Richard Cohen: a Scientific Inquiry

“Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask,” Richard Cohen wrote recently in the Washington Post regarding Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. And why, Ken, I hear readers asking now, are you wasting my time with Richard Cohen? Because after rereading that May 4 column, and a second one by Cohen five days later, it’s simply impossible to resist responding.

Cohen’s original column attacked Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner for being, as the headline put it, “So Not Funny.” Colbert, wrote Cohen, was “not just a failure as a comedian but rude,” as well as someone “representative of what too often passes for political courage.” In the second column Cohen complained that, in response to his musings on Colbert, he’d been savaged by “a digital lynch mob.” Cohen—who described himself as “a funny guy” in listing his credentials to critique Colbert—said his critics were politically motivated and had falsely accused him of being Bush’s lapdog (“If this is the case,” he wrote, “Bush had better check his lap”) and a “mainstream media warmonger.”

With some dust having settled over the Cohen‒Colbert debate, I turn to the topic now not to attack but in the spirit of inquiry. Hence, to determine whether Cohen is qualified to judge Colbert’s performance, I pose two simple questions:

A) Is Richard Cohen funny?

B) Is Richard Cohen courageous?

Funny: the Data

Let us proceed to the data, first regarding whether or not Cohen is “a funny guy.” Consider a few sections from his past columns. Note that dates cited below may refer to publication at the Post or newspapers that syndicate Cohen’s column.

Date	Quote
November 27, 2003	My joke about Paris Hilton is that none of this would have happened if she had been named Washington Marriott. Then she would have been the child of Mormons and raised quite differently with, one would hope, better results. We would now be watching an Internet tape of her doing missionary work in the Third World instead of assuming that position for much of the First World to see.
December 27, 2003	Am I a metrosexual? I’ve been asking everyone that question ever since I apparently became the last person in the world to discover the term. This happened last week when I came across the word seemingly a dozen times in various newspapers and wondered, if you’ll pardon my English, what the hell it meant. As an old Washington hand, I was doubly perplexed since Metro is what the subway is called in the nation’s capital. Is a metrosexual someone who has sex on the subway?
October 13, 2005	. . . in Washington, . . . most secrets have the shelf life of sashimi.
December 15, 2005	The ubiquitous Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia quotemeister—need a quote/do not tarry/call U-Va. and ask for Larry—opines that [Hillary] Clinton is readying herself for a presidential run by adjusting her tint, toning down the blue and heightening the red.
February 7, 2006	(On how he was invited to appear on numerous TV shows after being on with "Oprah.") "Access Hollywood" called. Honest. I considered taking off my tie, spiking my hair, smearing it with gel and going on to talk about Oprah and Jen and Angelina and other women I know and am pretty close to (sort of), but I did not think this would comport with my self-image (as a kind of svelte Henry Kissinger) and so, with some reluctance, I turned down "Access Hollywood," keeping my inside stuff to myself. Maybe, y’know, someday.
February 14, 2006	The French, too, have their traditions. One of them—in fact their sole animating foreign policy objective—is to make life difficult for the United States. This has been the case since Charles de Gaulle, a man of fixed fixations who resented the fact that France was no longer a great power, just a cuisine or, in some years, a good runway show.

Funny: Analysis

Humor is subjective, but the evidence here is overwhelmingly and painfully clear: Cohen is not “a funny guy.” He is funny like Karl Rove is sexy.

Courage: the Data

Cohen, it must be said, can be an absolutely fierce bulldog—when he’s attacking soft targets like Louis Farrakhan, suicide bombers, or Nazis (he is a particularly outspoken and principled opponent of Nazis). But how did Cohen do in the run-up to the war in Iraq, when journalistic courage and independence were so critically important? I will proceed in a similar fashion.

Date	Quote
March 11, 2003	There ought to be an understanding that while war is bad—very, very bad—sometimes peace is no better, especially if all it does is postpone a worse war. That is what would happen if the United States pulls back, leaving Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in power and our troops sweating in the desert, their morale and their strength dissipating . . . If, at the moment, he does not have nuclear weapons, it is not for lack of trying. He had such a program once, and he will have one again just as soon as the world loses interest and the pressure on him is relaxed . . . . I do not equate Iraq with Nazi Germany. The threat is not the same. But what is the same is that once again we are faced with a beast and the challenge to do something about him. (Note: This tactic of equating a target with the Nazis and then denying that he has done so is one Cohen favors. “I am not likening Hamas or Islamist militancy to Nazism; I am only likening the mind of one sort of zealot to another,” he wrote on February 1. “All too often they mean what they say.”)
February 25, 2003	The extremes on both sides—but particularly the war’s opponents—no longer feel compelled to prove a case or stick to the facts. (Note: Unlike Colin Powell.)
February 6, 2003	(On Colin Powell) The evidence he presented to the United Nations—some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail—had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool—or, possibly, a Frenchman—could conclude otherwise.
October 25, 2002	“The Case for War in Iraq” Bush also has said that Iraq was "six months away from developing" a nuclear weapon. This is news to every expert I’ve talked to or read about. It is just not the case—or, if it is, the administration has not supplied the intelligence to support its claim. At the moment, Iraq is believed to be as many as five years away from developing a bomb. What’s disturbing about these exaggerations is that they fertilize the growing paranoia of what must now be called the anti-war movement . . . A case for war exists. A case for exaggerating it does not.
October 11, 2002	“Going to war with Saddam—it’s time” In listing his reasons for (probably) going to war against Iraq soon—the threat of weapons of mass destruction, the nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime and its flouting of international law—President Bush the other night failed to mention the most important one: Now’s the time . . . . The removal of Saddam is a worthy and sensible goal. He’s a beast—a hands-on murderer who rules by fear . . . . Two things are a given. The first is the nature of the Iraqi regime. It will persist in developing weapons of mass destruction the way lemmings head for the sea or junkies seek a fix . . . . Iraq is probably five years or so away from developing an atomic weapon, but why wait for that to happen? . . . For the sake of international law, for the sake of preventing nuclear blackmail, for the sake of ridding the world of a leader with Hitler’s megalomania and the weapons to fuel it, war may be the only course.
September 24, 2002	I am with President Bush most of the way on Iraq. If inspections are thwarted, if Hussein plays his old games, then America has no choice but to hit him.

Courage: Analysis

Cohen’s columns did periodically raise questions about the cause for war—for example, he criticized Bush for not supplying the intelligence to back up its claim of Iraq’s potential nuclear capabilities, albeit because he worried that the administration would overstep its rhetorical bounds and reduce the chance that Cohen could have the war he so anxiously desired.

But on balance his writing had all the nuance of the World War I-era stories in the British press about German soldiers marching through Belgium with babies on their bayonets. Cohen has now become more critical of the war—“Whatever Bush’s specific reason or reasons,” he wrote on March 30, “the one thing that’s so far missing from the record is proof of him looking for a genuine way out of war instead of looking for a way to get it started.” Ironic, given his own pre-war calls for blood. It reminds me of a Randy Newman concert I went to in the 1980s. “This is a song,” Randy said from the stage, “in which I strongly come out against the war in Vietnam. Now that it’s safe.”

Thus, we can safely say that Cohen is not qualified to judge Colbert’s performance. And we can also say: President Bush, check your lap. There's someone there who needs petting.

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