Re: Richard Cohen vs. Everything
Subject: Re: Richard Cohen vs. Everything
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 7/30/09, 22:36
To: "Doig, Will" <Will.Doig@thedailybeast.com>

Howdy, Will-

Just wanted to see if you received my last e-mail about the intelligent design piece. I've pasted it below just in case you'd like to take a look.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

The Further Adventures of William Dembski

Back in the dark days before ubiquitous internet, disinformation was sustainable. When you were told that Marilyn Manson is actually Paul from The Wonder Years, it would have been difficult to prove otherwise; one would have had to find someone's old VHS tape on which they'd recorded one of the episodes, check the credits to figure out what that actor's name was, and then find someone's copy of Antichrist Superstar and look for the same name on the liner notes. And it was unlikely that you would find old Wonder Years episodes and Marilyn Manson albums in the same place. It was easier to just half-believe that Paul was Marilyn Manson.

   Life is different now, if less interesting. Consider William Dembski, the mathematician and theologian who rose to the top of the nascent intelligent design pack in the late '90s after claiming to have proven that certain aspects of biology can be attributable only to the intervention of one or more intelligent entities. As for who or what those entities might be, Dembski is coy when addressing a potentially secular audience, claiming that there "are many possibilities." Among these possibilities, we may determine, is that Dembski is lying; in a 1999 interview with the Christian magazine Touchstone, Dembski stated unambiguously that "[i]ntelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." With ID being increasingly under attack as theology clothed in science, Dembski has since been more hesitant in giving due credit to either John or the Logos. 

    Bits of information are no longer compartmentalized like so many scattered VHS tapes and gothic rock album liner notes, which is why Dembski and company can't get away with trying to portray ID as a scientific theory with no religious intent while having already admitted that same religious intent to sympathetic Biblical literalists. But that crowd doesn't seem to understand this fundamental aspect of the internet, that Google waits in watch of dishonesty. And thus it is that Dembski's blog Uncommon Descent is among the most interesting things that the internet has to offer. More importantly, it provides us with a sense of how the leaders of the ID movement would run things if they were ever to run anything other than a blog.

    Dembski began blogging in 2005, perhaps as a means of procrastination; 2005 was also the last year in which he and his movement colleagues bothered to put out a new issue of their own scientific journal, although their lack of output hasn't stopped them from criticizing mainstream journals for declining to publish their work, non-existent though it may be. Some choice moments in the years since:

* In conjunction with his friends at the pro-ID Discovery Institute, Dembski decided to commission a Flash animation ridiculing Judge John Jones, the Bush-appointed churchgoer who, despite being a Bush-appointed churchgoer, ruled in the 2005 Dover Trial (known more formerly as Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and even more formally as something longer and more formal) that intelligent design could not be taught in public school science classes. The animation consisted of Judge Jones represented as a puppet with his strings being held by various proponents of evolution; aside from being depicted as unusually flatulent, poor Judge Jones was also shown to be reading aloud from his court opinion in a high-pitched voice (Dembski's, it turned out, but sped up to make it sound sillier). The point of all of this, as The Discovery Institute explained, was that Jones had supposedly cribbed some 90 percent of his decision from findings presented by the ACLU, and that this was a very unusual and terrible thing for Jones to have done. On the contrary, judges commonly incorporate the findings of the winning party into their final opinion, either in whole or in part, and Jones' own written opinion actually incorporated far less than 90 percent of the findings in question. For his part, Dembski agreed to reduce the number of fart noises in the animation if Jones would agree to contribute his own voice. Jones does not appear to have accepted the offer.

* One of Dembski's hand-picked blog co-moderators, Dave Springer, once received an e-mail to the effect that the ACLU was about to sue the Marine Corps in order to stop Marines from praying; outraged, Springer posted it on his blog in order that his readers could join him in being affronted. After all, the e-mail had told him to. "Please send this to people you know so everyone will know how stupid the ACLU is Getting [sic] in trying to remove GOD from everything and every place in America," the bright-red text exhorted, above pictures of praying Marines. "Right on!" Dembski added in the comments. It was then pointed out by other readers that the e-mail was a three-year-old hoax; the ACLU spokesperson named therein did not actually exist, and neither did the ACLU's complaint. Springer was unfazed by the revelation. "To everyone who’s pointed out that the ACLU story is a fabrication according to snopes.com - that’s hardly the point," he explained. "The pictures of Marines praying are real." Dembski himself had no further comment.

* Dembski has spent much time and energy pointing out that Charles Darwin made several racist statements back in the 19th century, even going so far as to call for a boycott of the British ten-pound note due to Darwin's picture being displayed thereupon. Incidentally, Dembski has spent most of the past decade working at universities within the fold of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in the 19th century for the sole purpose of defending slavery.

* Springer, the aforementioned aficionado of e-mail forwards, once noted that he stopped reading an article by a critic of intelligent design because it contained a cartoon depicting the famous Black Knight routine from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Anyone who needs to resort to Monty Python in a scientific argument can be safely ignored as not having any legs to stand on," he announced. Springer can be forgiven for not being aware that Dembski himself has referenced Monty Python in the context of a scientific argument more than once. Somewhat more inexplicable is that Springer himself has done the exact same thing, making reference to the very same Monty Python routine and doing so in the very same context as did the article he was criticizing - twice. I mean, come on.

* Upon being told that University of Texas Professor Eric Pianka had given a speech in which he'd supposedly asserted that the world would be better off if most of humanity was killed via a global contagion, Dembski announced on his blog that he had just reported Pianka to the Department of Homeland Security out of concern that the elderly biologist was planning to somehow contribute to the destruction of humanity. The FBI interviewed Pianka but took no further action, having perhaps determined that the recipient of the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist award was not actually planning on killing off the majority of the world's population.

* Seriously, it was the exact same Monty Python routine.

    As much as he puts into his blog, his professorships, and his voice acting, Dembski is still as prolific an author as ever. His latest effort, set for release later this year, takes on the wave of pro-atheist books that have seen publication over the past couple of years. Among the pundits whom he'll be countering is Christopher Hitchens, contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of God is Not Great. If you happen to spot Hitchens drinking, it's probably just to calm his nerves.



On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Will-

With regards to religion pieces William Dembski, the de facto leader of the intelligent design movement, is coming out with a new book in September, The End of Christianity, which is supposed to serve as a refutation of all the atheist books which have come out over the past couple years (Hitchens, Sam Harris, etc.). Over the last few years, he's spent much of his time playing with his blog, Uncommon Descent, which itself has been something of a train wreck insomuch as that he and the strange array of co-bloggers he's recruited are constantly making bizarre factual errors, self-contradictory arguments, and the like; on one occasion, they even published one of those ridiculous chain e-mails with multi-colored text to the effect that the ACLU was about to sue the Marines Corps in an effort to stop Marines from praying, which of course was a three-year-old hoax. Aside from being amusing, these incidents illustrate what a disaster it would be if the intelligent design crowd were to actually gain some degree of power over the scientific community as a whole.

I've written a 1200-word piece detailing all of this; let me know if you'd like to take a look. As you may recall, I'm the author of a 2007 book on the intelligent design movement; I also serve as director of communications for Enlighten the Vote (formerly GAMPAC), a political action committee that assists atheist political candidates and promotes the Establishment Clause.


Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Will-

Thanks for getting back to me. I'll let you know if I have any ideas for religion pieces in the near future.


Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Doig, Will <Will.Doig@thedailybeast.com> wrote:

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: Doig, Will
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
Brooklyn, NY
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
Brooklyn, NY
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
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 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 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. Sort of.




On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Doig, Will <Will.Doig@thedailybeast.com> wrote:

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: Doig, Will
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
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.