Columnists have mortgages, too, y'know.

I have truly come to believe over the past year that Cohen is so tired of being attacked by the left blogosphere that he purposely writes stuff like this to piss us off.

Not only to piss us off, but to provoke all these strident and unseemly postings which will automatically give him another column lamenting the absence of civility in our public discourse.

Hey, those 800 words have to come from somewhere.

what cohen or glenn think? Two ranters arguing.

You're right, tiberius. There's absolutely nothing of interest on this blog. You should do yourself a favor and go away and never come back, because there's nothing here for you. You should try FreeRepublic.com, you'd fit in just marvelously there.

MoeLarryAndJesus:

In a just world Cohen would be sentenced to having INTREPID tattooed on his forehead.

Who needs word salad, when you can have metaphors Nicoise?

Did you see the end of yesterday's thread? Bucky1 posted something about LBJ and McCarthyism for you. I'm not sure if he intended to shoot his own foot off, but he did.

A deadly dart from Paul's glorious mighty bow,

Will lay the fake-warrior's neurons real low.

what cohen or glenn think? Two ranters arguing.

Who cares what tiberius thinks? Anyone?

When he starts to think I'll consider it.

Well, okay, I'll get it started as a draft. Gimme a day or so.

And just so I contribute something on topic: what still amazes me about the pundit class, even though I've long since learned to remain even-tempered about the idiotic content of their punditry, is their blithe assumption that the future they've worked so hard to bring to pass will inevitably exempt them from the miseries it visits on the rest of us.

Can they really not imagine the feral hordes of a failed totalitarian economy breaking down the doors of their air-conditioned offices, or killing them in the street for their alligator shoes? Nope, guess not. Nemesis is always pour les autres.

and the lights will stay off as long as the main stream media is owned by so few corporations.

There will most likely be no changes at any of these papers until it is forced upon them out of their economic bottom line reality.This alone shows just how many people there still are that live their lives on a daily basis with the lights off.

Government propaganda is still the most lucrative action in D.C. and will remain so until corruption is removed from public office as well as media.

Glenn's exposure of these things are critical and most welcome to those of us who love prison and are not so scared to be put there.

Are trilobites really extinct?

http://www.dnr.state.md.us/education/horseshoecrab/

Maybe that's just what they wanted us to think.

Greenwald and his colleagues haven't exactly burned up the available supply of pixels in demanding prison terms for the leaks of classified materials that have been irritating to the Bush administration.

Fitz himself was aware of this aspect of the case which is why he made it a point NOT to invoke the espionage act. He was aware that when members of the government are themselves are guilty of criminal conduct, there is nothing quite so useful as the ability to classify the evidence. It's also worth noting that at no time, were journalist at risk for prosection for revealing classified information.

Of course the fact that they were at risk of jail time for sheilding their sources helps explain why they're all gathering in that tight circle to defend Libby.

Leave it to a Chicagoan to refuse to play by DC rules.

One of the core aspects of the disease our democracy, and culture at large is suffering from is the practice of argument by assertion--and, of course, the widespread acceptance of this practice. It runs throughout Cohen's piece, of course. It runs throuhgout virtually all Versailles writings, as well performance on tv.

tiberius, however, gave us a particularly lean example, when he wrote:

Who cares...

what cohen or glenn think? Two ranters arguing.

The assertions are implicit, but so close to the surface you can read the 8-point type through the water: (A) Glenn is a "ranter" just the same as Cohen. (B) There's no point in a critical examination of either of them.

But, of course, criticisim is the very heart of Western Civiization. It was the great invention that separated Greece from its Egyptian forebearers, as well as Egypt's own contemporaries and their descendants. It was the pre-Socratic critical tradition of natural philosophy that gave rise to Greek science, philosophy, and democracy, as well as, arguably, its theatre. Criticism was central to Judaism as well--indeed, no other religion values criticism as highly as Judaism.

Thus, the rise of critical culture in the Enlightenment was not just a late-blooming fad. It was a rearticulation of the fundamental distinctions that set Western Civilization apart.

Argument by assertion is mere brute force. It has no genuine intelligence in it. But this is what tiberius espouses.

And so does Cohen. This is precisely Glenn's point: that there is nothing to support any of Cohen's individual assertions, much less his ur-assertion that he and his kind are above any critical judgement--certainly any judgement that might send one of them to jail. And Glenn establishes this, not by assertion, but by critical analysis of what Cohen has written.

tiberius is most instructive, because he offers, in succinct form, the only rebuttal Versailles is capable of.

As O'Reilly is wont to put it: "Just shut up."

Or Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat cake."

Because they have no argument.

They have only force.

And when that starts to drain away, they get very petulant, indeed.

I will see you at the 'Bang!
Gratefully,
Ginsberg

PS - meanwhile, if you or any of the contributors see anything you would correct for re-submission to R. Cohen, please notify (especially content and argumentation, but yes definitely grammar & punctuation, too). One thing that was conspicuous to me was: arguing the lights off thing in reference to the press, while in fact, R. Cohen wrote of it regarding public officials?