Go, Dickie, Go!

From Richard Cohen in the Washington Post in 2006 on the war in Iraq:

We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.

Let's see. I'm not doing too well today. Who can I beat up on so I'll feel better? I need me some therapeutic violent action on someone else, preferably someone weaker than I am - some bully violence.

Cohen has a regular gig at the Washington Post, the closest we have to a national newspaper besides USA Today.

In his column today, Cohen says:

Blogger Alert: I have written a column in defense of Dick Cheney. I know how upsetting this will be to some Cheney critics, and I count myself as one, who think -- in respectful paraphrase of what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman -- that everything he says is a lie, including the ands and the thes. Yet I have to wonder whether what he is saying now is the truth -- i.e., torture works.

Is Cohen talking to me? No, surely not. He's talking to the big-name bloggers. Is he losing his mind? That's seems a possibility to me.

Cohen goes on:

Cheney is a one-man credibility gap. In the past, he has said, "We know they [the Iraqis] have biological and chemical weapons," when it turned out we knew nothing of the sort. He insisted that "the evidence is overwhelming" that al-Qaeda had been in high-level contact with Saddam Hussein's regime when the "evidence" was virtually nonexistent. And he repeatedly asserted that Iraq had a menacing nuclear weapons program. As a used-car dealer, he would have no return customers.

Still, every dog has his day, and Cheney is barking up a storm on the efficacy of what can colloquially be called torture.

When Cheney barks Cohen listens. Cheney lies over and over, yet Cohen is still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Go, Dickie, go.

Is Cohen the best that the WP can do to fill the space on their opinion pages? I'll wager his pay is not chickenfeed, either. Is it any wonder that blog readership grows as newspaper readership diminishes?

H/T to Atrios.