Who? He retired, so perhaps The Kids Today are unaware of who he is. Shame, he's a funny guy, just ask him.
Let's start with where he was 10 years ago
Like many of our top 10 wankers from the last decade, Cohen slowly faded from relevance. So much so that I wondered if he had said much of anything worth remarking on during this decade. I grabbed the trusty google and OH MY GOD HOLY SHIT the man kept wanking all the way through to the end of his career. Deserves some credit for stamina, at least.
A running theme through all of these is how most of these people mattered way too much until, well, they didn't. Still cranking out their column per week, but mostly just farting in the wind. One could get outraged at Maureen Dowd, for example, from 1999-2009 or so, because for reasons too horrific to comprehend, what she wrote mattered. Cohen, too, once upon a time. Extra troubling for those two in particular because in the taxonomy of The Discourse, those two are/were "liberals."But back to Cohen. He didn't stop wanking, and searching through my blog archives, I realize I didn't entirely stop paying attention.
A reminder, from 2013, that "we" keep having the same racism-advertised-as-realism and fact free "urban" crime scares over and over.
I don’t like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don’t know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.Cohen has a long history of arguing that people are perfectly correct to be scared of black people and to react violently because black people are, after all, black.
Then there was the time that our great philosoper of race discovered that slavery was bad after seeing a movie.
I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance…slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children."For instance…slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks." Cohen was about 72 years old when he wrote that. Have to go with the "christ his editor fucking hates him" theory for that actually getting into print.
He also gave us this:
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.Though that was 9 years, and people are trotting out the same arguments now about the current LGBT backlash, so perhaps our funny man is just a product of his class, mostly bigoted conservatives wearing liberal smiley face hats. Racist more in sorry than in anger. They made me be racist.
One of the final contributions from this great liberal lion was defending the Central Park 5 prosecutor arguing, essentially, sure they might not have done it but they were black and they probably did something! For "liberal" white guys of a certain age, from Trump to Cohen, the Central Park 5 story is sort of their founding mythology and you will not take that away from them. It was their permission slip to go full racist again after holding back just a tiny bit.
As I said recently, I don't know how you be a responsible employer when the guy at one desk is looking over at his black colleague at the next desk while writing columns about how if black people don't want to get arrested for crimes they didn't commit, they should just stop going where white people can see them.
Similarly, you can't have a nondiscriminatory workplace when you're pushing out columns like "Are trans people even people?" and "Are gay people all filthy grooming perverts? It's complicated."
Just asking kweschins!
Pareene had some more, in 2013, if you can't get enough!
Also, fuck you, Richard Cohen, for actually making me do some work for this entry! Why did you have to keep on wanking for almost a whole extra decade!
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