No. Seriously. Richard Cohen really did dedicate his column this week to complaining about Obama’s memorial speech for Richard Holbrooke. According to Cohen, Obama didn’t really like Holbrooke and didn’t pretend to in his oration.
Obama’s lack of artifice can be admirable, but it is almost never politic. For a while he even wouldn’t wear that kitschy American flag lapel pin, 95 cents worth of patriotism. But blarney is as essential to politics as the evanescent lie is to seduction. I am referring now to convincing strangers that you understand their concerns, feel their pain, so that in the end you actually do. A good politician never speaks to a crowd. It is always a collection of friends. Obama speaks mostly to crowds. His hallmark has been his disconnect, a perplexing standoffishness that has hurt him politically.
At the end of the week, the general consensus was that Obama had proved his mettle in Tucson and, along with his recent legislative victories, righted his presidency. But the president who bounded onto the Kennedy Center stage two days later shrunk in stature as the program wore on, and he left the hall, in my eyes at least, looking a lot like the man he was before Tucson.
I think Cohen has caught a communicable disease called botulinum Noonanitis. It causes you to make trite disconnected observations and vomit up ridiculous pet peeves on an unsuspecting readership.
Do we really want lessons on the art of seduction from a veteran sexual harrasser? Did he really just make a case for questioning the president’s patriotism because he didn’t wear a flag-pin?
Wank on, wank off.
Holbrooke started his foreign service career in Vietnam in the Agency for International Development, aka, CIA, in helping to pacify little villages. You know, like My Lai. He ended his service in Afghanistan searching for peace while US troops pacified villages.
I wouldn’t have been offended if Obama had taken a dump on the guy’s casket.
I guess you weren’t asked to speak at the funeral.
Your weather has to be better than ours in NJ. We have icy sidewalks.
can’t stand Cohen
.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
you know, I am less concerned with what an old hack like Richard Cohen thinks than the fact that Obama’s war and civil liberties policies are now earning the praise of Dick Cheney and that Obama’s pitching deregulatory frames in the WSJ.
THAT, to me, is far more wankeriffic than Cohen’s ramblings, because it actually matters.
not that those stories will ever be dealt with here. doesn’t fit the narrative.
I’d say “consider the source”. The Dick Cheney knows that Dick Cheney’s praise will make democrats angry at Obama. It’s a pretty transparent trick if you ask me. and a twofer since it gets Dick Cheney in the news as an eminence grise. sick.
Yes, but Cheney is also kinda right. Obama has in a number of respects taken the outrages of the Bush regime to a new level.
Holbrooke, as someone who spent 40+ years helping give a bipartisan sheen to America’s butcherous foreign policy, was a Serious Thinker and thus a member in good standing of the Village. Cohen was simply defending one of his own.
When someone asks the difference between “liberal” and “progressive,” Cohen is a good place to start. I was surprised when Salon honored him as the Village’s worst wanker in its list — there’s so much competition — but the man does have a flair for it.
I believe Cohen is the hardest wanker in the business. Broder is serious competition, however. But Broder is mostly a one-trick pony. With Cohen, you never see The Stupid coming.
We will never cease to get this endless flow of meaningless tripe from the media and its little clowns. Nero fiddling in Rome comes to mind. As does how accurate the blog name News Corpse is…