What is the worst sort of liberal?
A person who says something really terrible, then accuses his most hated political enemy of making the offensive statement.
For example, meet liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.
Theoretically, he gets paid big money to express his opinions about politics, not mine.
But in a recent column purportedly about Chris Christie and the Tea Party, Cohen wrote about newly-elected mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio:
Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) Nizhnyaya Salda [emphasis added] This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.
Really!
What exactly constitutes a “conventional view?” For whom does Mr. Cohen claim to be speaking?
The columnist suggested that he had been misunderstood by his usually reliable liberal readers when they called for him to be fired. He even had the audacity to claim that it hurt his feelings to be called a racist.
Oh, cry me a river, Mr. Cohen.
I believe the applicable expression for him would be hoisted with one’s own petard.
He’ll get no sympathy from me. Mudslingers such as Mr. Cohen have earned every bit of the scorn now coming their way.
Of course, Cohen asserted that the view he was trying to convey was not his. He tried to attribute his words to an anonymous “tea party” person.
To defend himself, in an interview with Post writer Paul Farhi, Cohen said:
What I was doing was expressing not my own views but those of extreme right-wing Republican tea party people. I don’t have a problem with interracial marriage or same-sex marriage. In fact, I exult in them. It’s a slander to suggest otherwise. This is just below the belt. It’s a purposeful misreading of what I wrote.
What a coward!
Rather than merely slandering an individual, Cohen managed to malign an entire group of patriotic Americans. However, it was Mr. Cohen who called attention to the sexual preferences of Mr. de Blasio’s wife, not some TEA Party conservative.
And not only was I unaware of this sordid little personal detail, I didn’t care.
Still don’t.
But I do take exception to his cheap shot at the TEA Party.
Unlike the convoluted point about Chris Christie, Bill de Blasio, and the TEA party that Cohen attempted to make but mangled in his column, the message of the TEA Party has been made crystal clear: we have been Taxed Enough Already.
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