You are aware that Richard Cohen totally lost his mind on 9-11, right? He really did - he's never been the same. He went from a mediocre centrist Democrat to a wild-eyed and absolutely scared shitless war cheerleader.

New campaign ad.

[Fade in]

McCain: Hi, I'm John McCain and I'm running for President. I was a POW during Vietnam.

[Fade out]

McCain: I'm John McCain and I approve this message...and was a POW.

McCain IS a known commodity...a loose cannon.

Creepy. I just made a comment in the other thread talking about how McCain's gaffes were probably underreported and Obama's were overreported because Obama was the "unknown" candidate. The idea that McCain's POW background inoculates him is idiotic. There's just no logical connection there.

I've been thinking it over, though and it seems basic psychology provides a better explanation for the difference in media treatment for gaffes. If you're at a party and some drunk guy you never met breaks with a window with his fist, you're going to think, "Man, what a dick!" If some friend you've known for years does it though, you'd go, "Man, John's so wacky when he gets drunk!" If you've formed a positive impression of someone, that image is pretty resilient and any negative actions are seen as being exceptions rather than the rule, or are downplayed as character quirks.

That's the issue Obama has to face. He has to be on his best behavior because he's introducing himself to people. It's hard for us to consider him "unknown" after this long primary season but not everyone reads the newspaper. Also, people are predisposed to be suspicious of him because his name's funny or he's not that experienced or he's black or whatever. At what point does he become "known", though? After he becomes President?

McCain has either reversed himself or significantly amended his positions on immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign spending (as it applies to use of his wife's corporate airplane) and, most recently, offshore drilling. In the more distant past, he has denounced then embraced certain ministers of medieval views and changed his mind about the Confederate flag, which flies by state sanction in South Carolina only, I suspect, to provide Republican candidates with a chance to choose tradition over common decency. There, I've said it all.

He didn't say ALL of his reversals, and the one he chose to leave out is glaring. McCain, the man who experienced torture, reversed his stance against torture. That right there tells me that while he once had a line he would not cross, the line has been completely eradicated by presidential ambition.

I bet somebody at the Post asked Richard Cohen to "write something funny."

POW?

You mean Songbird?

what?

You mean the corporate media doesn't like it when the facts challenge their pre-determined narrative of events?

I just don't understand how people still seem surprised or disappointed when it happens.

Its just what the corporate media does. They don't like challenging pre-conceived notions because that would rock the boat, and if you rock the boat, you endanger the profit margins.

McFuddle's credibilty has not been established or tested on the true national landscape and the fact he gets this free rdie for his and his campaign's gaffes truly show a media bias. He is campaigning an image and the image he shows is really scary and not ready to be commander-in-chief! He is truly unfit and a "mental midget" to handle the complex world we live in. His world left us thirty years ago!

Good line from an Al Gore DCCC fundraising Email:

If our candidates are successful, we will have leaders who will no longer trade in fear and failure...who will fight for real action on the climate crisis and achieve progress on health care and jobs.

Our fear of their failures. I like it

As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over.

Awesome! So as president, McCain would be a craven, opportunistic sellout on the economy, tax cuts, foreign policy, immigration, civil liberties, domestic spying, and campaign spending . . . but if he were to be taken hostage by a foreign country and tortured, THEN his sense of honor and principle would kick in! So good to think about being under the protection of such a man.

As soon as I saw the title of Cohens column (I refused to click on it) I figured he would end up Atrios' wanker of the day. The WaPo opinion page is as close to a toxic waste dump as you get this side of the Wall Street Journal.

Fortunately, in the Internet age, columnists like Cohen have little or no influence that they once had.
I,too, do not need to read his column because it's similar to the drivel he's been producing since 2002.
Cohen appears to be part of a cadre of baby-boomer campaign beat writers who ducked the war in Vietnam, and who attempt to assuage their guilt by fawning over and accepting without question, anything uttered by McCain.
Cohen burnished his hack credentials by being a cheerleader for Bush's war in Iraq.
'nuff said.

I don't think "envy" is the right word here. I'm thinking guilt is the operative driving force.

During the last elections in 2004 and 2006, I used to yell regularly at Dickie Cohen and the WaPo. I think I even heard back once in response to a particularly biting letter. But he never changed. He kept going on doing his wankery. He's the energizer bunny of wankers.

Why doesn't anyone ever call these partsan, lickspittle pundits out on their truly hideous bias?

If Purple Hearts awarded by our own military commanders and actual shrapnel embedded in one's flesh isn't proof enough that someone honorably served, why should ANY hearsay account of what the Viet Cong said or did to a captive be proof of anything?

Cohen sat back and wrung his hands while the Swiftboaters assailled Kerry's character, and flip flopping was made out to be his most serious character flaw. Why didn't Cohen lather up Kerry as being of unquestionable character and unassailable because he stood up for country and put himself in harms way when we needed him to? Where were the articles about Kerry's unquestionable bottomline?

Answer: There were none - he just likes McCain, and I guess it is "just for his candor and verbosity on the straight talk express." Lot of good that's going to do us.

i guess this also explains why mccain gets a free ride from the media

http://www.sensico.wordpress.com

Tena, Eco and NCSteve... I think you are on to something. Whether we call it military hero worship or armed services envy, the MSM are starstruck by McCain and simply cannot examine his record, dissect his experience or critique his policies without nauseating reference to his "maverick" status. At last, Cohen has brought our problem out in the open, by calling it what it is. That is, Maverick is code for Cojones: McCain is simply more of a man than Obama, as he has undergone the ultimate in presidential vetting: torture! Free pass! This is psychodrama on so many subconscious levels, that the media can hardly speak of it, much less examine and understand it, and free themselves of it in order to practice respectable journalism.

"We know his bottom line..." What does that mean? Does it mean he won't pander to the likes of Jerry Falwell & Pat Robertson whom he once dissed? Or, that he'd never condone the use of torture by the United States, because he himself had been tortured? Or that he won't want to make Bush's economically disasterous tax cuts permanent, after opposing them in the first place? And on, and on. Just what is his "bottom line"? Cohen never says

Formerly NT Steve: "Their official position is, and always has been, that, as a beacon of decency and humanity, their country doesn't torture, so by their evil, perverse circular "logic," whatever they did to him was not, and could not have been, torture."

Hey! That's OUR official position! Wow. What a coincidence. And George Bush came up with it without ever being in Vietnam.

Seriously: Can't you just hear the asterisk in his voice when Duhbya says we don't torture* ???

* The infliction of pain equivalent to organ failure or death.

(Of course, if they die, you're doing it wrong...)