Those Who Would Give Up Their Liberty For Some Temporary Security Deserve Richard Cohen
We are ruled by cowards and fools:
There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America’s critics but the message sent to Americans themselves. When, oh when, will this administration wake up?
Osama Bin Laden has already beaten Richard Cohen. Cohen is so scared, so terrified that he is perfectly willing to throw away everything that keeps us safe in order to be protected from his terrors. Maybe, just maybe, if the country was really fundamentally threatened by Bin Laden this might be justifiable. Might. But Bin Laden is not a threat to this country. He cannot conquer it. He cannot cripple it. He cannot bankrupt it, directly. He can kill Americans, in sometimes spectacular fashion, but he cannot threaten the well-being of the country as a whole. And yet Cohen wants to legalize torture:
Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded,
Never mind that torture just doesn’t work. (And it doesn’t. History has proven that torture is effective pretty only for getting people to tell you what you want to hear. ) It is a moral abomination, a strike against the best of our morals and a direct assault on the dignity of the individual. It directly contravenes the Fifth Amendment and punishes a person who has not been convicted of the crime in question. It either breaks the practitioners or turns them into monsters and it absolutely destroys the people it is practiced upon. It is among the lowest forms of human behavior, the mark of the savage. And Cohen wants to embrace in the face of what is, in historical context, a nothing of a threat? What the hell would this coward have done in the face of a Hitler or Stalin?
My wife and I talk about current events all the time, as probably surprises no one. We have young children, so we sometimes uses euphemisms and talk around issues. Recently the eight year old asked for details for something we were talking about, something that involved kidnapping in Haiti. When we tried to talk around what we thought were the scary details, he said “No. Tell me the whole truth.”
Richard Cohen doesn’t have the strength of character of my eight year old. He doesn’t want to know the whole, scary truth. He wants the President to lie to him, to tell him that world isn’t a scary place, that 24 isn’t just a show, that torture is perfect and that nothing will ever, ever hurt him ever again. The real world isn’t like that. It is telling that my eight year old can face up to that and Richard Cohen cannot.
Screw bin Laden, people like this are scared of their own neighbors and countrymen. They build gated communities to protect themselves from the same people who vote for them, read their columns, grant them stature and influence, or consume their goods. Forget an Islamic extremists, these people can walk past an African American high school student without clutching their wallet and intently avoiding anything remotely resembling eye contact.
An absolute shame that this cowardly bitch and unquestionable hack can claim Far Rock as his birthplace – ironic too, considering that since the wave of gentrification scraping NYC of all its character, parts of Far Rock are among the few areas of the city that still retain their Dinkins-era street cred. (But then again, Cohen graduated only four years after Brown vs. Board of Ed anyway, so his whole roots thing is likely moot in the first place.) Anyway, stick to fucking Peter Jennings’ wife and sexually harassing your co-workers. If we want your opinion we’ll ask a high school freshman from Edgemere to beat it out you.
The hilarity is that this geriatric douche is supposed to be one of WaPo’s more liberal voices.
Digg brings up something I haven’t seen explicitly discussed about the current wars. It does occur in Digg’s invective, not his analysis, so I’m afraid I can’t give him credit to doing so either.
Geriatric. Why is geriatric an insult under color of politics? “That old lie, ‘Dulce et decorum est’“.
It has long been common wisdom that wars are bought by old men but paid for by young. Part of the deep-seated anger during the Vietnam War focused on this, but I’ve really heard nothing of it about Afghanistan and Iraq. What’s the difference?
The most obvious possibility is the draft. I certainly was keenly aware that until my 26th birthday, I could be required to kill or be killed for the gilded egos of politicians whom I neither voted for nor trusted.
Discussions of age were present during Obama’s candidacy, but they were largely logistical in that they focused no McCain’s potential replacement, and on the assuption that the younger candidate was more appealing to young voters. But I think that underestimates the importance of Obama being one of our younger presidents. Certainly some of the media furor about him comes from commentators find him alien because of his youth (Reports of the “terrorist fist jab”, in addition to being hyperbolic partisan name-calling, amounted to shock and confusion that he wasn’t an ancient fossil incapable of contemporary expression.), and many of his policy stances, especially being pro-technology, are basically positive evaluations of newness, including youth.
I have come to any deep conclusions yet, but I think one of the oldest conflicts in politics, like class conflict, is generational conflict. And normally war brings that to the fore; why hasn’t it this time?