I gotta find out whose cousin Richard Cohen is, because that's the only reason I can imagine The Washington Post keeping around a columnist who obviously suffers from some sort of bizarre, mid-stage dementia.
In today's series of incoherent paragraphs, Cohen takes on the Jim Webb flap two weeks after it happened. After reporting a fuller and more honest account of the incident than George Will did (in what Cohen refers to as a "magisterial rebuke"), Cohen goes on to say that Washington needs to have good manners, except that sometimes the times call for bad manners, except now is not one of those times, unless it is, and Jim Webb should behave himself. Or something.
But here's the part that shows that Cohen really is nuts:
Not only is such behavior rude, but it is usually counterproductive. We don't want to get where we were in the late 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson became a virtual prisoner in the White House, avoiding antiwar demonstrators by simply staying home.
This may be a rude question, but what the fuck is Richard Cohen talking about?
This president doesn't "avoid antiwar demonstrators by staying home." He "avoids antiwar demonstrators" by having them all rather rudely rounded up and fenced inside "free-speech zones" 10 or 12 blocks from any event he's appearing at. He avoids them by having his people go to significant American taxpayer expense to ensure that only fawning toadies are allowed anywhere near an event at which he deigns to appear. All that happened with the Webb thing was that the president couldn't very well put a US Senator-elect in a cage on Connecticut Avenue while he met with the other Senators-elect.
Because, well, that would have been rude. So once, just once in five years, this president is forced to actually confront someone who (a) isn't afraid of him, and (b) can get some coverage of his courage, unlike most Bush demonstration protesters over the past five years who've quietly and quickly been whisked away by Secret Servicemen, so quietly and quickly that the press must have hardly even noticed it has happened, since they so seldom bother to track down any of these brave, if rude, American citizens.
But you can't have your bodyguards put a US Senator in a double chickenwing camel clutch and drag him screaming from the room, and you can't just narrow your eyes and walk away, the way President Bush did with Cindy Sheehan:
So when Sheehan received an invitation to meet privately with President Bush at the White House two months after her son died, the least she could have expected was a bit of compassion or a kind word coming from the heart.
But what she encountered was an arrogant man with eyes lacking the slightest bit of compassion, a President totally "detached from humanity" and a man who didn’t even bother to remember her son’s name when they were first introduced.
Instead of a kind gesture or a warm handshake, Sheehan said she immediately got a taste of Bush arrogance when he entered the room and "in a condescending tone and with a disgusting loud Texas accent," said: "Who we’all honorin’ here today?"
"His mouth kept moving, but there was nothing in his eyes or anything else about him that showed me he really cared or had any real compassion at all. This is a human being totally disconnected from humanity and reality. His eyes were empty, hollow shells and he was acting like I should be proud to just be in his presence when it was my son who died for his illegal war! It was one of the most disgusting experiences I ever had and it took me almost a year to even talk about it," said Sheehan in a telephone conversation from Washington D.C. where she was attending a July 4th anti-war rally.
Sheehan said the June 2004 private meeting with the President went from bad to worse to a nightmare when Bush acted like he didn’t even want to know her name. She said Bush kept referring to her as ‘Ma’ or ‘Mom’ while he "put on a phony act," saying things like ‘Mom, I can’t even imagine losing a loved one, a mother or a father or a sister or a brother.’
"The whole meeting was simply bizarre and disgusting, designed to intimidate instead of providing compassion. He didn’t even know our names," said Sheehan. "Finally I got so upset I just looked him in the eye, saying ‘I think you can imagine losing someone. You have two daughters. Imagine losing them?’ After I said that he just looked at me, looked at me with no feeling or caring in his eyes at all."
Instead, Bush was forced to take it when Webb called him on his bullshit. And he didn't take it very well.
Most commentators on the event have pointed to Bush's initial response to Webb's saying that "he'd like to get them out of Iraq." Bush said, "That's not what I asked you," and this comment is so obviously boorish that it must have even offended George Will's sense of decorum, since he conspicuously omitted it from his "magisterial rebuke" of the Senator-elect.
But I think we can picture the scene well enough to imagine how the first question, which looks so bland, even polite, on the page, was the thing that really set Webb off.
When George W. Bush asks, "How's your boy?" he's not asking because he cares, he's not even asking because it's nice manners, and he's certainly not asking it in a nice or caring way.
He's doing that thing where he's bouncing around the room, his coke-starved eyes darting for the exits, how-ya-doin-how-ya-doin-how-ya-doin, throwing in a nickname or two here or there, and in general, asserting that these visitors are nothing more than a bother, something to be gotten through, these visitors to the home the American people have provided for him, his wife, and their two idiotic (but safe and sound) children for the past six years.
A couple of weeks before the White House meeting, Jim Webb's son -- not his "boy," his son, whose name is Jimmy -- was nearly killed when his tank column came under attack. And then this prick comes in and tries to bully Webb with this empty bullshit, and Webb's just supposed to say, Fine, fine, Mr. President, thanks for asking?
Well, Jim Webb's son is not fine. As far as we know, he's better than 2,906 American sons and daughters and fathers and mothers and husbands and wives. But he is in a world of shit, as the saying goes. I worry every morning when my kids leave the house for fucking day care. For those who have a son or daughter there, I imagine every ring of the telephone, every knock on the door, every visit from the mailman, every email in the inbox is a source of potential terror and bottomless grief. Nearly all the time, you don't know where your son or daughter is, whether they're wounded or healthy, whether they're alive or dead.
And while we all know -- most of us abstractly -- that losing loved ones is a part of war, Jim Webb knows this better than most of us do. He certainly knows it better than George W. Bush. For him, it's real. Webb knows that rule number one of war is that people die.
But he also still believes that rule number one of sending people to war is that you don't do it on a whim, you don't do it just to prove you can, you don't do it to win elections, you don't do it to support some childishly idiotic vision of the world, you don't do it because it's fun, you don't do it recklessly, you don't do it incompetently, and you don't do it stupidly.
And if you do, you shouldn't expect everyone to rally round the flag, or the presidency, just because "we're at war."
Later in his column, Cohen writes:
That, of course, is the whole point. This imbroglio about Webb and manners is, at bottom, about the (very) premature deaths of young people in Iraq -- the sons and daughters of people much like Webb.
Well, no, Richard -- that's not what it's about "at bottom." That's what it's about right there on the top, the front, the surface, for everyone to see. George W. Bush strutted into the room like the little dauphin he is, and suddenly came face to face with a real man, a man who still holds to the quaint notion that America itself is a free-speech zone, a man with real things to say. When the man said those things, the petulant little boy who has wrecked our country over the past six years went crying to George Will.
It's amusing that, in the weeks just after the 2006 elections, Jim Webb was promoted as exhibit A of the "conservative" new strain in the Democratic Party that led to its success. If this is a "conservative Democrat," tell me where I can get another 536 of them. Jim Webb is ready to end this war, and that's what Democrats were sent to Washington to do.
If that mission means you have to be a little rude to the president, so be it. We ain't running a fucking tea party here.