Dear Mr. Cohen,
I'm sure you did not find Stephen Colbert's keynote address to the WH Correspondents' Dinner any funnier than President Bush did, for the simple reason that you were every bit as much in the crosshairs. I watched the video, and the press audience were amply amused by his first several digs at Bush. Then the first salvo was fired in their direction ("the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world"). From then on, it was mostly stunned silence as Colbert went right after DC press establishmentarians such as yourself: sycophantic, credulous stenographers who grope for the smelling salts any time some gauche, extra-Beltway Cassandra expresses naked anger or outrage over the state of our governance.
Out here in the barren wastes of the
Realitysphere, many of us tend to get vehemently angry when
people die for no good reason--or worse, for official lies. In another 3 months, my naval-reservist brother, now a married father of two, will guard an Iraqi maximum-security prison and drive convoy trucks, all within sight of the Iranian border. When it comes to the war in Iraq, some of us have a lot more at stake than bragging rights at the next Sally Quinn DC Cocktail Hour. And yes, Richard, your casual complicity in this deadly affair pisses us off royally.
It's normally quite easy for you to ignore us, of course. But occasionally, rash, public intemperance on the part of outsiders like Colbert threatens to rupture the airless bubble you inhabit: one in which press and politicos alike glide through their seamless, time-worn dance; one in which an anodyne, premanufactured air of stability and normalcy reigns supreme; one in which the greatest sin lies not in twisting the knife but in resisting one's own assassination too loudly. In your world, nothing under the sun should ever be so new or alarming as to render itself immune to your practiced trivialization.
Your last two columns exemplify this point beautifully. The Cohens, Broders, and Ignatii of the media--the so-called deans of our so-called Fourth Estate--long ago decreed that vituperation and ridicule, properly moderated, are best reserved for irrelevancies like Al Gore's "earth tones" and the president's golf swing--or, at the very least, restricted to the Hans Blixes and Scott Ritters of the world who ingraciously contradict the official line with all the subtlety of hyenas copulating table-side at the University Club.
Having thus anointed bland, back-slapping, aw-shucks self-deprecation as the sole legitimate brand of humor, you seem willfully blind to the virtues of pointed irony along the lines of Andy Kaufman and Jonathan Swift, and blithely ignorant of the traditional function of the Court Jester. Or perhaps it's true, as Upton Sinclair noted, that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary (or in this case, his continued 'access' to the White House) depends upon his not understanding it.
This calculus would explain why it was OK for you to write off an "angry" Al Gore in favor of "Bush the likable conciliator" during the height of the Florida election debacle, or why you felt comfortable donning the folksy mantle of Fiddler on the Roof's Tevye and smearing everyone who saw through Colin Powell's grand Iraq sophistry before you did as "fools" and defeatist "Frenchmen". It's what let you brand strident Bush critics as "compulsive" blame-America-firsters "infected" with knee-jerk loathing.
Though you often whine belatedly about Bush's manifest arrogance (with all the wounded melodrama of a betrayed lover), I have little doubt that you will come out against "vindictive" Congressional investigations of the self-same White House mendacity, should the Democrats retake either chamber in the fall. Because, Mr. Cohen, whenever the chips are down, you remind me of none other than Rodney King in your fervid assertions that we could all get along if only the rabid, unhinged Left would just play nice, stop shouting, and give the bastards another mile or three. Never mind who's right or wrong, it's our tone that matters. Smiling ear to ear, our glad-handing Fratboy-in-Chief, George W. Lucy, keeps baiting you with that football, and you respond with an inbred knack for vujà dé that would make Charlie Brown blush: That is, you really have seen it a hundred times before, yet you remain resolutely clueless in your stampede toward self-beguilement.
You often imply that you are a much-mistreated ally of Democrats and liberals, yet you seem to miss few opportunities to kneecap any whose passion and outrage exceed your own chamomile-and-milk-of-magnesia sense of decorum. On top of that, for all your talk of moderation and sticking to facts, you have an alarming tendency to be both credulous and stubbornly wrong on seminal issues such as Iraq and the good faith of the current administration. When this is pointed out, you offer up excuses, retreat behind the false mantra of "everyone else got it wrong too!", and complain that the Lefty Blogger Hordes are just so darn Angry and Mean--as if their employment of a few Ann Coulter-esque hyperboles somehow invalidated their outrage and made it the province of inscrutable, irrational "Bush haters."
If you really are a liberal, a Democrat--or heck, even simply a man of whatever stripe who values empiricism and accountability, then there are scores of juicy targets wandering the halls of power in this one-party town. There literally aren't enough of you to keep pace with all the cascading scandals. Yet you persist in devoting some of the most widely-read column inches in the world to chiding your "friends" for their bad attitudes and parrying cherry-picked anonymous e-mail flames from the wholly disenfranchised Left. You seek safety in reflexive compromise, priding yourself on your triangulation between the most arbitrary and unrepresentative of extremes (ex: the shrillness of Nicholson Baker as counterweight to 3 branches of government), regardless of how far right on the Useful Idiot scale it lands you. Let one powerless liberal voice be raised in immoderate anger against unchecked Republican abuse of authority, and all substantive distinctions evaporate from your mind: you perceive only a moral equivalency of dangerous nut-job factions, and straightaway you set about bemoaning the death of civility and seeking a middle course.
Is it any wonder we turn away from such conflicted, self-obsessed, johnny-come-lately op-eds in favor of substantive reporting and analysis from the likes of Murray Waas and Josh Marshall? Is it such a surprise that we find a single Stephen Colbert speech more cathartic and courageous than all of your output and Broder's taken together? The crudeness and hostility of your correspondents may be gratuitous, but using it as an excuse to dodge the substance of their criticism is disingenuous.
As you yourself advised Valerie Plame, DC is a rough town where "ricochet" happens. So, Mr. Cohen, if reading a few coarse words is truly such a shock to your sensibilities, then may I suggest you retire and spend your golden years in some more sheltered cove where you can nurture whatever rationalizations you find most comforting. The rest of us lunatic fringe 65-percenters have got a nation to rescue.