WaPo's Richard Cohen: Great Columnist, Or Greatest Columnist?
The only thing that would cheer us up if Bill Kristol loses next year's Pulitzer Prize for commentary would be a victory for Washington Post "moderate liberal" columnist Richard Cohen instead. If you haven't been following this guy recently then you know NOTHING. Oh, the prose-poetry of his sentences! One gorgeous conjunction masterfully gives way to a brilliant proper noun, brought to life by an effervescent transitive verb and wrung to a world-historical clincherwith yet another brilliant proper noun. Recently, Cohen has told us about his "keen eye"and the wretched"tattoos" plastering our children these days. In today's column, Cohen shares the following: John McCain is a maverick, while Barack Obama is a youth!
OMG he is so gay for old John McCain:
Just tell me one thing Barack Obama has done that you admire," I asked a prominent Democrat. He paused and then said that he admired Obama's speech to the Democratic convention in 2004. I agreed. It was a hell of a speech, but it was just a speech.
On the other hand, I continued, I could cite four or five actions -- not speeches -- that John McCain has taken that elicit my admiration, even my awe. First, of course, is his decision as a Vietnam prisoner of war to refuse freedom out of concern that he would be exploited for propaganda purposes. To paraphrase what Kipling said about Gunga Din, John McCain is a better man than most.
Obviously, Obamatards are Obamatards. They know nothing about anything beyond their television sets. The academic community is in lockstep behind Obama, sure, but that just reinforces the point: Obama is Hitler. John McCain may not have any actual policy proposals beyond a budget-busting tax plan and Victory In Wars, but -- and thank you Richard, Richard Cohen, for making this point -- he is a prisoner-maverick like Gunga Din.
Obama argues that he himself stuck to the biggest gun of all: opposition to the war. He took that position when the war was enormously popular, the president who initiated it was even more popular and critics of both were slandered as unpatriotic. But at the time, Obama was a mere Illinois state senator, representing the (very) liberal Hyde Park area of Chicago. He either voiced his conscience or his district's leanings or (lucky fella) both. We will never know.
In other words: Obama lied about the Iraq War somehow. We do not know how he lied, and we probably never will. But he definitely lied so shutup already.
All politicians change their positions, sometimes even because they have changed their minds. McCain must have suffered excruciating whiplash from totally reversing himself on George Bush's tax cuts. He has denounced preachers he later embraced and then, to his chagrin, has had to denounce them all over again. This plasticity has a label: pandering. McCain knows how it's done.
Preachers and W.'s tax cuts -- on these two issues alone has McCain changed his stance. And it hurt his feelings when he did it so lay off goddamnit.
The Washington Post pays Richard Cohen actual money to write columns in its newspaper.
Obama the Unknown [WP]