Too gentle a word for Cohen's behavior here.

He is part of a team of people paving the way for a pardon that they sense on the wind. If they explain it in advance, eroding the granite foundation of facts on which the conviction was based, the pardon will seem reasonable and Washington will seem a reasonable place to cover. But this can stay true only as long as the discourse is steadily shifted to conform with the madness of our current government, totally lacking in principle or democratic basis though it is. This column reveals Cohen to be a disgusting human being interested in nothing but preserving his career: for if people know how corrupt this Administration has been, for as long as it has been, there would be only masochists left to watch the news or read the opinion columns. --Not much call for opinion columnists and Nuremberg, was there? Because reasonable people cannot disagree on what needs to happen. Hence the need to make the insane reasonable, and cushion the most egregious acts of misgovernment in advance where possible.

After six years of extremely close attention to the Brobdingnagian lies, hypocrisy, and un-American imbecile servility of the Washington press under Bush, I thought I had developed an extremely strong stomach. But this column makes me physically ill.

How hard can a human liver work to try to keep up with this poisonous offal, this daily gorge of contemptibility, and convert it into a kind of civic rage that might possibly be useful to the country?

Thank God for Glenn's intellectual metabolism. I have an iron gut but stupidity this intense perforates it almost immediately. And my God but how, for anyone who values integrity -- the filthy clots of banal dishonesty, the bullshit, the plasma of phony world-weariness in which they flow -- my God but how it BURNS!

For the rest of my life I will be a single-issue voter and a single-issue consumer: my watchword forever is Accountability.

And that means firing people like this, on the spot, as soon as their '"'counterintuitive'"' lies hit the desk of the copy editor.

JvdH

Glenn,

Do I sense a bit of sarcasm dripping from your proverbial poison pen? GOOD! The Fiefdom of Beltmania, complete with its courtesans, male prostitutes and jesters, deserves as much vitiol as can be heaped upon it! Their closed and cloistered assylum (Washington D.C.) has (in)bred a colony of disconnected, self-righteous, sanctimonious, slobbering boobs, whose sole purpose seems to be the perpetuation of their own mutant "species."

The more I read of this kind of journamalism, the more I feel that we have indeed gone "through the looking glass" into an "alternate reality;" similar to the old Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk and crew slip through to a parallel world where good is bad and bad is good. Our country, the one that we were raised to love, honor and respect; the one whose moral foundation of freedom, liberty and justice for all shone like a beacon to the rest of the world, no longer exists. High crimes and misdemeanors go largely ignored and mostly unpunished. Our leaders lie with impunity and without consequence. No one is responsible for ANYTHING, so accountability is non-existent - at least for the rich and powerful. But if, heaven forbid, one of Beltmania's own is held to account, the whines and wails and screams of "INJUSTICE" can be heard far and wide throughout the fiefdom.

I am truly ashamed of what we have become. I am even more ashamed of my fellow citizens who view all of the injustices, all of the anarchy, and simply carry on as if none of it really matters. Then again, when less than 20% of the population believes that America is on the right track, perhaps there is still hope. The question is: What can we do to move our people to ACT; to change the status quo; to make America - America again?

All you need to know about Cohen is....

...that he thinks sex is better with the lights off.

Yes, that got my attention also. I felt myself straining (in imagination mode) to see the best parts of the experience. I didn't like that. Much was missing.

A brilliant post: trenchant. You filet with ease. Washington aka Broderville is truly a fetid swamp.

...these guys (mostly guys) are going to have to hire personal editor/ombudsman types for defensive purposes... to read what they've written before the publish it.

"Have I set up myself up for any wicked nicknames with this piece?"

"Is there anything here that's going to come back to haunt me?"

etc.

They used to have editors to keep both themselves and their papers out of trouble, but now that everyone in the beltway lives in that same delusionary bubble...

When I read your post, I took it to include a non-snarky assumption on your part (not Mr. Cohen's part) that all readers would wish that Scooter Libby had been spared this agony and that Ambassador Wilson should not have taken things so personally.

I knew that I shouldn't have put that ps in - it was stupid of me. I apologize for putting it in and for not reading your post more thoughtfully before responding emotionally. (I hate it when I do the stupid things it irritates me that others do.)

Yeah, those of us who can spot the irony, and express the outrage have several more than three modules working for us.

It is the inability to experience both joy and outrage simultaneously that causes so many so much pain. It is vital to be able to exist as a healthy adult that amidst this disturbing environment, we can find sustaining events and interactions.

Also credited with the inability to do so, is the advance of contradictory belief systems, rigidity, foolish "in the moment" cleaverness, bad journalism, decidedly low ethical/moral readings, tunnel vision, slavish attention to a fantasy world-view brought-on by slavish attention to main stream media sources, established residence either on memory lane, or in one's own echo chamber and lastly, late-onset dull-normalism during which once intelligent people become lazy, lose their curiousity and give up all hope.

I think we're also seeing the "De-evolution" issue of Spy magazine become a prophetic work.