Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the clearly syphilitic Richard Cohen:
Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.
This bit of cultural wisdom was offered, mind you, as part of an explanation for why New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will have difficulty attracting the support of Iowan conservatives should he seek to compete in their presidential nominating caucuses. It’s not immediately obvious why Chris Christie will be punished for the New York mayor’s miscegenation, nor is it clear why Iowa was singled-out as the home of the neo-Dixiecrats. But this is what happens during the Tertiary Stage of syphilis. People stop making sense, and they may even begin blurting out racially insensitive remarks that have no logical or temporal connection to anything.
I recommend that Cohen pursue a prolonged treatment of intravenous penicillin, followed by a comfortable retirement. Watching the cap on his career is more painful than prolonged exposure to Charlie Sheen.
The Washington Post‘s habit of providing lifetime sinecures assures that even once-decent columnists will eventually sully their names and destroy the paper’s reputation, because public dementia and writing opinion columns are two things that do not go together.
And Richard Cohen has not been a decent columnist for at least thirty years. Somewhere, there is a pasture calling his name.
public dementia and writing opinion columns are two things that
doshould not go together.It’s one of the perks of the job, sadly.
And the Editor and Publisher are the chief enablers:
“Fred Hiatt told TheWrap that Cohen wasn’t being racist when he wrote, “People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.” But Hiatt said that he should have edited that particular sentence “more carefully.”
“Anyone reading Richard’s entire column will see he is just saying that some Americans still have a hard time dealing with interracial marriage,” Hiatt said. “I erred in not editing that one sentence more carefully to make sure it could not be misinterpreted.”
While some at the newspaper including Ezra Klein have criticized Cohen, the Post’s publisher Katharine Weymouth hailed the column as “brilliant.”
Good Lord, all of these people are completely around the bend. Bezos simply has to do something.
since when has this construction not prefaced a stupid and offensive comment?
it’s like flashing a railroad signal for burning stupid.
Cohen suffers from a disorder that can only be cured by a hard and swift cock punch and a polite suggestion to shut the fuck up already.
Punch, hell. I’m bringing the chainsaw.
People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York …
I hadn’t realized that the word conventional is a synonym for the word racist.
He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Am I misreading, or does he think ‘conventional’ means ‘racist?’
You’re not dreaming/misreading.
I don’t think he’s necessarily espousing these views. I think he’s trying to express the views of tea party and evangelical conservatives. He doesn’t spell out his own views, which leads one to wonder if he doesn’t share this narrow, racist view he sets forth. But I don’t want to make that assumption (about anyone).
Funny what passes for fringe among those who pine for an imagined purity, an America that never really existed. Like the scene in back to the future at the gas station where four men in perfectly clean uniforms run out to service the car, washing windows, checking oil and airing the tires. I can remember the mid-60s, when a kid would pull the dip stick and wash the windshield. Cars were poorly engineered, extremely unsafe and seemed old when they reached 60,000 miles. The good old days weren’t as good as people remember.
Alas, I am apparently a fringe liberal because my wife used to be married to another woman. That she, at my suggestion, invited her ex to our wedding, no doubt makes us freaks of some kind. But it was the most beautiful experience. All that was present was love. The love that these two woman had once shared as partners and still share as friends, and the full-hearted support and approval for our relationship that came from my wife’s ex. It was like we were all part of a family, a fabric. She saw close-up the love between us and so much came through that.
Tea party types and evangelicals seem to close their hearts to others for reasons that make no sense. Because their skin is a different color or because they love someone of the same gender. Would God really want us to turn our backs on each other? That makes no sense. Who would want anything to do with such a God? Such views are an insult to religion itself.
I call bullshit. You don’t cite other people’s racist views, and call them “conventional,” without a) being racist yourself and b) being too chickenshit to own up to it.
This may be the single most offensive thing I have ever read from a “respected” national columnist – with not just a WaPo perch but syndicated in hundreds of papers as the “liberal” counterweight to eight or nine conservative voices. That’s obviously a very high bar, not least because Richard Cohen himself has so many other entries in the category. Reading that literally made me sick to my stomach.
I grew up with virulent racism. I don’t find it a joking matter. People would have called him on that bullshit in 1964. Fifty years on, there’s no excuse – no degenerative disease, nothing – that can avoid the conclusion that Cohen is a despicable human being.
I do wish he would finish his sentences. It should read “I/we/they am/are not a/ racist/s I/we they just do and say racist things”
Isn’t there some kind of a limit to # of racial slurs/actions, like if a dog bites once he gets a paddled, twice he goes to the vet, 3x his owner goes to the vet?
In my own Boomer generation, growing up in Massachusetts, endogamy with respect to religion and ethnic group were culturally and familially, though not legally, required.
Miscengenation was, I suppose, the most extreme form of exogamy then possible for most Americans.
Nowadays, I suppose, a Jewish-American princess could marry a black Muslim terrorist from Somalia and really freak out her parents.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
To this day, many Jewish Americans are very concerned about the breakdown of this taboo as more and more young Jews marry young people of non-Jewish religion or ancestry.
Ask Alan Dershowitz, in many ways a liberal but certainly not an orthodox one.
And the Jews are not alone.
For that matter, worldwide, exogamy is generally a statistically trivial exception much disapproved by nearly everyone of all races and religions.
Who, exactly, is reality-based, here?
Cohen’s comment is truly nauseating, but yours doesn’t help, and is based on some fundamental misconceptions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFKsJPOU6vI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPILYQ3Z0Mo http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/12/world/africa/yityish-aynaw-miss-israel-ethiopia/
I was going to comment, as i feel PV was commenting from a peculiar position, but the videos say more than i can.
I do wonder about the assumption he makes that worldwide disagreement with mixed(race/cultural/religious) marriages is the default, i cant find much about it other than that its about 15% in the us and that there are no laws prohibiting it, except for Saudi Females and Egyptians marrying Israelis could lose citizenship because of it.
I would expect many places having such laws if the majority of people were against it but historically there dont seem to be that many examples either. Maybe i am missing something?
One of the points I was trying to make is that such restrictions are not necessarily based on race. I was not suggesting that Hasidic Jews are liberal, because they certainly are not. It was that the restrictions they observe are not fundamentally about race, they’re about religion.
As for Miss Israel, that’s pretty much the same point, but in a secular context. However, Ethiopian Jews are, on the whole, quite religious.
The thing with Egyptians and Israelis is not about race either, it’s about nationalism.
The categories by which different cultures view the world, and themselves, differ greatly. In some cultures, for example, it’s forbidden to marry within your clan, in others it’s forbidden to marry outside of it. And so on. Of course there are also parallels, and there is also the phenomenon of assimilation to a dominant culture, which is what I really see in somebody like Cohen.
I find it hard to imagine any culture that doesn’t have some pretty clear distinctions between “us” and “them”. That’s virtually inherent in the concept of culture. It’s how they define it and how they handle it that differs.
Maybe Cohen has what I call “Tower-ette’s Syndrome.”
He’s lived in his DC MSM Tower-bubble for so long that he blurts out the shit he hears from the other racist drunks at the cocktail parties, without the ability to censor himself – and so, all sorts of whack-a-doodle crap comes out in his odious columns!
It’s his Editors who need the penicillin!
Ooops, never mind!
Editors were the first ones cut, in the budget cutting.
My bad…
He’s been writing the same crap for 30+ years, as Boo says.
And Richard Cohen has not been a decent columnist for at least thirty years.
Which makes the Twitter hand-wringing today weird. People are only now realizing he’s saying stupid, racist shit? There is online proof of Cohen saying racist shit in 1996(I think). I’d bet there is stuff farther back, it’s just a matter whether it’s available to find online.
My mistake. There is web proof of Cohen’s racism going back to 1986. See:
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/06/us/post-offers-apology-to-blacks.html
I’ve gone back and re-read his column a few times, in an effort to find some way in which I could interpret this as simply an in-artful observation of maybe a Tea Party-ish perspective of the GOP, and not the actual viewpoint of Cohen. But I just can’t seem to find a way to give even a shred of the benefit of the doubt here.
This perfectly encompasses the view of a totally quarantined beltway insider. For him to be so obviously clueless as what the dog whistles that “expansion of government, immigration, secularism, and the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde” actually mean in the mind of the GOP is just kind of stupefying.
But the problem with Cohen is that, if he actually stepped foot outside his comfortable beltway existence, he would probably be like the guy who has spent his entire life in prison, and finds himself released at the age of 70, into a world in which he has no capacity to function. Not that Cohen is even doing that much functioning these days inside his comfy and isolated little bungalow.
Considered that he’s been stuck somewhere around 1970, but that’s too generous as “gag reflex on seeing an interracial couple” wouldn’t have been seen in any newspaper outside the deep south and probably not even there either.
It is pretty astonishing that anyone can think biracial people are a recent innovation in this country, but I don’t think it’s just Richard Cohen’s mental decay at work here. He’s basically giving an accurate description of the xenophobic element in the Republican party, the main evidence of cerebral degeneration being that he thinks these views are “conventional” in a country that has twice elected a mulatto president.
And the historical amnesia is typical as well. When the xenophobes talk about immigration, for instance, they tend to act as if Spanish-speaking people only began arriving in this country a few weeks ago. The United States just is and always has been multicultural. That’s why the REAL national motto is E pluribus unum.
They also ignore the fact that about 25% of the territory of the United States used to be part of Mexico, a Spanish speaking country. Obviously, all of the Spanish speaking people left, only to come back again a century and a half later, right?
A good portion of Spanish speakers never “arrived.” They have always been here….
Precisely. In fact, lot of the first gabachos in California were illegal immigrants.
Boo —
Get off Charlie Sheen.
Stupid people need role models that aren’t Southern jackasses, also.
Besides, I think his movies are great.
I need to call the Washington Post, but I want someone to record me on video doing so.
I’d like to see that.
gag reflex? offensive doesn’t begin to cover it
Happily, Amazon is quite good at customer returns.