It’s Still Not Safe to Drink The Cohen

Once upon a time a toad hopped into the offices of the Washington Post editorial board and explained to the staff “If you kiss me, and hire me on as an opinion columnist, I will turn into a prince and write brilliant, insightful pieces for your paper.” As it happened, neither of these statements was true. But the toad was hired and kept on nonetheless. (This is, after all, the newspaper that leapt at the opportunity to hire war whore William Kristol after the New York Times editorial board came to their senses and severed ties with the least talented human being to ever put crayon to construction paper and slide it under the door of the Editorial Board offices.)

Today the aforementioned toad (nee Richard Cohen) regales us with another example of his searing intellect in a piece promisingly titled: “ Sarah Palin’s Foolishness Ruined U.S. Politics.“

Now you’d think that with a topic as uncomplicated as Sarah Palin’s “foolishness” an opinion columnist should have no trouble scribbling out a few lines about the intellectual bankruptcy of the modern GOP and the collapse of that party into a solipsistic fan club for ignorance. After all, we are talking about a political party where rejecting the scientific consensus on topics as far ranging as climate change and the Theory of Evolution have become not just positives, but an actual litmus test for candidates.

And Cohen does start out well, explaining how he just got back from watching the Tee Vee and they had this show on about what a horrible person this Sarah Palin lady is:

The movie portrays Palin as an ignoramus. She did not know that Queen Elizabeth II does not run the British government, and she did not know that North and South Korea are different countries. She seemed not to have heard of the Federal Reserve. She called Joe Biden “O’Biden” and she thought America went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein, not al-Qaeda, had attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. Not only did she know little, but she was determinately incurious and supremely smug in her ignorance.

So far so good. As I said, we’re off to a promising start, Richard, please don’t fuck this up with some competely unjustified conjecture that somehow manages to apportion half the blame for this sorry state of affairs on the Democratic Party in the name of… you know… flase balance:

Apres Palin has come a deluge of dysfunctional presidential candidates. They do not lie with quite the conviction of Palin, but they are sometimes her match in ignorance. As with Palin, it seemed hardly to matter. Herman Cain for a while was a front-runner. He had a nonsensical tax plan, zero knowledge of foreign affairs and had never held elective office. Yet, for a brief but terrifying moment, many Republicans were saying he should be the next president of the United States.

Michele Bachmann told a touching fib about vaccinations and Rick Perry did not know squat about who governs Turkey, a NATO ally and a vitally important Middle East power. He got wrong the number of justices on the Supreme Court — he said eight — and could not remember a Cabinet department he had vowed to eliminate.

OMG, OMG…. he gets it! Richard Cohen understands how dysfunctional the GOP has become, and the extent to which they have become the enemy of learning and intelligence and thought and such. And no false equivalences in sight! No “of course, the Democrats are just as bad” to be seen anywhere!

Until….

So far, the Palin effect has been limited to the GOP. Surely, though, there lurks in the Democratic Party potential candidates who have seen Palin and taken note. Experience, knowledge, accomplishment — these no longer may matter. They will come roaring out of the left proclaiming a hatred of all things Washington, including compromise. The movie had it right. Sarah Palin changed the game.

Oh, Richard… and you were doing so well up to now. But then you had to go and blow it with this stupid and completely unjustified inference that comes out of nowhere. The Republicans are a party of fools who worship ignorance and and so the Democrats simply must be too, if not now, then soon.

Never mind that the two most recent Democratic presidents were a Rhodes Scholar and a professor of Constitutional law. Clearly the Democrats are riding that same roller coaster of ignorance as the GOP because… because… because otherwise one party would be less bad than the other, and that can’t possibly be!