
To:
Subject: Richard Cohen vs.
Everything
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
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
Throughout
2007 and 2008, in fact, Cohen had plenty else to say about
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