Wonkette
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is maybe the worst writer on Earth, yes? He has never made a valuable point in his life, and the only reason he still has a job is because, uhh, maybe the Post wants him to sexually harass more of their employees?
So check out this week’s column about that cad, Jon Stewart, where Cohen takes after Howie Kurtz and CHASTISES Jon Stewart for “blaming CNBC for everything,” which he wasn’t doing at all. Then watch as Cohen lists all the terrible things that have happened in the last decade — and before, because he includes the Tulip bubble! — and asks, “How was anyone supposed to know?” That’s the best he can offer, in his newspaper column. Why even bother?
I find the more reporters to comment on Jon Stewart, the less there is to be said.
How can I get off your lawn when your entire life’s work gives me the painful, crippling sheeits?
I’ll be damned if I take somebody who looks like the unnatural offspring of Bob Balaban and a Yeti.
He didn’t watch the show. Journalism 101: Get your information 3rd hand.
As to CNBC, he’s right. They didn’t do this all by themselves. The print media sucked. And there’s gotta be clips of FOX and CNN shutting down guests who are trying to warn people. I’m sure I’ve seen them.
But the role that Cramer and other financial journalists played was incidental. There was not much they could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at. The financial instruments that Wall Street firms were both peddling and buying are the functional equivalent of particle physics. To this day, no one knows their true worth.
It is a little known fact that, unless granted subpoena power by an act of congress, Journalists are prohibited from engaging in a practice that is known, to those in the business as: “investigative journalism.”
Famous cases of journalists who were granted subpoena power by congress and were able to break big news:
Symour Hersch was granted subpoena powers in 1969, which allowed him to break the Mi Lai massacre story.
Neil Sheehan was granted Subpoena powers in 1971, which allowed him to report of the Pentagon papers.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were each garnted hal a subpoena power which they could only activate by linking rings and shouting out “subpoena powers ACTIVATE!!!! Form of: an investigative reporter” which allowed them to break the Watergate scandal.
How was anyone supposed to know? And nobody could have predicted Hurricane Katrina, except, of course, for all those people who did.
For the followers of Reaganjesus, it’s just much easier to say “nobody could have known” that to admit that a bunch of socialist hippie scum were right all along.
Gee, Dickie, lots of smart folks thought that unregulated derivatives were a bad idea in the mid 90s (see Nick Leeson and Orange County Bankruptcies of 1994, or Long Term Capital Disaster of 1997 which directly led to the Asian financial Crisis of 97/98.)
The real estate bubbles of the 80s in both commercial and residential gave us a pretty good idea of what was going to happen which directly led to the S&L bailouts.
Or what about the bursting of the great intertubes/tech bubble of 1998-2001?
No, the signs were there but you were too busy playing the role of Prissy Pollyana Princess chiding anyone who said not nice things for being rude or “not funny.” To quote Jon Stewart: Fuck you.
I find myself significantly more enlightened by Glen Beck’s Great Leap Forward, or whatever the hell he’s doing over there.
Gosh darn this stunning lack of journalistic credibility on the part of Jon Stewart. Why can not this funny man just be funny? You know, cavort and gambol for our pleasure like those Keaton and Chaplin fellows. Also.
Yesterday we had Tucker Carlson trying to rehabilitate his career on the back of Jon Stewart. Today we have Richard Cohen trying to sound with-it by talking about Jon Stewart, whose show we can reasonably assume he has never watched. Jon Stewart is a very popular man for people who know this is their last best shot at relevance. Who will it be tomorrow? Paul Harvey? Ron Silver? Dick Cheney?
So in other words, Richard Cohen is saying financial journalism is totally useless and no one should pay attention to it, especially if they intend to mock it. Glad we’ve cleared that up.
“How was anyone supposed to know?”
Makes me nostalgic for the Bush years, when every single, massive fuck-up was explained away with those words. The good old days…
As soon as I saw this column on the Post’s op-ed page this morning, I knew it was only a matter of time before it’d show up on Wonkette. Thanks for not disappointing.
hobospacejungle:
Too late for Ron Silver.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alec-baldwin/mourning-the-death-of-ron_b_175534.html
hobospacejungle: Paul Harvey is dead. Thank Jeebus.
David Denby started it.
“If these people kept their money in these companies — financial and insurance giants they had built and knew from the inside — how was even Jim Cramer to know these firms were essentially hollow? ”
Cohen’s an idiot. All those CEO’s didn’t sell their stock in their sinking companies because the knew it would be the kiss of death, not because they didn’t know. And Stewart’s beef with Cramer and his ilk was that they weren’t doing their jobs. Reporting. Investigating. Not cheerleading.
hobospacejungle: Morton Downey Jr.?
Mocker. Mock thyself
Fucker. Fuck thyself.
Serolf Divad: I wonder which one was the bucket of water.
Serolf Divad: Alas, Cramer was only granted subpenis power, possibly underpowered, at that.
Sorry.
We r in ur zeitgeist, dancing on Jim Cramer’s bald head.
Curse you< Newell, for forcing me to read such twaddle.
saggyboobedhag: Oh, I bet he watched it; it’s just that Cohen has the singular ability not to comprehend what he’s just seen.
Remember, this is the guy who said he saw Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner and proclaimed him “rude” and “so not funny”, while at the same time saying:
“(H)e failed dismally in the funny person’s most solemn obligation: to use absurdity or contrast or hyperbole to elucidate — to make people see things a little bit differently. He had a chance to tell the president and much of important (and self-important) Washington things it would have been good for them to hear…”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/03/AR2006050302202.html
So, bottom line, this guy can sit through anything and not have it change his preconceived notions about whatever he’s going to write anyway.
As Truman Capote allegedly said, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
How was anyone supposed to know? Stand up and turn around, that’s how.
I don’t even know how Newell reads these fucking columns. Between this and deciphering Dame Peggy, that young man deserves a raise.
ManchuCandidate: FMA: Yeah, that was kind of the point, if there was one. Um…even the dead are trying to use Jon Stewart to come back to life. Yeah, that’s it.
If stupidity was a chocolate eclair, Richard Cohen would be a chocolate eclair over 54 feet long.
Yet another subscriber to the “we were blind-sided” theory. They’re too spineless to admit that it was their greed that numbed their senses from the blaring horn, bright lights, and thunderous growl emanating from the reality train that was about to hit them.
Serolf Divad: All of those guys had stool pigeons feeding them the story. Who was ratting out AIG? I covered finance in 1998, and one reason I quit was because they wanted me to write stories about “what’s the market going to do?” which is just lying. I was bitching about repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back then (which wouldn’t have helped AIG, but it would have kept a lot of commercial banks out of trouble), but bitching from prejudice is not journalism. Like most business journalists, my formal training in financial transactions equaled bupkis; I learned what I knew from researching stories.
Jon Stewart’s point, that teevee business “journalism” is not only shallow and poorly researched, but actively engaged in helping Wall Street relieve individual investors of their money, is valid. Most print business journalism is free advertising for companies, too, and people who base investment decisions on anything other than raw financial numbers are idiots. CNBC is entertainment for suckers, as Jon quite entertainingly pointed out.
Separately, expecting business reporters to figure out the actual leverage involved in mortgage-backed securities, which the CEOs of a lot of the companies selling them didn’t even know, without an audit or a bunch of whistleblowers, is asking a bit much. The list of people who ought to go to jail is quite long, and the rating companies that said this garbage was AAA should be at the front of the line.
WadISay:
Mmmmm… you’re making me wish stupidity were, in fact, a chocolate eclair. There’d be soooo many eclairs around here.
Wow the only thing that column deserves is a “Terrible.” There are blogs that nobody has ever heard of that write better shit than Cohen.
“Post management concluded that Ms. Spurgeon had been subjected to a “hostile working environment” but not to “sexual harassment” and that Cohen was guilty of “inappropriate behavior.”
Har har. Hostile work environment is actually the legal term for sexual harrassment, as my lawyer husband reminds me when I want to sue my employers for being rude and snotty. Washington Post was trying to be tricky.
Richard Cohen. Ick.
GAK! Why does this guy continue to land op-ed column space in the paper of record for our federal government? When he’s been either horrendously wrong or launching total airballs (when he’s not harrassing the interns ha ha) for years and years!!!1! ACK GACK! And they pay him!
If they’re hiring writers who are just WRONG, H-e-double-hockey-sticks, why not just go ahead and hire that Kristol guy? Then you’d have WRONG covered seven ways to sunday!
What? Oh. Never mind then -
But he worked SO HARD to be the worlds worst journalist!!1
“He who writes this column had some of his (extremely) hard-earned retirement funds in AIG stock.”
“CNBC played no role in the Tulip Bubble that peaked, as I recall, in 1637″
Fuck, now he’s gonna keep writing for another 250 years!
Why hasn’t Wonkette picked up on the other insane bit of drivel on the important pages today? David Brooks apparently believes that “get rich quick” is like the 11th amendment or in the Declaration or something. I hate it when self-important fucktards in the media wank about our “aspirational society.” To paraphrase the great Jon Stewart, people aspire for cocaine and hookers, too.
Of course, I have greater respect for those who aspire for cocaine and hookers than I do for columnists. At least they are trying to stimulate the economy. Not wanking about how Cramer is good for America or journalism is teh awesome or some such.
better be careful, my wonkies, lest mr. cohen get miffed and write an unreadable book about how snarky you guys are.
I put this column through one of those internet translation programs and came up with:
“I was one of those suckers ACTUALLY basing my investment decisions on Jim Cramer’s TV antics, and the only way I can face my losses is to pretend that no one knew or knows anything about anything. And I hate you all.”
“As with the war in Iraq, for which credulous media should take some responsibility, the sins are blown out of proportion.”
Yes, damn you dirty hippies for pointing out that if we’d done our jobs instead of shilling for the Bush administration, we could have spared the Iraqi people and our own soldiers and their families countless horrors and nearly unlimited suffering. But you all are blowing it way out of proportion. Yes the US military was lined up on Iraq’s border with tons of weaponry that they intended to use, but how were we supposed to know that the use of those weapons would result in death, maiming, and destruction? Who could have seen that coming?
Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cohen.
Jon Stewart is my hero. He got rid of Tucker Carlson and Jim Cramer. What more can anyone ask for?
I have an idea! I read the Post every day and could he get rid of Richard Cohen and that idiot Bushie Michael Gerson? Please.
JDHART: Let’s just hope that the WaPo opinion page goes the way of the WaPo business section. I’ll feel bad for Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne, but hey, sometimes the baby goes with the bathwater.
I swear I just saw this bastard flashing people from the roof of the White House! and Cohen STFU…..Acorn!!also.
hobospacejungle: You’re two out of three on dead men there. Wait, three out of three. Technically, Cheney is only a mockery of life.
I think it’s his manly physique, aquiline nose and preposessing jaw structure.
Rary Guppert: Perhaps he would take a book leave and we wouldn’t be subjected to his op-eds.
JDHART: And Krautzenjammer too? Please?
norbizness: Looking at the picture, I see Wolf Blitzer in corpse makeup. Or are those big black circles glasses? Unpossible - it must be Black Metal Wolf.
Yea, dumb John Stewart. Cohen already explained in one of his most erudite columns - “Ink-Stained Wretchedness” - that the collapse of our financial system is mainly due to teenagers, Angelina Jolie and George Shultz getting tattoos.
Cleared up. Moving on.
He who writes this column had some of his (extremely) hard-earned retirement funds in AIG stock.
I’m gonna have to call bullshit on that hard-earned line. This reads like he just banged his ancient, addled head on the keyboard over and over.
If ever there was a guy who needed to be cockpunched….
It’s high time someone called Jon Stewart out for tearing down without building up.
Cohen is either lazy or stupid as a bag of hair.
“They [e.g. Cramer] cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at. The financial instruments that Wall Street firms were both peddling and buying are the functional equivalent of particle physics.”
****
The information about AIG appears in its annual and quarterly reports.
“Operating income at the [A.I.G. Financial Products] unit also grew, rising to 17.5 percent of A.I.G.’s overall operating income in 2005, compared with 4.2 percent in 1999.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28melt.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
In the summer of 2006, the NYT (Floyd Norris, I believe) reported about the surge in CDOs as financial instruments.
In Feb. 2008 the head and founder of this AIG credit default swap unit (which dealt in credit default swaps, sometimes called CDOs) suddently bailed and then went incommunicado.
Hmmmm. Was any of that worth looking into, Mr. Cohen?
“It does not take cable TV to make a bubble. CNBC played no role in the Tulip Bubble that peaked, as I recall, in 1637, or in the Great Depression of 1929-41. It is the zeitgeist that does this — the psychological version of inertia: the belief that what’s happening will continue to happen.”
Oh, Richard, you sad little old man. No one has said that CNBC caused this. People are merely wondering why no one in the mainstream media seemed to think that this bubble pop might result in bad things. I’m pretty sure that that is all Mr. Stewart was saying.
Also, the idea that I should believe that no one at these companies had any idea what was going on because they kept their invested shares in said companies? Oh, well, there you go. They kept their money in the doomed companies, so clearly they thought everything was going to keep going up, forever and ever.
WadISay: Dude, you can’t “build up” on a foundation made of quicksand, shit, and that “sour earth” from the Pet Cemetery movie. Stewart’s just pointing out that the foundation is made of shit. Cohen is rubbing himself with it and calling it fairy dust.
No, really, the motherfucking tulip bubble? I mean, let’s just say, for argument’s sake, the daily papers with well-paid reporters were covering such things (they weren’t, apparently, until a few years later, and in Sweden). Such papers wouldn’t really have the kind of reach that modern media has, right? Let’s say that an intrepid Dutch journalist was all “This tulip market is whack, yo. I’ma tell the public not to put their monies in bulbs!” - what kind of reach would our little wooden-shoed reporter have, really?
OMFG, I just started to formulate an argument about the ease with which reporters can access and spread information these days, versus any existing reporters in the 1600s. Someone PLEASE pour me a fucking whiskey.
Servo: Righto. And I’ll bet he was also blindsided by the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Such an easy excuse: It wuz too hard! Nobuddy cudda figgered it out!
S.Luggo: I’ll take “stupid as a bag of hair” for $100, Alex.
The Tulip Bubble. Really?
Whatever papa smurf, take your geritol and SHAT UP!!!!
Denby and Cohen can make a manwich together.
Richard Cohen …. Michael Gerson …. WashPo revenue fell 77% last year…. Coincidence? You decide!
Next thing you know they’ll hire David Denby as movie critic. Also.
stopmebeforeitypeagain:
1. Line Dick’s cage with clean sheet of white cardboard.
2. Remove and translate shart marks into English.
3. ……
4. Profit!
Well, I just think consumers and those who were predator lenders also. That’s, you know, that has to be considered also. But again, it’s got to be a comprehensive long-term solution found for this problem that America is facing today. As I say, we are getting into crisis mode here.
Oh, and one thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day American people, Joe Six Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars. We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt. Let’s do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card. Don’t live outside of our means. We need to make sure that as individuals we’re taking personal responsibility through all of this. It’s not the American peoples fault that the economy is hurting like it is, but we have an opportunity to learn a heck of a lot of good lessons through this and say never again will we be taken advantage of.
And learn proper grammatical construction of the English language. Also.