Fire Richard Cohen. Fire Him Now

The Washington Post will never recover its reputation as long as it continues to employ people in the unreality-based community like Richard Cohen:

Rising Hegemon: Suffer the little Wankers: Apparently, Richard Cohen finally noticed the sky is blue.

So common is the statement "Bush lied" that it seems sometimes that I am the only blue-state person who does not think it is true. Then, last week, the indomitable Helen Thomas changed all that with a single question. She asked George Bush why he wanted "to go to war" from the moment he "stepped into the White House," and the president said, "You know, I didn't want war." With that, the last blue-state skeptic folded.

Five and a quarter years of shilling for George W. Bush is five and a quarter years too many.

Comments

[liberal]

On a more subtle note, I don't understand why some people (including many respectable thinkers) don't agree that launching a war under a fraudulent _casus belli_ is grounds for impeachment.

Some of them don't think there should be payback for what the Republicans did to Clinton; I don't understand this argument, given that politics is largely marked by iterated prisoner's dilemmas.

Others seem to think that if the President didn't violate an actual statute, then he shouldn't be charged. (Of course, he did break FISA or whatever the statute related to that was, but I'm speaking of the war.)

...back to Richard Cohen, I think his main problem is that he ain't too bright.

[me]

I guess the lesson is if bush had given Saddam a BJ, then we could impeach him.

[Charles]

There's a very simple solution, Brad.

By his own confession, Cohen deserted from the National Guard.

So... re-induct him, and send him to Iraq. A one-year tour would do wonders for his attitude.

[Derelict]

liberal--

Some of us history buffs remember the fraudulent causus belli used to "justify" the 1939 invasion of Poland. That was definied as crime against humanity at the later Nuremburg trials. So, too, with Bush and his trumped-up, fraudulent case for invading Iraq. I can find no way in which that does not fit the definition of a crime against humanity.

Although it's apparently considered "shrill" and "unhinged" and "extreme-far-left," I will nonetheless say it:

George W. Bush is an international war criminal, guilty of waging aggressive war, of ordering the arrest and torture of people, of invading and occupying a country that posed no credible threat to the United States.

I pray nightly that The Hague indicts him, and I wonder why it has not yet done so.

[kharris]

Liberal,

The problem, I think, is an unwillingness to admit the prerequsits exist for an undesirable outcome. Agreeing that Bush's actions are grounds for impeachment is not the same as arguing for impeachment, but partisans and scaredicats refuse to make that distinction. This refusal leads to dishonesty.

[ogmb]

http://itmfa.com/

[Matt]

Cohen is just babbling. One senseless column after another. Time for a WaPo higher-up to take him aside and suggest he needs a break-- spend more time with his family, write a book, recharge the batteries.. whatever.

[liberal]

Derelict wrote, "I can find no way in which that does not fit the definition of a crime against humanity."

Actually, I thought an illegal invasion (which is what we're talking about) is a war crime, not a crime against humanity _per se_.

But in a practical sense, either is moot, because if I read history correctly, war crimes trials are only conducting against those who lose a war (where getting leaving Vietnam/Iraq/etc is not losing in that sense).

Of course, in a practical sense, Bush will never get impeached, either, because even if the Democrats take back the House, I think they'd be too timid to try it.

[liberal]

kharris wrote, "The problem, I think, is an unwillingness to admit the prerequsits exist for an undesirable outcome."

I'm sure that's true in many cases. Though there's probably some out there with no partisan bias who believe that a pres should be indicted by the House only on statutory charges (which is IMHO an incorrect reading of the Constitution).

[liberal]

Matt wrote, "Time for a WaPo higher-up to take him aside and suggest he needs a break-- spend more time with his family, write a book, recharge the batteries.. whatever."

Cripes. If they did that using consistent criteria, they'd have to dismiss a good fraction of their columnists (Novak, Krauthammer, Will, ...)

:-)

[piotr]

"war crimes trials are only conducting against those who lose a war"

This is not correct. Privates, seargants, dog handlers etc. can be tried for war crimes, and even serve time. Lieutenants -- not so much.

But one day the quaint idea that folks are equal under the law may actually gain currency.

[ChristianPinko]

Although Cohen is the very model of a modern major wanker, I will defend him to this extent: I've never seen anything convincing that Bush wanted war from Day One of his presidency. I think that he wanted to lower taxes from Day One, yes. But my guess would be that it was Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolofowitz, and the rest of the PNAC crowd who wanted to take out Saddam, and they simply got Bush to go along with them.

Any thoughts?

[Matt Austern]

I think it's clear that the Bush Administration wanted war from day 1. I'm not convinced that it's productive to figure out who makes decisions within that Administration, though; that requires too much Kremlinology and speculative telepsychodiagnosis for my taste.

[Steve]

I don't think there's evidence of anything Bush wanted from Day One, other than to take a vacation. But it's not even about whether Bush wanted war from Day One, it's about whether he wanted war against Iraq a lot sooner than he said he did. According to Richard Clarke, it was practically a done deal on 9/11/01.

[Ginger Yellow]

I don't think Bush wanted war from day 1 of his presidency, but I do think Bush wanted war against Iraq from within a week or two after 9/11, no matter who was responsible. Whether the PNAC people persuaded him or it awakened some father/son rivalry thing I don't know.

[Barry]

Ginger, there's some interview from ~1999, where George W was moaning about his father having not used his political capital from the Gulf War. W stated that *he* wouldn't refrain from using such capital.

Given that, the idea that he wanted some sort of war makes sense.

[liberal]

hj wrote, "Well the US signed the Kellogg-Briand treaty that outlawed war."

This I file under "international law that doesn't seem to be enforced much."

Remember, a big problem with international law is that there's no entity with a monopoly on legitimate violence that can enforce the law. (Yeah, I suppose the UN could, but it's not set up to really function that way.)

[Barry]

liberal: "...back to Richard Cohen, I think his main problem is that he ain't too bright."

His basic problem is that he's a wh*re to power. He dissed Clinton from Day 1 to Day Last, but doesn't seem to have the same fire to go after the right wing.

[Derelict]

I'd say that there is a preponderance of evidence that Bush intended to invade Iraq even before he was president. From his remarks to several reporters on different occasions before and uring his campaign, he made it clear that he felt his father had left the jobs unfinished--and that he (W.) was going to finish it.

Within a week of having taken the oath of office, we now know, Bush had commissioned a group that included the PNAC crowd to draw up plans for war with Iraq. By April, 2001, that group had produced plans to divvy up Iraq's oil production.

And then, of course, there is Richard Clark's testimony that Bush wanted to pin 9/11 on Iraq no matter what. When Clark, CIA, and State refused to go along with THAT scheme, Bush (via Feith, Cheney, Hadley, et al) began cherry-picking and fabricating intelligence to inflate Iraq into an existential threat.

There is plenty of evidence that Bush was determined to invade Iraq long before 9/11. And even a cursory glance at the course of events post-9/11 makes it clear that Bush was going to war with Iraq no matter what.

[ogmb]

> His basic problem is that he's a wh*re to power. He dissed Clinton from Day 1 to Day Last, but doesn't seem to have the same fire to go after the right wing.

The second sentence doesn't parse with the first.

[Basharov]

"But my guess would be that it was Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolofowitz, and the rest of the PNAC crowd who wanted to take out Saddam, and they simply got Bush to go along with them.

"Any thoughts?"

Bush in March 2002: "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out."

[MDtoMN]

"> His basic problem is that he's a wh*re to power. He dissed Clinton from Day 1 to Day Last, but doesn't seem to have the same fire to go after the right wing.

The second sentence doesn't parse with the first."

It does if you recognize that control of the presidency is not the major source of power in our society, particularly in our media establishment. The media establishment is owned by people who favor Republican views, is dominated by people from demographic groups which massively favor Republican views, and consists of people fully cognizant that Republicans are running the show and have been for quite some time.

[Auto]

The WaPo's entire Op-Ed page is a disaster. Insufferable gasbags like Broder. Novak's shilling for Repubs. (He used to be a bulldog reporter -- have the Dems stopped returning his call or has he stopped calling us?) The unpleasant and terminally unhappy Krauthammer. Applebaum never lived up to initial hopes. And the visiting writers are all second-string junior varsity -- they approach the WaPo after the NYT rejects their stuff.

Amazing that so important a paper can have a so spectacularly bad Op-Ed page.

[Doug]

"war crimes trials are only conducting against those who lose a war"

This is not correct. Privates, seargants, dog handlers etc. can be tried for war crimes, and even serve time. Lieutenants -- not so much.

But one day the quaint idea that folks are equal under the law may actually gain currency.

Posted by: piotr | March 30, 2006 at 12:03 PM

Strictly speaking, not so much. Lieutenant William Calley, My Lai, Republic of Vietnam.

Much more accurate to say that the crime will be pinned on the lowest ranking service member who can credibly be blamed. Unlike, say, that asshole who thinks torture can be compared (favorably) to his normal office practice.

[liberal]

Auto wrote, "Insufferable gasbags like Broder."

Yeah. What a moron. The Republicans could be murdering Democrats _en masse_, and he'd still be extolling the virtues of bipartisanship. Eric Alterman really put him in his proper place in _Sound and Fury_.

"Applebaum never lived up to initial hopes."

Her most embarassing moment was her comments on electronic voting---if it's good enough for ATMs, why isn't it good enough for the polling booth?

[Charles]

Derelict, your comments about Dubya are sounding ever more centrist. Here is what the Sergeant Major who was in on the founding of Delta Force, Eric Haney, has been saying:

Q: What's your assessment of the war in Iraq?

A: Utter debacle. But it had to be from the very first. The reasons were wrong. The reasons of this administration for taking this nation to war were not what they stated. ... We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies....

The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It's about vengeance, it's about revenge, or it's about cover-up. You don't gain intelligence that way....I ask, who would you want to pay to be a torturer? Do you want someone that the American public pays to torture? He's an employee of yours. It's worse than ridiculous. It's criminal; it's utterly criminal.

(www.dailynews.com/entertainment/ci_3641046)

When a sergeant major of Delta Force is calling the actions of this administration criminal, he knows whereof he speaks.

[monkyboy]

Some people seem to have forgotten that Bushie and Rummy bombed Baghdad 3 weeks after they took over our government...

[BH]

monkyboy fails to mention that Hussein and his military forces fired off more missiles at Allied jets in the two no fly zones during the month of January 2001 than they did throughout the entire year of 2000.

That's why the U.S. and UK launched the bombings in February 2001. Same thing that President Clinton did in 1998, except that the Clinton Administration did it on a bigger scale including B-52s.

[Michelle]

For all of you who don't believe (or don't know) that Bush wanted war with Iraq "from day one," there has been reporting uncovering insiders throughout government (CIA, State Dept., Pentagon, White House) that have stated flat out that Bush wanted to invade Iraq from before day one.

Paul O'Neill wrote that it was at the top of the agenda at the very first cabinet meeting of the Bush administration, 2 weeks after Bush was inaugurated.

James Risen's book exposes much more than just the NSA's wiretapping of Americans. Risen reported that his sources throughout government, in the Pentagon and in the CIA, and in the White House, knew that Bush was taking the country to war with Iraq before 9/11, and was manufacturing lies to justify it. They knew that the aluminum tubes were not for nuclear weapons. They knew that the report that Saddam was trying to acquire yellowcake was false. This was before Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. They knew that Bush was lying and nobody was doing anything to stop this train wreck. Everybody was looking out for their careers.

The Downing St. memos show that Bush was fabricating evidence in order to support a pre-emptive war against Iraq.

Chris Matthews said this past week on his program "Hardball" that Bill Cohen (Clinton's Secretary of Defense) told him that in December 2000, Dick Cheney told Cohen to prepare a report on only one country for him - Iraq. Cheney told Cohen that he was only interested in everything that we had on Iraq. Cohen told Matthews that it was then, in 2000, that he knew that this administration was set on war with Iraq.

Mickey Herskowitz of the Houston Chronicle, well-known journalist, biographer and Bush family friend who worked for a time with Bush on a ghostwritten memoir, said that an Iraq war was always on Bush's brain.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He went on, 'If I have a chance to invade…, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'"

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2005/06/20/why_george_went_to_war.php

How is that there is this revisionist history now excusing Bush?

Can good grooming really fool so many people as to the criminal deviancy of this administration? Has everyone forgotten that his father also lied about the 'imminent threat' posed by Saddam in the first gulf war? That Bush claimed that secret satellite photos showed Saddam's troops massing on the Kuwait-Saudi Arabia border, and we would all have to trust him on that. Then the St. Petersburg Times got ahold of two commercial Soviet satellite photos of the same area showing nothing of the kind. http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-consp.htm

Have we forgotten about Nariyeh and the phony "The Iraq soldiers are throwing babies out of incubators onto the floor to die" story that the senior George Bush repeated many times in the lead-up to the first gulf war? Why Victoria Clarke isn't in prison for coaching Nariyeh, the niece of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S., is beyond me. Instead, Clarke is making the talk show circuit promoting her book "Lipstick on a Pig."

The U.S. has become a nation that bestows Medals of Freedom, promotions, and financial windfalls to those who are actively engaged in crimes against humanity. The days of Americans being able to believe that we're a force of good and a model of decency for all other modern nations to look up to are way behind us. It's over. Bush is driving this train wreck over the cliff and those who can stop him (Republicans in Congress) aren't willing to. And the Democrats are totally worthless.

[Michelle]

In Risen's book, one of his sources said that 9/11/01 actually delayed Bush's plans for war with Iraq.

Can good grooming really fool so many people as to the criminal deviancy of this administration? Has everyone forgotten that his father also lied about the 'imminent threat' posed by Saddam in the first gulf war? That Bush claimed that secret satellite photos showed Saddam's troops massing on the Kuwait-Saudi Arabia border, and we would all have to trust him on that. Then the St. Petersburg Times got ahold of two commercial Soviet satellite photos of the same area showing nothing of the kind. http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-consp.htm

Have we forgotten about Nariyeh and the phony "The Iraq soldiers are throwing babies out of incubators onto the floor to die" story that the senior George Bush repeated many times in the lead-up to the first gulf war? Why Victoria Clarke isn't in prison for coaching Nariyeh, the niece of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S., is beyond me. Instead, Clarke is making the talk show circuit promoting her book "Lipstick on a Pig."

The U.S. has become a nation that bestows Medals of Freedom, promotions, and financial windfalls to those who are actively engaged in crimes against humanity. The days of Americans being able to believe that we're a force of good and a model of decency for all other modern nations to look up to are way behind us. It's over. Bush is driving this train wreck over the cliff and those who can stop him (Republicans in Congress) aren't willing to. And the Democrats are totally worthless.

[Lee A. Arnold]

The adoption of the "Bush lied" meme by the foreign policy establishment follows, by only a few months, their adoption of the "occupation was incompetent" meme. Since they were all, Republican and Democrat alike, pretty much in on the plan from the beginning, it appears that throwing the President overboard is the next step in public opinion-management of this war, --as well as the first step by the Republican Party to disentangle themselves from a leader with low polling numbers (and here's wishing them good luck!) But they all continue, Republican and Democrat alike, to hang onto the meme, "now that we're there, we must see it through." This will take many more years, a few decades perhaps, of continuous month-to-month fine-tuning in management of ublic opinion, or else another attack or two on the U.S.

The question remains, how do you fight an enemy that has no central state nor standing army, (and when you have contributed to so much of their anger, and your further actions increase their numbers,) by taking a military position? Near their most prized resource? And then institute torture on an administrative basis, smearing your own good name and morals, perhaps for a long time to come? What we need is a better argument. What we have instead, all over the land of the free and the home of the brave, is a real lack of brains.

[jm]

As one who reads a lot of WWII history -- a fair amount of it in Japanese -- I see the Bush administration as being very similar in competence and character to Hirohito's government. I think its members deserve a similar fate.

[christofay]

"George W. Bush is an international war criminal, guilty of waging aggressive war, of ordering the arrest and torture of people, of invading and occupying a country that posed no credible threat to the United States." That too.

And all the money we spent with Halliburton and a hundred other wing-nut companies for securitie is wasted; at best, and it's not good at all, it's been used for domestic spying. Can we get it back please?

[christofay]

"(Novak, Krauthammer, Will, ...)"

The $90 / hour steelworker punditry class

As I don't listen to the wing nut radio, I have a hard time keeping track of who's who, pill-popper man, phone sex man, and so on. Now I realize there is more to keep track of, Cheney whispered fuck you from the podium of the Senate, Bush flipped the bird in the White House, Scalia did the Italian version of flipping the bird in a church.

[christofay]

Pres Bush wanted war with Iraq pre-Day 1 of his presidency. Didn't he mention with his ghost writer in 1999 that we would go to war with Iraq if he had the political capital? (political capital for Bush meaning a blank check to raid the people's treasury)

[Kate G.]

Michelle,
thanks for reminding us of O'Neil's book. I remember reading that stunning admission of how early bush was determined to "Get" Iraq and being astounded that it wasn't picked up by more news organizations. But when you read Richard Cohen you realize that they have simply abdicated their responsibility to the truth in favor of--what?

aimai

[Clever Online Alias]

Now...

It's probably just a coincidence, and I'm sure "no one could have predicted" it, but it seems to me that ever since the production levels of Iraqi crude have dropped, and per-barrel prices soared, there have been record-setting corporate profits posted by the economic sector we all know as Big-Oil.

Yeah... I'm sure those are utterly unconnected data points and only random happenstance.
... I also believe paper passports can be recovered nearly intact, and fully legible, after having survived a destructive force so massive in scope that it utterly disintegrated three (3) steel and concrete towers... (and a couple of those almost indestructable "black box" data-recorders, to boot.)
...

BTW: I'm in the market for a bridge, should anyone have one for sale.

--
HEY, KIDS!!
Who's the wealthiest, elitest reg'lar-Joe of them all?
Who's always a uniterator, and never a dividifier?
Who's the Most Macho Cheerleader on any squad?
That's right!
It's Mr Misunderestimated, the Yale Cowboy!
YAY!!

[kharris]

Yes, good for Michelle. I was going through the responses wondering why the HC piece from 1999 and the O'Niell book had not been mentioned. The list of circumstantial evidence against Bush on his desire to go into Iraq is more than enough to endict a ham sandwich. The sandwich would be convicted. Our dead. Their dead. All the bad will and brand new terrorists. All Bush's fault. He has probably eroded the US position in the world for decades to come.

[Barry]

kharris, the single hypothesis that makes the most sense is that they don't want to buck the powers-that-be. Not necessarily Bush, but the people who back him. And I don't mean the AM radio audience, or the right-wing christofascists. I mean the people who write the big checks, whose displeasure can trash careers.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/opinion/l29iraq.html

The Memo About the Road to War

To the Editor:

Once more, we are reminded by a secret, official British government memo that President Bush was determined to lead the United States to war against Iraq, although there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was a threat to us or anyone else.

Mr. Bush even proposed possible staged scenarios to make it appear that Iraq had provoked the war. We also see that he casually expected an easy conquest of Iraq and setting up of a new government.

In this senseless, unnecessary war, tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed, and the United States has lost the trust of most of our friends and allies.

When will President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld be called to account for their lying us into this disastrous war?

Some questions remain: Why did President Bush choose to go to war? Was it oil? Or was it the desire to make him more electable as a wartime commander? And why did Prime Minister Tony Blair agree to go along?

Morton Wachspress
Pompton Plains, N.J.
March 27, 2006

•

To the Editor:

In "Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says," the National Security Council spokesman is quoted as saying, "Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to comply, but he chose continued defiance." This has been a Bush administration theme since the war began.

Since Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction, what exactly could he have done to comply with the demand that he rid Iraq of W.M.D.?

Robert Dare
Weaverville, N.C., March 27, 2006

•

To the Editor:

How depressing to see your photograph of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair strutting lock step into a news conference after carefully rehearsing their plans for goading Iraq into the war they were determined to launch no matter what Saddam Hussein did.

The famous "special relationship" between our two countries has certainly changed in quality, hasn't it?

Judy Brewton
Stamford, Conn., March 27, 2006

•

To the Editor:

The memo from the Bush-Blair meeting in January 2003 attributes an idea to President Bush:

A United States surveillance plane painted in United Nations colors would fly over Iraq; the Iraqis would shoot at the decoy, and voilà, the pretext for starting the war.

Laugh or cry, but admit that this scheme would have eliminated all those alternatives: the weapons of mass destruction, the ties to terrorists and the spreading of democracy.

Jesper Christensen
Louisville, Ky., March 28, 2006

•

To the Editor:

What moral authority does the United States have left, now that it is widely known that it tortures prisoners and detains them indefinitely without due process?

How can the United States expect any country or culture to take its position seriously when human rights abuse abounds under the current administration and military? And, with extraordinary rendition, the United States actually counts on other regimes to torture its prisoners.

With all the talk about retraining a culture, it seems that the United States needs to retrain itself in human rights and justice.

Karen Alexander-Brown
Hillsboro, Ore., March 24, 2006

•

To the Editor:

Let me get this straight: the best strategy comes from British colonial experience, and yet we're not really seeking to create an empire in Iraq?

S. D. Hull
Kinnelon, N.J., March 27, 2006

[anne]

We could of course leave Iraq immediately. We could have left a year ago and a year before that, and we could have left a month or so after Iraq's government had been deposed. The war and occupation have been a physical and psychological and material and moral disaster, but we could leave Iraq immediately.

[anne]

I am not interested in mean spirited sloganeering about cutting and running and the like which prepare us to stay forever as though forever colonists. Simply leave Iraq.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/international/europe/27memo.html?ex=1301115600&en=7c30d11fe0c8c923&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

March 27, 2006

Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.

LONDON — In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons....

[Matt Austern]

I saw a snarky comment that the reason Richard Cohen didn't realize years ago that Bush was dishonest was that Cohen thought he'd need to know algebra to see whether Bush was lying.

And I just realized that this isn't just a snarky comment: it's literally true. As Paul Krugman has pointed out, anyone who was paying attention to the numbers during the 2000 campaign could tell that Bush was dishonest. What Bush said about the budget was false, and transparently so. Bush displayed enormous contempt for the press corps and for the American public by telling lies that could be checked so easily by anyone who was willing to take the trouble to do a little bit of math.

Alas, people like Cohen, with their willingness to treat the shape of the earth as a matter of opinion, show that the Bush campaign's contempt for the press was justified.

[Nan]

Richard Cohen playing dumb about Bush lying is really no mystery. It is consistent with the Washington conventional wisdom dynamic.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Sally Quinn Coctail Crowd. These people invested heavily in Bush as a "straight talking Texan" in 2000. They went out of their way to portray him as a man of honesty and integrity and contrasted him with Pinocchio Gore. They are invested in the narrative. The entire DC press elite functions on narratives. These people don't think, reason, look at the evidence. They check the approved narrative. Bush=honest has been the narrative since 2000. So when they are presented with evidence that Bush lied they make excuses for him. Bush didn't lie. He was misled by aides, by intelligence. He was tired. He got confused, etc. etc.

The real scandal here is that Richard Cohen is the supposed liberal in the Washington Post op-ed page, supposedly balancing such fire breathing partisan right wingers as Will, Krauthammer, Hoagland and a bunch of other partisan columnists on the right. This is not an accident. The WP editorial page is neocon, its op-ed page leans neocon with Alan Colmes clones like Richard Cohen for supposed balance.

Richard Cohen is the useful idiot of WP. They employ him so they can pretend to have liberal balance to hardline ideologues on the right.

[PW]

Nan is right. And we outliers (as opposed, I guess, to out-and-out liars) tend to forget the importance of social connections in Washington that drive opinion and drain judgment.

[Russ]

Well, Cohen isn't the only person doing a little backtracking. I e-mailed Tucker Carlson on 3/21/2006 calling him on a statement he made on "The Situation".

Carlson: "Wait, wait, wait. Just for the record, for one thing, I opposed the invasion of Iraq."

However, on May 12, 2004, in an interview with Joe Hagan, Carlson stated: "I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," he said. "It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually."

Needless to say, I only received the generic "thanks for your e-mail" response.

[Ari]

Readers:

Why does this super Blog appear to hide the menu from us every few days? Has something been happening to Typepad? Can a reader fix the problem?

[Lord]

'I didn't want war. I just wanted everyone to do what I said. Sit, Sadam. Rollover, Sadam. Beg, Sadam. I had no alternative when he wouldn't comply.' - George

[liberal]

Nan wrote, "They went out of their way to portray him as a man of honesty and integrity and contrasted him with Pinocchio Gore."

I agree, though I've never understood this. Bush has always reeked of insincerity. (I'm willing to say the same thing about Democrats, e.g. Hillary.)

"The entire DC press elite functions on narratives. These people don't think, reason, look at the evidence."

I agree, though I think that's partly a function of their being journalists. (Print) journalists love narratives, and are rewarded much more for their writing ability than their analytical abilities.

"The real scandal here is that Richard Cohen is the supposed liberal in the Washington Post op-ed page, supposedly balancing such fire breathing partisan right wingers as Will, Krauthammer, Hoagland and a bunch of other partisan columnists on the right."

Nah. Much more reliable liberals on the WaPo op-ed page are Dionne and Meyerson.

But your overall point that the WaPo is overstocked with fire-breathing right-wingers is dead on.

[liberal]

Matt Austern wrote, "What Bush said about the budget was false, and transparently so. Bush displayed enormous contempt for the press corps and for the American public by telling lies that could be checked so easily by anyone who was willing to take the trouble to do a little bit of math."

But don't forget that _elite_ journalists can make a _lot_ of money. Thus, they stood to benefit from Bush's tax cuts.

[Arun Khanna]

It seems that you mention individual (benchmark free) instances of problems with reporting by Post but by the time you reach your conclusion/recommendation stage you end up using the implicit benchmark of New York Times to evaluate the Post.
Alternatively, I could simply be misreading your blog entries about the Washington Post.