WaPo status - Has Cohen responded to anyone here?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

Cohen laid into Steven Colbert, calling him a bully, not funny and not comparable to the truly funny Bush twins. No, not the pot smoking ones in New York, the ones in DC at the Correspondents' dinner.

More than a few of us wrote Mr. Cohen. Some of the letters were entertaining, most of the letters were well thought out and interesting, and a few people here did such a fine job that I am in awe of their way with words. (I bow generally in their direction in my most unMonty Python fashion)

Has anyone received even an acknowledgment that he received and read these tender, loving missives? I have not.

I suspect that he took a royal dump
of his e-mail
then wiped using the latest poll results from USA Today.

[acmejack]

1. Not the letter I wrote him!

No surprise, though, while not obscene, it was as blistering as I could make it.

[Missy M]

2. No response or acknowledgment to me.

[Chalco]

3. Good question.

Here's what my neighbor wrote to him:

"Dear Mr. Cohen,

Colbert was no court jester. He was a vessel. He was the voice of tens, if not hundreds of millions of disgusted Americans who no longer have a voice in this shattered democracy. You think Colbert was rude? Bullying? Bush deserved worse. Bush should have been brought whimpering to his knees, begging for grace.

This is a president who cherrypicks his audience, doesn't read, smiles and nods while a city drowns, sends other people's children to their death, robs the student to pay the millionaire, hoodwinks the elderly and ill, sells our land to the oil and timber barons, promotes cataclysmic global warming through his greedy policies, lies like Pinocchio, and frankly couldn't give a rat's ass about you and me. So I wonder what you get out of sucking up to him?"

Chalco

[speedoo]

4. That letter to Cohen is freakin' brilliant.

Concise and hard hitting. Kudos to your neighbor.

[DrRang]

5. There's a bit on atrios.blogspot.com that reprints Cohen's

column, wherein he disses the letterwriters and says he didn't read much of all that "hateful" mail he got about his Colbert column.

[deutsey]

6. Tell me if my letter is "hateful"

Mr. Cohen,

You say you are a funny person. While I have seen no evidence of that in what I have read of your writing, I'll take you at your word. "Being funny," after all, is something of a subjective thing. The same people who find Richard Pryor or George Carlin hilarious probably fail to see the humor in Larry the Cable Guy or Adam Sandler, and vice versa.

As an independent Mark Twain scholar, though, I think I know a little something about American satire; enough to know, anyway, that it isn't always intended to be "funny" in the same way other kinds of humor are meant to be.

If you read Twain's essay "To a Person Sitting in Darkness," for example, you will probably conclude it isn't very funny at all. Twain's invective against US imperialism contradicts the avuncular image of the old man in a white suite spouting folksy aphorisms that we associate with Twain. This essay (and many others he wrote throughout his life) isn't funny but it is damn good satire, the kind of satire that is meant to afflict the comfortable.

However, in 1901 The New York Times in poo-poo'ed the essay much the same manner you critique Colbert's speech. Scolding a reader who wrote in support of "To a Person Sitting in Darkness," the NYT pontificated:

"A man who makes it his vocation to be funny is not called upon late in life to develop a historical conscience."

Knowing what I know of Twain, he didn't make such a distinction between being funny and developing a historical conscience. Based on what I heard in Colbert's speech, I don't think he does either.

It's a pity that critics like yourself do.

[Roland99]

8. Pfffft...you made him run to his dictionary a few too many times!

:D

[chaumont58]

7. Cohen has lost it. He's a beltway whore

and always has been. Dems would be better off forgetting this sob, he is as worthless as teats on a boar hog.