Moving Past the Cosby (Side) Show.....

A few weeks ago I read an article in which a journalist was questioning why rape criticisms against Bill Cosby didn't get much media attention. The accusations have been percolating since the mid-1980's and many people were aware of the accusations, although not necessarily the full details. Now they charges have broken through into mainstream public consciousness, and they're all over the media.

The media deserves no award for bravery, coming to the story this late in the game. Whatever excuses may have existed in the past, it is difficult to see the story as anything but the media's siding with the rich and powerful up to the point that the story penetrated the public consciousness -- by virtue of a comedian's accusations against Cosby going viral. While some in the media are offering some introspection, and you'll find an occasional mea culpa, the intensity of the present coverage seems to me to reflect another failure of the media, its tendency to shine a spotlight on an issue of current controversy or debate in order to try to grab as many viewers or readers as possible, even if that means tending toward the salacious or missing the forest for the trees.

Dare I suggest, I think there is a very big forest out there, covering the same time period as the accusations against Cosby, and that the media is continuing to protect the wealthy and powerful.

A few years ago in the U.K., a series of stories broke about a deceased entertainer who, as it turned out, was a serial child molester. If you even scrape the surface of the story, you hit the same sort of issue you encountered in the Jerry Sandusky case -- acts that were sufficiently brazen and careless that they ended up being witnessed by others, but with the decision made not to involve the police. Not to kill the golden goose, or tarnish the image of his employer, but to cover up. The accusations against Cosby are similar to those made against Roman Polanski, except Cosby is alleged to have targeted adults.

Corey Feldman has indicated that, as teen stars, he and Corey Haim were targeted by predatory adults. You don't have to look very hard to find "casting couch" stories in which young actresses, and some young actors, found themselves in awkward situations with people -- usually unnamed -- who were trying to obtain sexual favors in exchange for a part, or other help advancing their careers. Sometimes when a story breaks about a predatory individual it's immediately apparent that his predilections were widely known, and widely ignored. Australian entertainer Rolf Harris, accused of sexually assaulting teenaged girls, earned himself the nickname "the Octopus". An Australian news journalist recounts,

Rolf Harris was known as “the Octopus”. But he wasn’t the only one.

During 25 years in television, I was warned by colleagues about dozens of stars who would grope, molest or harass anyone who took their fancy.

These include a presenter who is a household name.

An example is given of how that nationally famous news presenter sexually groped a female employee as recently as two years ago, but his identity is withheld. The article identifies only two sexual offenders, both of whom had already been publicly identified by others and one of whom had been criminally convicted.

I stumbled across a letter written in response to a Richard Cohen column,

Richard Cohen wrote in his Nov. 18 op-ed column, “None of our business,” that the sexual misbehavior of a “great man” should go unpublished. I disagree.

A man who believes in his own greatness may feel he is exempt from rules of honorable behavior that apply to others. That belief reveals a possibly dangerous arrogance in his character.

Sure, the press can go overboard with scandal, and as a former reporter and journalism teacher, I deplore that. But as a woman, I’d like to know if a so-called great man lies to his wife and uses women as sex objects. I may vote for him anyway when weighing that knowledge against his other attributes, but I’ll see him more clearly as imperfect and flawed, and most certainly avoid calling him “great.”

The column is about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the FBI smear campaign against him,

I did not know at the time [in 1964] about King’s affairs. I learned about them later, once the FBI bugs of King’s home and hotel rooms had become common knowledge in newsrooms around the country. But here’s the thing: No one printed a word of it. I know of no item in a gossip column and, since celebrity TV junk was still in the future, nothing on the air either. Lots of people knew the secret, but the press in those days respected the privacy of public figures: King was saved from ignominy. He was preserved for greatness.

Cohen also mentions Gary Hart, FDR, JFK, Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Lyndon Johnson, Anthony Weiner.... For the most part, examples that involve consensual extramarital relationships. Jefferson's case is particularly discomfiting -- you can't have a consensual relationship with a slave, although contemporary knowledge of the affair might have offended more people based upon her race than upon the fact that it was an extramarital affair or involved a profoundly coercive power dynamic.

Cohen's complaint also is of another time. Gary Hart brought to an end the era in which you could be an unapologetic skirt chaser and still aspire to national office. Senator Bob Packwood helped end the era in which powerful politicians could do whatever they wanted to their employees behind closed doors -- and, if you recall, he threatened to take down other politicians who he claimed had committed acts comparable to his own, before choosing instead to exit politics and enrich himself by becoming a lobbyist.

I find it difficult to be wistful for an era in which the powerful could easily abuse the weak, even in a nominally consensual adult-to-adult relationship. It may be that media coverage of politicians' sexual peccadilloes has the unfortunate effect of causing somebody with non-abusive tendencies to either stay out of politics or to lose an election, but I think there is nonetheless a significant net benefit. We have enough sociopaths and narcissists at the head of government and industry without also giving them -- restoring to them -- free reign to sexually abuse their underlings. In the current era, MLK would know that if he didn't control himself with women he would almost certainly be held accountable in the court of public opinion. It would be up to him to decide if it was worth the risk. It should not be the media's job to protect him from himself, let alone to "protect" us from knowing the truth.

We have had an evolution in our society over the past fifty years, relating to how we treat sexual abusive conduct and how we respond to sexual harassment in the workplace. The improvement has come not only through improved legal remedies for victims of abuse, but through the publicity surrounding abuse cases. There is a valuable social lesson to be learned from stories about abusers being held accountable for their conduct, both in terms of helping other victims of abuse feel less isolated and in letting them know that legal remedies are available.

It's really easy, alarmingly easy, to rally to the defense of the rich and powerful with little risk to your professional reputation. There's certainly a lot more risk in taking on the rich and powerful, and more difficulty in convincing your publication's lawyers to let you push a story into the public consciousness. I find it difficult to give a reporter or commentator credit for ignoring an open secret for years or decades, only to jump onto the story when it is finally broken by others, even if they admit that they should have addressed the story earlier or that the media failed to properly handle the allegations.

If journalists or commentators want to convince me that they're actually sorry to have not covered the story at an earlier time, or that they want to improve their profession, I suggest that they start covering some of the other "open secrets" about our business, entertainment and political figures and celebrities, rather than again waiting until they can safely and easily jump onto the bandwagon.

The Relative Value of a College Education

Richard Cohen reacts to his perception that people today are too concerned with the economics of college, and shares his perception of the college education he received back in the 1960's,

I apply my own set of metrics to my college education. I met some wonderful people, particularly fellow students who were so much more sophisticated and worldly than I was. I had some great teachers, one of whom became a mentor and taught me how to suffer criticism. (I’m still suffering.) Whole worlds opened up to me — philosophy, which I never would have read had I not been forced to; the clotted verses of Chaucer; and, of course, the aforementioned anthropology, both cultural and physical. The latter had me going from desk to desk. Upon each was placed a human skull. I had to determine the sex, the race and the age.

I went five for five. This is not the kind of thing you’re likely to do on the job. I came of age when jobs were plentiful and college not exorbitantly expensive. I graduated with debt, but it was manageable, and I set off to do something I loved — journalism. I had tried my hand at it in college. I know things have changed and I do not dismiss today’s economic conditions. But I tell you this — college made me a happier person. I don’t know what that’s worth in dollars, but I know what it is worth to me: everything.

Whatever his intention, I do think that Cohen fails to give sufficient weight to today's economic conditions. Tuition costs have soared since the 1960's, and pursuing a graduate degree in journalism at an elite university is the sort of pursuit of a dream that is likely to leave you underemployed and struggling to pay off your student loans. Cohen writes that his decision to go to college wasn't about money, but it didn't need to be. But a few decades earlier the type of college experience Cohen describes was a luxury few could afford, and a few decades later it is again increasingly becoming a luxury. Cohen states that he might have become an insurance salesman had he not gone to college, and might have become more wealthy by virtue of that choice. He also could have returned to the insurance industry after college had his journalism career not panned out, as his debt load did not define his choices.

I recognize and value the four year college experience, the opportunity (if you choose to take it) to learn subjects to which you might not otherwise be exposed, to have your ideas challenged and tested, to learn a subject in depth. But the shift toward "But will my degree help me get a job that pays a decent wage," or "Might I not be a lot better off if I instead learn a trade, find work that does not require a degree, or find some other path toward a career," are not manifestations of a shallow rejection of those values in favor of economics. They're a reflection of the reality that it's not much fun to spend a large amount of money (not to mention opportunity costs) to get a degree that might not only be insufficient to help you get a job, but could also leave you with a huge amount of non-dischargeable debt yet without the means to pay it off.

If you want to help today's college students and you value the four year college experience, rather than suggesting that students are somehow wrong or shallow to consider the economics of a degree program, it would be helpful to instead focus on how we can improve the economics of college -- how we can shift the cost-benefit analysis back to where it was when Cohen was able to attend college on the cheap with a wide range of job opportunities upon graduation. If we find that we cannot move the economics of college back in that direction, while we can continue to value the four-year college degree, we should also recognize that we're talking about a luxury that fewer and fewer people will be able to enjoy.

Race in America and the Beam in Michael Gerson's Eye

Michael Gerson complains that, in his recent speech on the Trayvon Martin shooting, the President didn't offer meaningful solutions to the problems of race and racism in American society. Gerson dismisses the criticism from some of his Republican peers, that the President who "attacked Obama for being 'divisive' and for injecting race into the Trayvon Martin debate", then continues,

The opposite criticism is more serious — that Obama has missed opportunities over the years to talk about race in a compelling and personal way. It is the unavoidable American issue. At one point, a third of all human beings in the South were owned by another human being. For a century beyond slavery, Jim Crow laws enforced a racial caste system. The election of an African American president — born three years before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — is a wonder of national healing and historical compression. Who can argue that we have heard too much from Obama on this topic? For five years, he strategically downplayed the reality of his own miracle.

The "reality of his own miracle"? In another context, Gerson's "miracle" might be that our society has evolved so quickly since the 1960's that the President's race was a marginal factor in his election. In the context of Gerson's column, though, the "miracle" is that the President was twice elected despite the continuing level of racism and racial divisiveness within the United States.

I tried to find out how Gerson responded to the Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and, although I found that Gerson had referred to Chief Justice Roberts as displaying "judicial arrogance", that was over his vote upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), not over his platitudinous statements on race issues such as, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race". It's interesting to me that a tax ruling caused Gerson to sound off like an overheated tea kettle, but Roberts' shrugging off racism as a continuing issue in society didn't seem to inspire him to so much as raise an eyebrow,¹ particularly given his explicit rejection of the notion that we're now living in a racially equal society:

Having finally engaged the issue of race, Obama drew the correct policy implication. Social divisions are deepest when it comes to African American boys and young men: often betrayed by schools, abandoned by fathers, treated with suspicion, unable to find jobs, wandering through dysfunctional neighborhoods, locked in prison in vast numbers and denied basic civil rights (such as voting) for the rest of their lives. Obama has a unique standing to address the challenges of minority youth. As a young man, he was prone to trouble and might have easily gotten enmeshed in an unforgiving legal system. The president can effectively argue that first impressions are not always correct and that second chances are sometimes necessary.

Giving credit where credit is due, at times George W. Bush spoke inclusively. He did not focus on traditional race issues, but was clearly interested in leading his party toward the greater involvement of minorities, made sometimes clumsy statements about Islam that were intended to diminish anti-Muslim sentiments, and at least once spoke inclusively of atheists. Gerson may have authored some of those lines. However, by any measure including word and deed, Obama has done far better.

Gerson complains about the President's policy proposals,

But Obama’s speech deserves this criticism: Its policy proposals — training police, reconsidering “stand your ground” laws, more community dialogue and “soul-searching” — were weak. It was as though the administration’s policy apparatus had never really considered the matter before — that it was somehow ambushed by America’s most obvious policy challenge.

Let me interject that the fact that the President proposes certain measures that might prevent a young black male, armed only with skittles, from arousing the suspicions of an armed self-annointed protector of the neighborhood, does not mean that he might not propose additional measures if he were broadly addressing the issue of race across society. Gerson's complaint is actually that the President spoke about the Trayvon Martin case without turning the speech into a broad narrative on race relations. Perhaps the President should give such a speech, but Gerson offers no challenge to the President's explanation of why he chose a different approach:

There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have. On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there's the possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.

Frankly, Gerson need only look at the racial demagoguery of his Republican peers to know that the President is correct.

Gerson's suggestions for policy proposals that the President should have included in the speech, I think, betray the fundamental weakness of his position:

The problem of African American boys and young men is a complex mix of lingering racial prejudice, urban economic dislocation, collapsing family structure, failing schools and sick, atomized communities. But is there really nothing practical that can be done? How about providing family supports — mentoring, fatherhood initiatives, teen pregnancy prevention and removing the Earned Income Tax Credit penalty for married couples? How about strong accountability measures to close the educational achievement gap instead of granting waivers that lower standards? How about support for faith-based institutions that reclaim lives from gangs? How about prison reform, so that mandatory minimum sentences are at least reduced? How about expanding substance abuse prevention and treatment, which seem to have fallen off the national agenda?

First, let's be honest, there was nothing particularly "African American" about Trayvon Martin's story, beyond that noted by the likes of Richard Cohen and Geraldo Rivera, which I will unfairly - but not all that unfairly - paraphrase as "He was a black kid in a hoodie, so who wouldn't have wanted to shoot him?" A seventeen year old with divorced parents, acting out at school, smoking pot on occasion, perhaps involved in a petty theft, sent to live with his father because his mother thought he could use a stronger male presence in his life... that's much more an "American story" than an "African American" story. The President's speech addressed the key issues - public perceptions and community attitudes that contribute to the perceptions that caused a guy with a gun to see a kid coming home from a store with a package of Skittles and make a cognitive leap to "F--king punks... These a--holes... They always get away".

Second, had the President followed Gerson's after-the-fact suggestion, Gerson's Republican peers would have merely expanded their list of complaints from "race-baiting" and "divisiveness" to "And now he's trying to get more handouts, more goodies, for his 'base'." Gerson has to know that, and has to know that his peers play a huge role in how, when initiated by a politician - and more so when that politician is Barack Obama - these discussions "end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have."

Third, alas, Gerson's policy proposals range from weak tea to platitudinous. Had the President make such proposals and pretended that they were significant, Gerson would be entirely justified in his complaint. The fact that this, after Gerson's years working with G.W. Bush, years in sinecures with so-called think tanks, and years of writing for the Washington Post, is the best Gerson has highlights how difficult these issues are to actually address in a meaningful manner, let alone solve.

1. "How about providing family supports — mentoring, fatherhood initiatives, teen pregnancy prevention and removing the Earned Income Tax Credit penalty for married couples?" - There is nothing wrong with advocating for "family supports", but Gerson's ideas are neither novel nor helpful. Is Gerson unaware of existing mentoring programs? Is he unaware that live births to teen mothers³ are on the decline? What does he imainge a "fatherhood initiative" to be, and why does he imagine it will have any impact on poverty? What in the world does "removing the Earned Income Tax Credit penalty for married couples" have to do with questions of race, and how does Gerson imagine that it will have a material impact on poverty?

2. "How about strong accountability measures to close the educational achievement gap instead of granting waivers that lower standards?" - Gerson was part of an administration led by a President who touted fraudulent educational statistics as something of a miracle, that he could replicate across the nation. That Administration foisted "No Child Left Behind" on the nation, a program built on the supposed principles that led to Houston's fabricated "miracle", and a decade later the program was a complete failure. The obvious, inherent flaws of NCLB led to a situation in which, but for waivers, very good schools would be classified as "failing" due to their "lack of improvement". Contrary to Gerson's suggestion the Obama Administration has been pushing school reforms that it hopes will be superior to NCLB, but it's not clear that a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to reform will do anything but repeat NCLB's biggest mistakes, effectively diminishing the quality of better schools by focusing on standardized test results, enriching vendors of those standardized tests at the expense of overall school funding, and causing more dedicaated teachers to leave the profession. With Gerson's exposure to the debate, and the failures of NCLB, it's astonishing that he believes that a call for "strong accountability measures to close the educational achievement gap" is an actual policy proposal and not an exhausted platitude from his early tenure with the Bush Administration.

3. "How about support for faith-based institutions that reclaim lives from gangs?" - Say what?

4. "How about prison reform, so that mandatory minimum sentences are at least reduced?" - While acknowledging the high rates of incarceration and contact with the criminal justice system for our society as a whole, and how much worse the numbers are for minority populations, I would like to see Gerson flesh out this idea: What crimes should have shorter sentences, how much shorter should those sentences be, and how will that have a material impact on race or poverty? For example, I've seen kids who are repeatedly caught selling drugs get ridiculous sentences as habitual offenders, and those sentences seem to me to be an absurd use of tax dollars and counter-productive to integrating those young men back into productive society, but shortening those sentences to something more reasonable isn't going to have any material impact on the economic plight of their communities. The fact that long sentences don't meaningfully deter drug trafficking, particularly street dealing, suggests that the underlying problem is economic.

5. "How about expanding substance abuse prevention and treatment, which seem to have fallen off the national agenda?" - No objection from me, but why is Gerson of the belief that drug abuse is primarily a problem of race or of the inner cities?

Also what, in any of Gerson's ideas, would have influenced the type of thought process that automatically translates "black teenager in a hoodie" into "danger to the community"?

I am going to assume that Gerson means well, that he's not just concern trolling, but that of itself raises questions. If it's so easy for a President to stand before a microphone and heal racial and ethnic divides, why is it that those divisions seemed to expand under the tenure of his former boss? Surely that was not what Gerson and his fellow speechwriters intended when penning speeches for G.W. - if it's as easy as Gerson suggests to "drive and shape a policy debate" through grand Presidential speeches, why did we at best tread water on these issues, even as Bush called for tolerance, pushed NCLB and faith-based initiatives, and the like?

My suggestion to Gerson is this: As you're a partisan Republican, you should spend less time worrying about what the President is not saying in his speech, and spend more time thinking about what the politicians of your party are or are not saying in theirs. Seriously - as much as I would like to believe that the President has a magical power to give a few speeches and move the country toward a post-racial ideal, I think it would actually be much more powerful and much more constructive if we instead heard those speeches come from the mouths of prominent, right-wing Republicans and their party leaders.⁴
------------------
1. Although there is a possibility that his employer's website has a flawed search engine, an "advanced search" on the Washington Post website starting with Jan. 1, 1987, turned up no articles by Michael Gerson that even mention "affirmative action".

2. November 3, 2004, "I will be your president regardless of your faith... And if they choose not to worship, they're just as patriotic as your neighbor."

3. Given that Gerson apparently believes that teen parenthood has a dramatic, negative impact on the welfare of children and communities, one wonders if he's willing to reconsider his opposition to reproductive freedom - provision of contraception to teenagers, the morning after pill, access to safe, affordable abortion, and the like. Does he continue to hold that allowing access to abortion "seems like addressing poverty by doing away with the poor; like fighting disease by getting rid of those with diseases" - and if so, how does he reconcile that with his own argument that we need to reduce or eliminate pregnancies among poor teenagers?

4. Even better, House Republicans can pass legislation moving those ideas from concept to reality. [And then I woke up.]

Richard Cohen May Not Be a Racist....

But he faces a bigger problem, in that he's not very smart.

What O.J. Simpson did was wrong. It was not, by verdict of his peers, a crime.

Of course he wrote "Zimmerman", but the logic behind the assertion is the same, as it would be if he said "Casey Anthony" or "Michael Jackson". Cohen is not alone in confusing a verdict of "not guilty" both with a declaration of innocence and with an expression about what conduct constitutes a crime. He's been around more than long enough to know better.

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.

My father wears a hoodie. As he recovers from his knee replacement surgery, I hope he doesn't bump into Zimmerman lest "the uniform" make poor Georgie afraid that he's going to get clobbered with a cane. The part that Cohen omits from his statement, "wearing a uniform we all recognize", is that the uniform isn't "wearing a hoodie" - it's "wearing a hoodie while black". And while I'll do my best to take Cohen at his word, for most people who are making similar statements about Trayvon Martin I'm not sure how important the hoodie is to the uniform.

A few years ago one organization or another ran a public service ad in which a black youth and his friends go to a store, and the storekeeper is intimidated by their appearance. The commercial concludes with one of the youths approaching the storekeeper, who is anticipating that it might be a robbery, slaps his money on the counter, thanks the storekeeper and leaves. It was meant to remind the Cohens, Zimmermans, and even those made less nervous about young black men in "uniform" that they should not assume the worst based upon wardrobe and skin color. And that's fair enough. The fashion choices of youths can be confusing to us older folk. If you want to dress in a manner reminiscent of a street thug, people are going to make assumptions about you and your boisterous friends. And sometimes it's fun to have people make assumptions.

But Martin? We know exactly what his "uniform" looked like the day he died - if you want to see it, you can click through to the image from this page. Frankly, as I look at that picture I have a very hard time continuing to take Cohen at his word. (Watch out, dad - your hoodie is scarier than Trayvon's.) To me it looks like the sort of thing you might pull on if the weather was a bit chilly, a bit drizzly and you wanted to be warm. But between the hoodie and the white skinny jeans, Cohen sees a scary "uniform". Cohen attempts to restore my faith in him:

Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime.

Wait... I thought this was about a uniform... about hoodies. So... perhaps what Cohen means is that he gets scared when he sees young black men, and thus believes everybody else should either follow his lead and invest heavily in Depends undergarments, or follow Zimmerman's lead and buy a gun.

In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

In New York City there are about 8.2 million people. By Cohen's measure, that's a bit over two million African Americans, so let's say 1 million African American males of various ages. There were 414 homicides in New York City in 2012. As of December 28, 2012 there had been 1,353 shootings that year. Cohen says that 78% of the suspects were African American, so that means roughly 1,055 shootings. So, assuming that nobody was a suspect in more than one shooting, roughly a 0.1% chance that an African American male in New York city was a suspect in a shooting. Or... whatever "young black males" means... maybe that bumps it up to 0.3%? That's Cohen's statistical case for his apparent fear that he's going to get shot by every young black man he passes in the street?

Oh, but it gets better,

Those statistics represent the justification for New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk.

Cohen seems to believe that all shootings in New York City are random. That is, young black men are carrying guns around and, for no good reason, might 'pop a cap' into a random New York Times columnist. A better columnist might have looked at the statistical result of stop and frisk.... a roughly zero percent impact on the number of shootings in the city. Needless to say, shooting incidents are not evenly distributed throughout the city - "they are closely associated with larger geographic crime patterns". In 2011, 43% of criminal shooting incidents occurred in Brooklyn, and just shy of 29% in Bronx. My guess is that if Cohen manages to avoid getting involved in drug deals, or walking through high crime neighborhoods alone at night while flashing the type of watch that has historically been among his obsessions (even then, with there being a high probability that he would still have his watch at the end of his jaunt, and virtually no chance that he would be shot), he's pretty safe.

Still, common sense and common decency, not to mention the law, insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior. Even still, race is a factor, without a doubt. It would be senseless for the police to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.

I'm curious about something. How would Cohen propose that the police could tell, simply by looking at somebody, that the person is from Denmark? What about these folks? Wait - I get it - they're not wearing hoodies, right?

Cohen presents the... factually challenged claim,

Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment. Everything else is discussed — and if it isn’t, there’s a Dr. Phil or an Oprah saying that it should be. Crime, though, is different. It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life. We all know about it and take appropriate precaution but keep our mouths shut.

There are only 130,000,000 hits on Google for "role of race in crime", and a mere 2.4 million hits on Google News - clearly this is something nobody talks about.

Cohen rambles,

If I were a young black male and were stopped just on account of my appearance, I would feel violated. If the police are abusing their authority and using race as the only reason, that has got to stop. But if they ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work.

So kids shouldn't be suspected of being criminals merely because they're black - but in the name of "common sense and common decency" we should "insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior". Thus, Cohen is able to conclude,

There’s no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy — the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason.

Understandably suspected of what? If it defies "common sense and common decency" to have suspected Trayvon Martin of criminal activity merely because he was young and black, what is it that Cohen believes constitutes the "other variables such as suspicious behavior" that Zimmerman saw to immediately make him think of Martin as a "f---ing punk" and an "asshole" of the type who "always gets away"?

Oh, that's right. The hoodie.

The Easiest (But Least Useful) Thing to Do About Syria is to Complain About Obama

These days, it's difficult to escape hearing lectures directed at the Obama Administration about what it should do in Syria. Many of the critiques, even by well-meaning and reasonably well-informed individuals, amount to little more than wishful thinking. And of course, there are the fire-breathing partisans who simply want to attack the Obama Administration. On Real Time last week, Niall Ferguson issued a frothy attack on the Obama Administration's record on conflicts in the Middle East while fastidiously ignoring the repeated question of what the Obama Administration should have done. I heard one critic claiming that a year or so ago it would have been possible to support a democratic revolution in Syria, but now the groups fighting Assad are all Islamist - which raises two obvious responses, the first being that if a democratic movement is that easy to squelch it didn't have much of a chance to begin with, and if we're talking about the same groups simply modifying their stated agenda in order to get support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia it's questionable whether they actually supported what we think of as democracy in the first place.

My eye was drawn for some reason to the latest anti-Obama harangue from Richard Cohen, a man who personifies the low-hanging fruit. It's almost embarrassing to pick apart his nonsense, like debating foreign policy with a kindergarten class, but... how to resist. Cohen sneers,

The president is the master of the muddle. He concocted a doozy in Afghanistan when he announced a surge and a date of withdrawal — a marriage and a divorce at the same time.

The think that Cohen should try to remember is that there's a difference between a policy that is "muddled" and one that he is not capable of understanding. Cohen is among those who don't understand that a "surge" is supposed to be a short-term escalation followed by withdrawal, not a long-term escalation with no end date. If you have no plan to end your "surge" then it's simply an escalation. Beyond that, why shouldn't the Obama Administration project an end-date for the longest war in American history, particularly when it seems clear that Afghan factions won't negotiate in good faith while the occupation continues. It may well be that things fall apart after we depart, but unless there's a reason to believe that prolonging the occupation will have a beneficial effect all we're doing is delaying the inevitable - at considerable cost. I understand that Cohen is not a man who cares about the cost of military action that he supports, whether in dollars or human cost, and that he may not even think about the cost, but those responsible for safeguarding the nation and ensuring that we have an effective military don't share his luxury of treating global conflict like an epic session of World of Warcraft, in which losses are measured in bits and pixels.

There's also something else Cohen doesn't seem to grasp about foreign occupation: people don't like it. Even if you can make the convincing case that your military intervention was a good thing, and liberated the people - and even if the people agree with that initial assessment - they want you gone. If it needs to be said, prolonged occupation is not good for relationships with the locals.

Cohen lectures,

For opponents of U.S. intervention in Syria, the instructive precedent is the Iraq fiasco. But that has so little in common with the Syrian situation they may as well cite the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua of early last century and the ultimate victory of the guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino. The more apt comparison is the 78-day NATO bombing campaign in 1999 that ended the bloodshed in Bosnia — and cost not a single American life. (Another apt comparison is Libya where, once again, no American boots were put on the ground and U.S. combat deaths were zero.)

And do you know why, to Cohen, the latter examples are instructive when the former are not? Because (a) he doesn't know spit about the conflicts he's describing (for starters, he's confusing the Kosovo and Bosnia interventions, and seems unaware of the military activity that occurred on the ground) and (b) he's cherry-picking examples that suggest that the U.S. can enter a civil war and achieve its objectives at a minimal cost - like we're playing a live action video game. Cohen doesn't explain why he believes that Bosnia is a better example, nor why the outcome in that region (century-old ethnic rivalries ignited, and a small nation shattered into several tiny nations) would be desirable in Syria. Or perhaps he imagines that a bombing campaign would somehow cause Syria's ethnic and tribal factions to unify? Cohen won't even hear about ethnic or tribal issues, sneering, "The weary recitation of all these ethnicities suggests a colonial-era mentality: those bloody people and their bloody behavior." As if dropping the word "colonial" somehow erases ethnic and tribal tensions from reality - and never mind that he, himself, made one of those "weary recitations" only a few days ago, "I have always recognized the difficulties of any intervention in Syria and the hideous ethnic complexities of the place".

Cohen huffs,

The operative philosophy is that you do what you can when you can. The United States has the muscle. There are few grander causes than the saving of human life.

Apparently our bombs don't kill people. Cohen has lectured his readers that it's "cold-hearted" not to... I guess it's "do something" in Syria, because there's a humanitarian need. And that would be great, if we knew up front that the cure wouldn't be worse than the disease. We helped the Afghan people liberate themselves from Mohammad Najibullah. They ended up with the Taliban. Cohen seems to think that all bloodshed will end the moment the civil war ends. Not to get all "colonial" about it, but there's good cause to believe that absent a significant outside military presence the civil war will be followed at best by ethnic cleansing and at worst by ugly reprisals of the sort he might recall from Lebanon... if he knew any history. Don't just take my word for it,

Mamoun al-Homsy, a former Syrian MP and one of the country’s opposition leaders, has reportedly recently distributed a recorded message to the Alawite community in Syria, in which he warns its members against supporting Assad.

In the message, al-Homsy called on the Alawites to immediately renounce Assad, warning them that if they do not do so, “Syria will become the graveyard of the Alawites.”

He also stressed that Syria’s Sunni Muslims “will not remain silent” over Assad’s crimes, adding that they intend to abide by the rule of “an eye for an eye” and will “teach you (Alawites) a lesson that you will not forget.”

Moving back to Cohen's opening paragraph,

I have written so many columns about the Syrian civil war they are like rings on a tree stump — a way of gauging Barack Obama’s steadfast inaction and what the cost has been. In one of my first columns about that war, I called on the administration to arm the rebels and impose a no-fly zone, grounding Bashar al-Assad’s attack helicopters and his airplanes. At that point — March 27, 2012 — the war had taken the lives of 10,000 Syrians.

For Cohen to relate the discussion back to his first demonstration of ignorance reveals little more than how wise the Obama Administration is to ignore him, even if it causes him to write an occasional angry missive about how they're not showing him the respect he deserves. Does Cohen understand that Syria built its air defenses using Russian technology to defend against an Israeli military? It's not that the U.S. cannot defeat Syrian air defenses - it's that doing so will involve considerable risk, and will necessarily involve bombing targets throughout the country, including in densely populated areas. Even Cohen must know better than to lecture, "Somebody like Assad would never endanger civilians by building air defenses that cannot be taken out without bombing civilian neighborhoods." But then, he seems to believe that bombs don't kill people, so... who knows what he thinks.

More than that, Cohen is ignorant of the fact that Syria is not dependent on aircraft and, just as in Libya, there's no reason to believe that a cumbersome, expensive no-fly zone would create a significant shift in favor of anti-Assad forces. Were Cohen aware of the history of U.S. actions in Libya, he would be aware that the Obama Administration rejected the simple imposition of a no-fly zone because they did not believe that it would result in Qadaffi's defeat. Cohen has incredible faith in no-fly zones because... he imagines them to have a much more impressive history of affecting the outcome of regional conflicts than history in fact indicates. The no-fly zone in Iraq was in effect for a decade and, while preserving the status quo, did not remove Hussein from power nor weaken his ability to maintain control without a full-scale U.S. invasion.

And this magic wish, "Let's arm the rebels" - if it were easy to find rebels worthy of being armed, it would be a no-brainer. As it's not, the only no-brainer in the discussion is again Richard Cohen. There's a reason Israel is fastidiously refusing to publicly take sides in the conflict, and it's not because they want Assad to win or because they don't care about the outcome. In the early column he references, Cohen purports that a rebel victory "would be a boon to Israel". If he's capable, perhaps Cohen should ponder for a while why Israel doesn't seem to share his opinion. Perhaps as part of that consideration, he can ponder the Pentagon estimate that it would take 75,000 ground troops to ensure that Syria's chemical weapons arsenal - which is highly portable and highly distributed - does not fall into the wrong hands.

Here's a thought that should be obvious, even to Cohen: If there were good, easy choices to be made to end this conflict, we wouldn't be wrestling with how to avoid turning an already big mess into a bigger mess. If the sort of magic solution that ends the conflict, replaces Assad's regime with a more forward-thinking, inclusive government, and prevents humanitarian catastrophe were easy, the world would have already implemented that solution. Instead, the only part of the conflict that's easy is to sit at the sidelines with little knowledge of the region, its history or the facts on the ground and complain, "The Administration's not doing things the way I would."

Richard Cohen's Squishy Moral Relativism

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

- Benjamin Franklin

"I am torn between my desire for absolute security and my abhorrence of torture."

- Richard Cohen

Alas, poor Richard Cohen, having spent many years thinking (to the best of his ability) about torture, and writing columns about torture, he just can't figure out where he stands:

As with the famous ink blots developed by Swiss psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach, some people look at the film and conclude that torture works, others conclude that it doesn’t, still others think the movie advocates torture, while some — and now we have gotten to me — don’t know what to think. I am implacably opposed to torture... unless it can save lives.

I oppose taxes, unless they're necessary to fund the government. I oppose vaccinations, unless they're necessary to prevent disease. Can you get more squishy?

Cohen is grateful that the film, Zero Dark Thirty, has started a debate over torture. This isn't like during the Bush Administration, when people were debating the definitions and use of torture in response to the actions of our own government. Our government has, after all, determined that torture is not a sufficiently effective tool for gathering actionable intelligence, and thus has abandoned the use of torture in favor of what it has determined to be better methods of intelligence gathering. No, that silly old debate didn't resolve anything, but now there's a movie!

Cohen speaks of "three senators [with] access to highly classified information... [who as] a group [] are a somber lot" taking the position that torture does not work. He elaborates,

Still, others have taken the same position. Journalists with no access to classified information but with access to people who possess that information insist that (1) torture doesn’t work and (2) it did not lead to the killing of bin Laden. Okay, point taken.

Apparently, to Richard Cohen, there is no difference between asserting, "point taken" versus "point not taken", because to him the important question is no longer whether torture "works", but whether torture is "moral". The concept of the lesser of two evils? Apparently that's not a concept that Cohen has ever encountered.

Is it immoral to waterboard someone who knows of an imminent Sept. 11-type attack? Wouldn’t it instead be immoral not to do everything in your power to avoid the loss of thousands of lives? Torture in that case might be hideous, repugnant and in some rarefied way still immoral, but I could certainly justify it.

In other words, who cares about the "real world" - Cohen has seen movies and TV shows in which bad guys are tortured into confessing their secrets seconds before nuclear bombs explode, with the good guys defusing the bomb just before the countdown timer reaches "zero", and if good guys do it on TV it can't be immoral!

The phrase "it depends" has been chased from our political life — a sign of feared wishy-washiness, which is, crucially, bad for TV ratings.

And yet it's TV shows and action movies, built to get those ratings, structured around simplistic plot lines and countdown timers, that inform Cohen's views. Does it matter that he can't find anybody "in the know" to tell him that torture "works"? Not in the slightest. He just wants somebody to admit that if we assume that torture can work in a fanciful, action movie scenario, there's moral ambiguity when the hero uses torture to elicit crucial information from a cartoon villain.

Cohen wants to engage in a dangerous form of moral relativism, the type that naturally extends to "If they do it, it's wrong, but if we do exectly the same thing it's an act of good because our motives are pure." He doesn't understand the difference between when something is morally justifiable and when it is moral. "If it saves a lot of lives" isn't sufficient - resorting to what appears to be Cohen's greatest source of moral influence, the motion picture, let's borrow from Batman and imagine The Joker is threatening to blow up Manhattan unless somebody shoots Richard Cohen in the head. Would it become moral to shoot Richard Cohen in the head? ("Ah, but I'm an innocent," Richard Cohen might protest, which under his theory of morality is beside the point. If it's "in your power to avoid the loss of thousands of lives" then it's "immoral not to do everything in your power to avoid the loss of thousands of lives", right?)

Cohen is also concerned that if the government bans torture, then people detained by the government won't be afraid of being tortured:

But it would be all right with me if the government were silent on torture so that no detainee could be confident of civilized treatment or if, in a crisis, an understandable looking away was permitted. Life ain’t neat.

I'm not sure where he thinks he's going with this. (Actually, I am, but only because I've read beyond this column.) Cohen imagines a nation in which torture is legal, and can be used on any detainee, but in which it is not actually used? Because then detainees will believe that it might be used and will volunteer information rather than risking being legally tortured?

Really, what Cohen is doing is alluding back to an argument he's made in the past, based upon his misunderstanding of the detention and torture of a single individual:

I refer you to the 1995 interrogation by Philippine authorities of Abdul Hakim Murad, an al-Qaeda terrorist who served up extremely useful information about a plot to blow up airliners when he was told that he was about to be turned over to Israel's Mossad.

As Cohen is no longer referring us to Murad, it seems reasonable to infer that somebody has clued him into the fact that the plot was revealed not through the use of torture, but because Murad's computer was overflowing with files detailing every element of the plot. And they may also have clued him into the fact that Murad was subsequently tortured, and that the torture produced no useful information while sending authorities on myriad wild goose chases. What do you do if the one anecdote you use to support your argument turns out not to support your argument? If you're Richard Cohen, it would appear that you continue to make the same argument but stop mentioning the anecdote. Cohen concludes his column by telling us that, thanks to the release of an action movie, "We are getting a robust debate over torture that we should have had years ago". Which is false. We had the same debate years ago and, but for a few details, he wrote the same column years ago. Several times. He also writes, "we are finding out a bit more about it — whether it works and whether it can ever be justified." Those are questions Cohen also asked and answered years ago. For example, on April 28, 2009,

Yet the debate over torture has been infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not. Of course it works -- sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is ticking, that may just be the one time it works.

And on May 12, 2009:

I know how upsetting this will be to some Cheney critics, and I count myself as one, who think -- in respectful paraphrase of what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman -- that everything he says is a lie, including the ands and the thes. Yet I have to wonder whether what he is saying now is the truth -- i.e., torture works.

By September 1, 2009, it was all squish:

The questions of what constitutes torture and what to do with those who, maybe innocently, applied what we now define as torture have to be removed from the political sphere. They cannot be the subject of an ideological tug of war, both sides taking extreme and illogical positions -- torture never works, torture always works, torture is always immoral, torture is moral if it saves lives.

So even back in 2009 Cohen was lecturing us that we should never speak in absolutes, whatever the facts may be. Except back then it was "extreme and illogical" to argue that "torture is moral if it saves lives" whereas now that's his central thesis.

Is the Problem a "Brain Drain" or a Lack of Sincerity

Richard Cohen is shocked that, in his opinion, the level of "talent" among the Republican candidates for the presidential nomination was lacking. His analysis reminds me a bit of how audiences react to Saturday Night Live - during most seasons, you'll hear people complain about how SNL was much funnier when [former cast member] was still on the show. If they're still watching the show three, five, eight years down the line, odds are that they'll be issuing the same lament but naming a member of the current cast. Call it nostalgia.

When Cohen complains about the lack of Republican talent, declaring that Ronald Reagan beat "a future president,... two future Senate majority leaders... and two lesser-known congressmen", he's judging the cast of characters based upon their future résumés, not their qualifications at the time, and is also expressing a degree of nostalgia for a campaign that didn't seem all that impressive at the time.

Cohen's comment reminds me of the critique of the 1988 Democratic Party candidates, "Gary Hart and the seven dwarfs", a list that included a future House Majority Leader and a future Vice President and a number of others who were fundamentally decent men. But easy to make fun of at the time. And hey, why didn't people like Mario Cuomo, Ted Kennedy or Bill Bradley throw their hats in the ring? And let's not overlook the "you gotta be kidding me" candidates like David Duke and Lyndon Larouche. Michele Bachmann's not looking so bad now, is she?

Cohen also seems to want to have it both ways, criticizing candidates for being foolish enough to run after engaging in bipartisanship, dismissing Jon Huntsman as "a former appointee of the Obama administration", and in almost the next breath complaining that candidates felt that they had to cater to the right. Cohen complains, "The list of Republicans who looked at Iowa’s daunting demographics and did not run is more distinguished than those who did", without naming any of the candidates he believes would have been better. He laments "None of these candidates were remotely qualified for the highest office in the land", but doesn't state what he believes to be sufficient qualification, let alone explaining if and how they fail to measure up to past presidential nominees.

He's also convinced that Mitt Romney "espouses extreme positions he does not for a moment believe", but does not provide any evidence that Romney does not in fact believe his present positions. The courtroom cliché, "Were you lying then or are you lying now," comes to mind? How are we supposed to know what Romney believes, and why dos Cohen believe he holds the answers. A column in which Cohen lays out Romney's actual beliefs and presents a convincing case for why the beliefs he describes are the ones Romney actually holds? That would be worth reading.

The focus on personality and presentation reminds me of Cohen's principal criticism of President Obama - that "he's dreadful as a schmoozer". Part of the problem we're seeing is the product of a modern class of commentators who love the horse race aspect of elections, who love being given special access to politicians, being flattered, but treat policy as an afterthought. If you have a national platform and are truly concerned, you can complain about the vapidity of a slate of candidates while the primary is underway. You don't have to wait until large numbers of your fellow commentators are (prematurely) dancing on the casket of the nominee produced by that primary process.

I don't want to dismiss an important element of Cohen's argument, that after decades of holding itself out as the champion of religion and social conservatism, the Republican Party has reached a point where... well, not quite where the inmates run the asylum, but where the groups to whom that pitch is appealing are both demanding results and turning out in force in primaries. It is difficult to pander to those groups while giving a wink to the business community, "we don't really care about that stuff, but we'll take good care of you," while not turning off large numbers of voters who find that level of extremism to be disturbing or those who no longer believe the wink - who believe that if elected you'll cater to the social extremists because they've gained so much power within the party.

At the same time, I can't help but wonder how George Romney would have fared. A man whose credentials were a lot like his son's, but who would likely have approached the race with a sense of humility instead of entitlement, of candor instead of obfuscation. To look at it another way, Mitt Romney is unlikely to carry Michigan, but Michigan twice elected his father as governor, and recently elected a Republican governor who ran on his success in business. But for Romney's past positions on a number of Republican litmus test issues, I think he could have run a far more moderate campaign and prevailed while retaining greater appeal to moderates and swing voters. I may be wrong - and unfortunately it's impossible to test my hypothesis - but I think Romney's biggest problem has nothing to do with a perception that he is not qualified to be President, but is instead the fact that he's widely perceived as a phony.

In four years, assuming Romney loses, Jeb Bush is likely to be running for the nomination. He's likely to be taking a more moderate position on social issues, and to be endorsing a mixture of spending cuts and modest tax increases to balance the budget. I'm not sure that Bush represents some form of secret Republican brain trust, and I see no reason to believe that he has any meaningful qualification for the White House that the better candidates of this year's Republican primaries lacked. But if he's perceived as sincere, and people can sufficiently distance him in their minds from his brother, he has a real shot. Even if he takes a moderate approach on immigration.

What a Surprise

When you skip the droning, Richard Cohen tells us his fundamental problem with President Obama: Obama doesn't spend enough time flattering Cohen and making him feel important.

Here is a man who is supremely gifted as an orator but dreadful as a schmoozer.

Another President Cohen likes,

But Lincoln’s other talent was talking, telling stories, sharing tales — and listening and listening and listening.

Politicians cannot ignore politics, and an ideal politician will be able to work a room as well as Clinton, write a speech as well as Lincoln, and form policy as well as... how far do I have to go back? I have sympathy for the President - I don't have Clinton's gift for glad handing, nor Lincoln's for listening to the endless droning of somebody who has access to me not by virtue of merit, but by virtue of wealth or position, and find that type of encounter to be wearying.

It's great that Cohen wants to feel important, but it's problematic that he does not appear to care about whether or not a President forms good policy as long as the President makes him feel important, returns his calls, and avoids looking bored when listening, and listening, and listening to whatever it is that Cohen wants to say.

Note to David Brooks

David, I sometimes think about writing something like this, but stop myself when I realize that when I write it, that type of humor seems forced. To borrow your inclination to create false dichotomies, there are two types of people in the world, those who refrain from publishing forced humor, and people like you.

Oh, I don't want to be unfair. I realize that your actual goals for the column were to ridicule any who dare question Mitt Romney's glorious perfection, allowing you to conclude with an effusive, over-the-top summary of the glory that is Mitt without having to actually support your claims. But... wow. Even Richard Cohen is funnier than you (and he, also, is nowhere near as funny as he thinks he is. In fact, the funniest thing about him appears to be that he thinks he's funny....)

In Other Words, Obama's Advisors Weren't Roger Cohen?

Roger Cohen usually writes better stuff than this. After acknowledging that President Obama has accomplished quite a lot, despite Republican obstruction, Cohen rattles off a list of issues in which he had hoped the Obama Administration would have taken different action, or in which he disapproves of its initial approach, and complains:

There is only one star in the galaxy at this White House and his name is Barack Obama. Everyone in the Sun King’s court has drunk the Kool-Aid.

The failure of hope, the absence of profound change, has much to do with the Republican obstructionism that has helped keep unemployment above 8 percent. But it is also related to Obama’s refusal to entertain a real team of rivals, to place around him big characters with big ideas who would challenge his instinct for cautious politics and foreign policy. And so a transformative election failed to produce a transformative president.

Cohen complains that he cannot think of an individual on Obama's team that compares to Nixon/Kissinger, Carter/Brzezinski, Reagan/Schultz, or George H. W. Bush/Baker. I think that Cohen only mentions Secretaries of State, along with Cohen's list of complaints, betrays the real issue - Cohen wishes that the Obama administration had taken a different or more forceful tack on certain foreign policy issues. Worse, Cohen argues that Obama did pick somebody who could have replicated that dynamic, but that although "a superb secretary of state" she chose to acquiesce to the White House "for various reasons (her future is very much ahead of her)" - the "various reasons" apparently being Cohen's belief that acquiescence better serves Clinton's future plans.

In short, Cohen's big complaint is that Obama picked a "superb" candidate who, for all he knows, confronts and challenges the President behind-the-scenes, but that he did not fire her for having a lower public profile than, say, Kissinger or Baker, or for taking their disagreements public? More than that, what does Cohen believe would have been accomplished by more public debate, discord or disagreement between Obama and Clinton?

Further, although Cohen gives no credit to Bush, most of the foreign policy issues of which he complains have existed during each of the administrations he mentions. When he complains in relation to Iran of "tired old carrots and sticks", he should stop to consider how the approach got "tired" - we have been at odds with Iran, after all, for decades. If Cohen recalls his history, our relationship with Iran was considerably more rocky under Carter/Brzezinski, when the Shah was toppled and the occupants of the U.S. embassy were taken hostage. Is Cohen joining the advocates for war on Iran, because if not rather than complaining he should be telling us what the Obama Administration could have done that would have fixed a problem that none of the aforementioned dynamic President/Secretary of State duos were able to resolve. Is he advocating a return to the "Nixon/Kissinger" approach of imposing and propping up leaders like the Shah?

Similarly, Cohen complains "half-steps on Israel and Palestine", as if the issue can be resolved in a vacuum. Were things better under "Nixon/Kissinger" when the occupation was permitted to continue indefinitely and the annexation of Palestinian lands began in earnest, or with Egypt's 1973 invasion of the Sinai? Even if that invasion led to the Camp David Accords and a cold peace between Egypt and Israel, did any of the policies of Carter/Brzezinski slow settlements or result in the creation of two states? How about Reagan/Schultz? Did the more aggressive polices of Bush/Baker result in the cessation of Israeli settlement of Palestinian lands? What about the efforts of President Clinton, who is not credited with a "dynamic duo" relationship? Good, bad or indifferent? And if you look at the real world and see Prime Minister Netanyahu in control of the Knesset, a man who has absolutely no interest in negotiating for peace, what is it that Cohen imagines that Obama could do - even if we ignore the fact that Cohen's "dynamic duo" presidencies often accomplished little to nothing, or moved the cause backward, under more favorable circumstances?

Cohen complains, that on "Egypt, [Obama] toyed with preserving Mubarak ad interim before the tide became irreversible." Mubarek became President of Egypt following the assassination of Anwar Sadat back in 1981. Thirty years in power, mostly under Cohen's "dyanmic duo" Presidents. Which of them "toyed" with the idea of removing Mubarek from power?

Cohen's lament continues, "On Syria, he has in essence dithered." As opposed to what? Invading? Seriously, for the complaint to be credible Cohen needs to identify both what a better approach should have been and why it should be better. It's easy to say that Obama has "dithered", but there are very good policy reasons for not increasing the U.S. role in the Syrian conflict. Using a loaded word like "dither" sheds no light on whether or not the Obama Administration is pursuing sound or unsound policy.

Finally, "On Afghanistan, domestic politics dictated the agenda, at a cost in American lives." That's a loaded, conclusory statement, not an argument. When you go to war, whatever your policy, there will be "a cost in American lives". The closest thing Cohen offers to a substantive point is the quote of a former State Department official who complains that the war in Afghanistan should be a "marathon" and not a "sprint" - which implies that Cohen would continue that war indefinitely. Does Cohen believe that an indefinite "marathon" of a war in Afghanistan would carry no "cost in American lives"? Frankly, the line is nothing but a cheap shot.

The most substantive argument Cohen offers is that "Marines will gather at Camp Lejeune, N.C., to receive the [Presidential Unit Citation (PUC)] award ... he should indeed present the award himself". A third of his column is in support of that argument, yet he can find no space to substantiate any of his foreign policy complaints.

There's apparently a possibility that hasn't occurred to Cohen - that the reason Obama and Hillary Clinton don't butt heads on the issues he lists is because, having carefully considered the facts and options, they agree that the present approach is best. No need for secret wars in Cambodia, no benefit in threatening Netanyahu with a loss of loan guarantees, no gain in invading Iran to deal with our disagreement with that nation's government, no need to fantasize that the indefinite occupation of Afghanistan comes at no cost in lives or treasure or will suddenly bring about an enlightened transformation of that nation....

That is, you don't need "Sun Kings" or "Kool-Aid" to recognize that Cohen doesn't necessarily have the better argument on these issues, nor should you overlook the fact that when given the opportunity to write a substantive criticism of the Obama Administration's policies he chose to forgo that approach in favor of a personal attack.

If This Is Ross Douthat's Best... His Best Isn't Good Enough

At least when David Brooks serves the right-wing echo chamber, he attempts to put a creative spin on things - to translate the memo into his own words. If Ross Douthat's stenography is anything to go by, he's well on his way to being every bit as insightful and relevant as Richard Cohen. You have to wonder if he's even thinking about what he says.

Mitt Romney isn’t just wrong on specific policies or too right-wing in general. He’s part Scrooge, part Gordon Gekko; an un-American, Asia-loving outsourcer; a tax avoider and possibly a white-collar felon.

Douthat doesn't believe it's necessary to offer evidence for any of his claims, and it's obviously no coincidence that he's lapping up and repeating every anti-Obama line served up by his party, no matter how outlandish. The tactic of taking a statement by an irrelevant person peripherally associated with the campaign and pretending that the person's isolated statement is an official stance of the campaign? "It's in there." And seriously, Obama's the one claiming Romney is anti-American? Would Douthat have us believe that Romney's pushing back against his party's innuendo that Obama's a corrupt, terrorist-loving, anti-American socialist, who has never held a "real job" and whose only love of capitalism is for the crony variety? Does Douthat care that Romney pushes that dogma, and routlinely dispatches his lapdogs to advance those slanders?

Remember when Mitt Romney released his birth certificate to the media? Douthat doesn't recognize that as a nod to his party's "birthers"? Where can I find a clear and unambiguous statement by Mitt Romney that he disavows birtherism and believes that the President was born in the United States? Not a staffer telling us what Romney believes - Romney actually stating what he believes.

It's one thing to criticize politicians for dirty tactics. It's quite another to play the part of a dim-witted pot calling the kettle black. He pretends that Romney's complacent? Romney's been on board with the dirtiest attacks against Obama from day one. When your candidate sets the tone, sure, complain that the campaign has taken a nasty turn, but when the best campaign tactics your candidate can muster range from the distortion to the outright lie, and his minions routinely make absurd attacks on the President, one thing you cannot claim is that he's "complacent".

Douthat also regurgitates a string of Republican talking points about the President's policies.

Since the campaign kicked off, the president’s domestic policy rhetoric has become much more stridently left-wing than it was during the debt-ceiling debate. He’s dropped all but a pro forma acknowledgment of the tough choices looming in our future, and doubled down on the comforting progressive fantasy that we can close the deficit and keep the existing safety net by soaking America’s millionaires and billionaires.

Douthat knows that's a load of nonsense, which is why he doesn't substantiate his rhetoric with any actual quotes of Obama or positions the President has taken - not even a link. Worse, he knows that if he were to actually share the quotes, not only would people find his polemicism to be absurd, a lot of the people who reflexively nod along with that brand of right-wing prattle would find themselves agreeing with the President. Let's not forget, the Tea Party Movement emerged from an angry backlash against the Wall Street bailout. Let's also not forget that the tax increases Obama proposes are tiny and take us back not to an era of "soaking the rich", but to an era of rapid economic growth during which the rich (as usual) did better than every other economic class. The horror.

I know it's easier - and more profitable - for columnists like Douthat to echo the party line, ignore the facts, support their party's candidate. But when it's done that badly, it's just plain embarrassing.

Update: Predictable as ever, here's Richard Cohen. Douthat wants to be the other side of that coin?

No, the Problem Isn't Gun Control....

Save perhaps to the extent that existing gun laws that are supposed to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill were not adequately applied, perhaps because Jared Loughner managed to avoid diagnosis and treatment. Bob Herbert suggests,

If we were serious, if we really wanted to cut down on the killings, we’d have to do two things. We’d have to radically restrict the availability of guns while at the same time beginning the very hard work of trying to change a culture that glorifies and embraces violence as entertainment, and views violence as an appropriate and effective response to the things that bother us.

Richard Cohen focuses, more accurately, on handguns:

But rather than going on a national guilt trip, we should turn our attention to the one element in this tragedy that can be controlled: easy access to guns. After all, enough ought to be enough. Rifles can kill (John F. Kennedy, for instance), but most homicides committed using firearms - more than 70 percent - are the work of handguns (Robert F. Kennedy, for instance). The handgun is wonderfully effective. It's little and it's lethal.

I say "more accurately" because, back when I lived in Canada, about half of the homes in my province contained firearms but, due to gun control laws, primarily long guns. And although frequently the "Murder Capital of Canada", the city I lived in was actually quite safe. I do recall a double homicide involving a handgun, but the honor of being "murder capital" was earned primarily by virtue of having a relatively low population (it doesn't take many murders to skew the "per capita" statistic), and a subculture that all-too-often brought knives to knife fights.

Do I think Loughner would have been deterred from going on his rampage if he had to shorten the barrel of a shotgun, or learn to shoot with a rifle? No, not really. It's a bit like the argument over his extended magazine. Yes, he was disarmed when trying to reload. Yes, it's possible that had his magazine emptied sooner he would have been disarmed sooner with less carnage. It seems to me that such laws are more apt to make somebody like Loughner modify his plans, as opposed to abandoning them. Arguments about handgun control make more sense when directed at opportunistic crime or robbery of retail stores and banks, where the offender is carrying a gun with profit in mind, than they do when directed at somebody like Loughner.

A Simple Quiz For Richard Cohen

Who said the following, when, and in what context?

• Settling Israelis in administered territory, as is known, contravenes international conventions, but there is nothing essentially new about that.

• Everybody has to move; run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don't grab will go to them.

The first quote is Moshe Dayan, in a 1968 memo proposing massive settlement in the occupied territories. The Second is Ariel Sharon in 1998, displaying concern that a peace deal with the Palestinians might result in the loss of Gaza, before he woke up to the demographic consequences of Israel's territorial claim to that region. For people like Sharon, from the start the purpose of the settlements was to frustrate the peace process and to create "facts on the ground" that would prevent the return of most or all of the occupied territories to a Palestinian state. Richard Cohen appears to understand this, flatly asserting,

[Israel's settlements] are all, under international law, illegal.

So let's move to part two of the quiz. What U.S. Administrations were responsible for each of the following statements, and when were the statements made:

1. The [Government of Israel] is aware of our continuing concern that nothing be done in the occupied areas which might prejudice the search for a peace settlement. By setting up civilian or quasi-civilian outposts in the occupied areas the GOI adds serious complications to the eventual task of drawing up a peace settlement. Further, the transfer of civilians to occupied areas, whether or not in settlements which are under military control, is contrary to Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, which states "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

2. The expropriation or confiscation of land, the construction of housing on such land, the demolition or confiscation of buildings, including those having historic or religious significance, and the application of Israeli law to occupied portions of the city are detrimental to our common interests in [Jerusalem]. The United States considers that the part of Jerusalem that came under the control of Israel in the June war, like other areas occupied by Israel, is governing the rights and obligations of an occupying Power. Among the provisions of international law which bind Israel, as they would bind any occupier, are the provisions that the occupier has no right to make changes in laws or in administration other than those which are temporarily necessitated by his security interests, and that an occupier may not confiscate or destroy private property. The pattern of behavior authorized under the Geneva Convention and international law is clear: the occupier must maintain the occupied area as intact and unaltered as possible, without interfering with the customary life of the area, and any changes must be necessitated by the immediate needs of the occupation.

3. Substantial resettlement of the Israeli civilian population in occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under the convention and cannot be considered to have prejudged the outcome of future negotiations between the parties on the locations of the borders of states by the Middle East. Indeed, the presence of these settlements is seen by my government as an obstacle to the success of the negotiations for a just and final peace between Israel and its neighbors.

4. U.S. Policy toward the establishment of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories is unequivocal and has long been a matter of public record. We consider it to be contrary to international law and an impediment to the successful conclusion of the Middle East peace process.

5. The Reagan Plan states that ‘the United States will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements during the transition period (5 years after Palestinian election for a self-governing authority). Indeed, the immediate adoption of a settlements freeze by Israel, more than any other action, could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks. Further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be fee and fairly negotiated.

6. The United States believes that no party should take unilateral actions that seek to predetermine issues that can only be reached through negotiations. In this regard the United States has opposed, and will continue to oppose, settlement activity in territories occupied in 1967 which remain an obstacle to peace.

7. [T]he settlement enterprise and building bypass roads in the heart of what they already know will one day be part of a Palestinian state is inconsistent with the Oslo commitment that both sides negotiate a compromise.

8. Our position on settlements, I think, has been very consistent, very clear. The secretary expressed it not too long ago. He said settlement activity has severely undermined Palestinian trust and hope, preempts and prejudges the outcome of negotiations, and in doing so, cripples chances for real peace and prosperity. The U.S. has long opposed settlement activity and, consistent with the report of the Mitchell Committee, settlement activity must stop.

The answers? 1. The Johnson Administration, 1968; 2. The Nixon Administration, 1969; 3. The Ford Administration, 1976; 4. The Carter Administration, 1980; 5. The Reagan Administration, 1982; 6. The George H.W. Bush Administration, 1991; 7. The Clinton Administration, 2001; 8. The George W. Bush Administration, 2002. Again, while he appears ignorant of the details, Cohen appears to grasp the gist of things, admitting,Cohen argues that, from a Palestinian perspective,

As for the average Palestinian, settlements are a poke in the eye. The construction of each one means yet another piece of his land has gone over to the enemy and cannot be a part of a Palestinian state. It is an in-your-face reminder of impotency, of the inability to control life or fate -- and of a baleful history that has seen nothing but defeat.

Although I doubt he has a sufficient grasp of the history of the conflict to have passed either quiz, Richard Cohen has expressly admitted that Israel's settlements are illegal and an impediment to peace, a position superficially consistent with the position taken by every U.S. Administration throughout the entire history of the occupation. The settlements have resulted in vast areas of the occupied West Bank being declared off-limits to Palestinians (the blue and red areas are exclusive to Israelis; the Green area represents an occupied portion of Hebron, with about 20,000 Palestinians under martial law for the benefit of about 400 radical settlers), with their lands criss-crossed with "settler only" roads, roadblocks and checkpoints:

But it's Richard Cohen, so you can't expect that anything logical will flow from his pen. Although he admits the settlements are illegal, an impediment to peace and a deliberate thumb in the eye of the Palestinians, Cohen argues that the religious and ideological importance of the settlements justifies dictating to the Palestinians, up front, that "some, regardless of legality, are going to stay". He makes no call for any sort of reciprocal land swap. For Netanyahu, whose government he has already described as perpetuating an illegal enterprise, Cohen complains that the settlements have "enormous symbolic value" and that for a minority of Israelis "settlements have enormous religious and ideological importance". It was thus "a major concession" for Netanyahu to (sort of, but not really) freeze the expansion of the settlements for ten months as a prerequisite for peace talks.

So you have a clear legal picture: Cohen sees the settlements as illegal. You have a clear consequence of continued settlement activity, with Cohen recognizing that each brick laid makes the possibility of achieving peace more remote. You have the consistent position of every U.S. Administration that the settlements are an impediment to peace and cannot be allowed to interfere with the peaceful resolution of the crisis. And you have an Israeli Prime Minister who says, "Screw you, even if the peace talks crash and burn we're going to go right back to expanding the settlements."

So, in Richard Cohen's mind, who is to blame? The party he describes as committing an offense against peace? Of course not. The party that is losing its prospect of statehood as a result of that intransigence? Not unless it results in the end of peace talks. What about the mediator who is trying to bring the two sides together to reach a peace deal? Yes, obviously the mediator is at fault, even though his position is 100% consistent with that of his predecessors and even though he has done nothing to create the problem:

Obama, too, has to husband his credibility. He foolishly demanded something Israel could not yet give. It was bad diplomacy, recalling neither Metternich nor Kissinger but the ol' professor and his question about the inept Mets ["Can't anybody here play this game?"].

Cohen apparently doesn't understand the difference between "can't" and "won't", and doesn't actually care about the consequences to peace of taking "no" for an answer. It is tragic that imbeciles like Cohen are given prominent positions where they can advance counter-factual arguments that undermine the peace process and perpetuate the crisis. But, as they say, welcome to America.

If Only Richard Cohen Would Pay Attention

Richard Cohen rarely writes anything of interest, and today's phoned-in column is not actually a departure from the norm. Cohen asks the rhetorical question, "Who is Barack Obama", and pretends that he has no way of knowing. And perhaps that's true - of him. But for goodness sake,

He went for health-care reform, not jobs. He supported the public option, then he didn't. He's been cold to Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu and then all over him like a cheap suit.

Those three "observations" tell us a lot more about Cohen than they do about President Obama. First, although he can reasonably be faulted (particularly in retrospect) for not pursuing a larger stimulus bill, it somehow zipped right above Cohen's head that the Obama Administration did pay attention to jobs - but for a variety of reasons, mostly practical, settled on a stimulus bill that was "merely" enormous instead of gargantuan. The Wall Street Journal was quick to whine,

The House bill is one of the largest single stimulus packages in history, almost equal to the entire cost of annual federal spending under Congress's discretion. A parallel Senate measure, which is expected to come to a vote next week, is now valued at nearly $900 billion.

Either bill, if enacted, would push the federal debt toward levels not seen since the second World War.

How did Cohen manage to miss that?

Second, those who were paying attention never had much cause to believe that President Obama was going to throw his weight behind a public option. Sure, in his hundreds of statements on healthcare reform, he suggested that he supported it... once or twice. But the rest of the time his support seemed at best anemic. Moreover, if Cohen believes that Obama's approval rating is where it is due to the absence of a public option in the healthcare reform bill, he's... not paying attention.

I doubt that there are many Americans who much care whether President Obama likes Netanyahu, or think's he's pond scum. As I recall, Clinton pretty much detested Netanyahu, but at times played smiley-face with him in public and remained popular.

Cohen's a personification of the Peter Principle. If he could escape his bubble long enough to read, for example, Dan Larison, he would find that the dots that elude him were long ago identified and connected by others. It may be disappointing when Obama follows conventional thinking, but there's nothing surprising about it.

Beyond that, Cohen's is the sort of column that Paul Krugman just called out.

The latest hot political topic is the “Obama paradox” — the supposedly mysterious disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want more passion. And so on.

But the only real puzzle here is the persistence of the pundit delusion, the belief that the stuff of daily political reporting — who won the news cycle, who had the snappiest comeback — actually matters.

This delusion is, of course, most prevalent among pundits themselves, but it’s also widespread among political operatives. And I’d argue that susceptibility to the pundit delusion is part of the Obama administration’s problem.

What political scientists, as opposed to pundits, tell us is that it really is the economy, stupid.

You would have to be pretty darn stupid not to recognize that, even if more people found Ronald Reagan to be likable than say the same about President Obama, his approval ratings followed the economy. Or you would have to be Richard Cohen. One or the other....

Update: It occurs to me that in past columns Cohen has inadvertently highlighted the reasons for his disdain for President Obama. "He didn't pay me sufficient homage during the campaign," and "He doesn't understand how important I am."

Maybe You're Just Born Bad?

Richard Cohen usually strikes me as a reflexive thinker - programmed to repeat a perspective that he adopted, without question, decades ago. On occasion, he revisits one of his bromidic thoughts and shares what he believes to be insights, but instead reveals himself to be an astonishingly weak thinker - perhaps not as compared to the average adult, but certainly as compared to people who are paid to think and write about issues.

In today's column, Cohen asks, "Did liberals get it wrong on crime?" By which he apparently means himself and some of his (imaginary?) friends.

The good news is that crime is again down across the nation - in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly, this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality to poverty - my view at one time - have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad news indeed.

Where to begin.... First, if Cohen were to actually look at historic crime trends, he would find that crime was low during the Great Depression - and that economic downturns aren't associated with increased crimes. Second, assuming Cohen has eyes in his head, he should be able to look around himself and see that crime occurs at all levels of society. Third, although perhaps Cohen has never before heard of the so-called "nature-nurture debate", there are vanishingly few people aside from Cohen and his (imaginary?) friends who believe that human behavior is dictated exclusively by nature or by nurture. Fourth, not many liberals are complaining about Cohen's claim that the myth of an immigrant crime wave has been shattered. Fifth, establishing a correlation is not even close to establishing causation - something that Cohen overlooks even as he is essentially making that very point about the association between poverty and crime.

There is, on the other hand, a broad consensus that early childhood experiences and the conditions within a community affect the likelihood that somebody is going to become involved in crime. It should be obvious to Cohen that the tautology, "crime is committed by criminals", is not helpful. The question remains, why do people become criminals.

Cohen shares another platitudinous observation,

By and large everyday people do not go into a life of crime because they have been laid off or their home is worth less than their mortgage. They do something else, but whatever it is, it does not generally entail packing heat. Once this becomes an accepted truth, criminals will lose what status they still retain as victims.

Seriously, until now Cohen and his (imaginary?) friends believed that the first thing somebody would do when facing the prospect of a job loss, foreclosure or other financial setback would be to rob a bank? To start mugging people in Central Park? "Oh no, I'm financially secure but upside-down on my mortgage - where's my gat?". Assuming that Cohen and his (imaginary?) friends truly used to feel sorry for bank robbers, muggers, burglars and thieves, was Cohen's contemplation of the roots of crime truly that simplistic? Even Marie Antoinette is attributed with more nuanced views on poverty. Concerns about the impact of impoverished families and communities on child development aren't about "feeling sorry for" those who turn to crime - the goal is, in fact, to reduce their number.

Cohen assures us that his claim "is not as outlandish as it may seem", supporting his point with what can fairly be described as an outlandish argument:

I recall that after the Watts riots of 1965 (34 dead), someone determined that the mobs looted only those stores owned by the miserly and the mean. In other words, the store owners had it coming, and the rioters, which is to say the criminals, were just getting some justice, often in the form of a TV set.

Did you get that? He's out to disprove an opinion he believes that "someone" made, some 35 years ago, assuming his recollection is accurate. But apparently his research on this issue ended 33 years ago....

So two years later, in the immediate aftermath of the Newark riots (26 dead), I conducted a one-man, totally unscientific survey of looted stores. I detected no pattern. Generous owners were trashed. Good guys suffered. The mob was not administering justice. It was getting stuff for free.

I am in no way defending looters, who are quite reasonably categorized as thieves, but I'm wondering exactly how Cohen did this "research"? Did he go to a few looted stores and ask the owners, "Are you a good guy who didn't deserve this, or a bad guy who got what was coming," and find to his surprise that every store owner claimed to be a "good guy"? And seriously - a "one-man, totally unscientific survey" that established "no pattern"? He thinks that is relevant?

Cohen also offers up an anecdote that supposedly documents "liberal dogma that criminals [are] like everyone else, only more desperate":

Probably the ultimate example of this was cited to me years ago by a woman who had her necklace yanked from her while walking in Manhattan. When I commiserated with her, she said of the crook - I am not making this up - "he probably needed it more than I did." This is liberal guilt at its apogee.

What amazing logic:

1. A woman who had her necklace ripped off her neck said that the offender "probably needed it more than I did."

2. ??????

3. Therefore, liberals think criminals are like everyone else, only more desperate.

It would remain a non sequitur even if Cohen established that the woman was a liberal, which he of course did not. On the other hand, perhaps the woman had a jewelry box overflowing with necklaces back at home and, as she worked through a traumatic experience and came to terms with her relatively modest loss, meant nothing more than what she said.

Cohen again flashes back to the 1960's (and earlier), presenting his version of the game, "What a hippie might say" ("all wealth comes from theft") followed by the most topical cultural reference he could come up with - Stephen Sondheim's lyrics from West Side Story making fun of bad parenting as the cause of teens joining street gangs. It took Cohen more than fifty years to process they lyrics from "Gee, Officer Krupke"?

Cohen concedes that "environment has to play a role and the truly desperate will sometimes break the law", presenting as his example "Victor Hugo's impoverished Jean Valjean, who stole bread for his sister's children." He concludes,

But the latest crime statistics strongly suggest that bad times do not necessarily make bad people. Bad character does.

Well... let's revisit those crime statistics for a moment. Cohen doesn't present evidence that the crime rate was steady during the recent recession - his statistics reflect a significant drop in crime. Cohen extrapolates from a reduced crime rate¹ that bad economic times won't transform an otherwise law-abiding adult into a criminal. Great. But what of all those people Cohen believes are born bad - bad to the bone? Does he believe that a recessionary economy causes them to be more introspective and to mend their ways? (Or perhaps that it gives them time to catch a rerun of West Side Story on TV and enjoy a Cohen-like awakening upon hearing The Jets sing about Officer Krupke)? Or, I ask rhetorically, is it that he simply hasn't thought things through?
-----------
1. Statistics derived from UCR's should be taken with a grain of salt, but let's assume that the overall crime trend is accurately reflected in the FBI's data.