When Richard Cohen was a child — back in the good old days when people stoically died of everything, and our best days (The Beatles/Civil Rights) were still ahead, and there were bookstores filled not with these Blackberries, but real books, the kind a person could read without a telephone, or a pager, or such things — his psychotic father would push him outside in the middle of the night, on a primitive bicycle (no Prius for him!), its basket loaded with the printed, rubber-banded stacks of wood-pulp produced by our nation’s best newspaper publishers, a torrent of cold rain pounding upon the child’s prematurely white hair, a deadly pothole concealed by a puddle of dirty street water, and then BLAM!, the morning’s papers sinking to the bottom of the asphalt crater, the wood pulp thirstily soaking up the rain juice, the work of America’s better journalists blurring into inky clouds of failure. The elder Cohen, snarling with rage, grabs little Richard and begins lashing him with whatever’s at hand — a garden hose, a dog leash, and finally, savagely, the bicycle chain. This is why GM should fail. MORE »