http://www.dailyhowler.com/COHEN: I loathe what has happened to the press. I loathe the incessant blogging and commenting and talking and yapping and hype. I hate that Clinton's observation that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June ran on and on when everyone save some indigenous people in the Brazilian rain forest knew what she meant. I hate that for days these same outlets discussed the relevancy of whether John McCain could be constitutionally barred from the presidency because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. This, too, is sad.
In fact, there was little discussion of the Canal Zone. But in this passage, Cohen says something that’s quite astounding about his own cohort, the press corps. In his view, “everyone knew” what Clinton meant when she made her comment about Robert Kennedy. And yet, journalists savagely trashed her anyway, for days on end, about an innocuous comment. For ourselves, we don’t think everyone knew what she meant (although we think her meaning was obvious); based on our e-mails, we know that many people simply couldn’t see what she meant. (Let’s be more clear: Couldn’t see what she had said). But it’s weird! In this passage, Cohen says that his cohort savaged Clinton over something they knew was innocuous. But he gives this astounding claim just one sentence—and he offers these highly conventional narratives about other things he loathes:
COHEN: I loathe also what Hillary Clinton has done to herself. The incessant exaggerations, the cheap shots, the flights into hallucinatory history—that sniper fire in Bosnia, for instance—have turned her into a caricature of what her caricaturists long claimed she already was. In this campaign, Clinton has managed to come across as a hungry hack, a Janus looking both forward and backward and seeming to stand for nothing except winning. This, too, is sad.
I loathe what has happened to Bill Clinton.
Cohen loathes “what Hillary Clinton has done to herself.” He then offers an unflattering account of what she has done, in support of which he gives exactly one (hackneyed) example. And he doesn’t even bother to say what he means about her husband! (We’ll guess: Everyone is supposed to think about the Jesse Jackson remark.) But does Richard Cohen loathe what Obama may have done to himself? For example, does he loathe the way the Obama campaign pimped around the RFK story—even though “everyone save some indigenous people in the Brazilian rain forest knew what Clinton meant?” In this column, Cohen doesn’t loathe anything Obama has done—and he doesn’t mention the way Obama’s campaign pimped that item around. We’ll offer an obvious explanation for that latter omission: In all likelihood, Cohen doesn’t know that it happened. Nor does something else seem to enter his mind: If the uproar about RFK was fake, is it possible that the uproar about Jesse Jackson was fake as well? Is it possible that Hillary Clinton “has managed to come across as a hungry hack” because the press corps (and others) have been pimping a string of fake narratives, culminating with RFK? Thoughts like these don’t occur to Cohen. Instead, he gives one example of Hillary’s perfidy—none at all in the case of Wild Bill.
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