Cotton-topped ladies man Richard Cohen hilariously poses as a "liberal" columnist at the Washington Post, despite being... how can we put this gently... a power-worshiping bigot. Don't take our word for it. Please, read the paragraph he wrote today. 
 
 Mr. Cohen's column today centers on the prospects that various Republican contenders for the 2016 presidential nomination may have in the Iowa caucus. Iowa, Cohen notes, is a conservative state, which may pose a challenge for Republicans perceived as moderate. 
 
 Then, out of nowhere, comes this paragraph, which we have bolded for ease of reading: 
 
 Today's GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn't look like their country at all. 
 
 I... I... think, perhaps, that even in the most generous of interpretations, that could have been... more clearly stated? 
 
 Richard Cohen, professional newspaper columnist, knows exactly how "conservatives" with "conventional views" feel about interracial couples: sick to their god damn stomachs. Don't even get Richard Cohen started on lesbians. 
 
 In conclusion, fire Richard Cohen. ||||| I'm not sure what, if anything, Jeff Bezos will do to try to turn around the financial fortunes of the Washington Post. But Richard Cohen's column today suggests one small step that the owner of the daily paper in a majority-black city could take—reconsider whether regularly publishing racist op-ed columns is a wise business strategy. 
 
 Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all. 
 
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 I'm sure there's some market niche for columns denouncing miscegenation and race mixing, but is it really the Washington, DC market? That seems very questionable to me. Obviously eliminating Cohen-related expenditures would not, on its own, bring the Post to solvency. But every little bit helps. 
 
 
 
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 UPDATE: For the record, there's nothing conventional about gagging at interracial marriage: ||||| There are four, and only four, Richard Cohen columns. 
 
 1. Boring conventional political column 
 
 2. Inscrutable, unfunny joke column 
 
 3. "I am scared of black people" column 
 
 4. "I am shocked and outraged that people called me racist/idiotic/humorless" column 
 
 We are due for a number four any day now. He probably has one or two pre-written ones, just waiting for those moments when people remember Richard Cohen's existence and read the latest things he has said. Here's today's entry (emphasis mine): 
 
 Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all. 
 
 They're not racist, they're just disgusted at the prospect of miscegenation. And it's a perfectly natural revulsion! 
 
 The trouble with this paragraph is the use of the word "conventional" instead of, say, "retrograde" or "archaic" or "racist." What kind of mind, and person, says "conventional" there? What kind of mind, and person, just automatically thinks of "conventional" "people" as reactionary, racist whites? Neutral, normal people, for Cohen, are always reactionary whites; remember how black kids in hoodies are wearing a "uniform we all recognize"? That "we all" there was doing the same work the "people with conventional views" is doing here. Those choices reveal a man very much out of touch with this era and deeply discomfited by it. (They also reveal a man who is terrified of black people.) 
 
 So, here in the real world, in 2013, the vast majority of Americans "approve" of interracial marriage. Majorities have approved since the mid-1990s. Seventy percent of people over 65 approve of black-white marriage. The "conventional" view, now, is that multiracial families are normal. "People with conventional views" are much more appalled by unreconstructed racism than by seeing a white man and a black woman raise a family together. 
 
 Keep in mind, Richard Cohen is only in his early 70s. He is in his early 70s, and he is from New York City. He is a secular liberal Jewish New Yorker who was in college, in New York City, at the height of the counterculture and New Left and civil rights movements. He did not grow up in the South during Jim Crow, or the lily-white rural Midwest. New York is one of the few American states that never even passed an anti-miscegenation law. If movies are what it takes for Richard Cohen to learn to see people of other races as human, I can only wonder why he didn't see "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which came out while he was attending Columbia University. 
 
 As I recently wrote, Richard Cohen is begging, perhaps subconsciously, to be bought out and allowed to retire. Today it's obvious that whoever edits him has the same desire. I'm not sure how someone other than Cohen could have looked at this column and thought that "people with conventional views" was a normal, acceptable way of describing a minuscule minority of racist white Americans. Please, Jeff Bezos, take heed. People with conventional views -- people with conventional human empathy -- must repress a gag reflex when reading nearly anything Richard Cohen writes. 
 
 UPDATE: I just wanted to add an update here, based on Richard Cohen's response to the uproar that greeted this awful column. You will not be shocked to learn that the man who once proclaimed himself the target of a "digital lynch mob," because too many people were emailing him, is reasonably sure that he is The Real Victim Here. 
 
 "The word racist is truly hurtful," he told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "It's not who I am. It's not who I ever was. It's just not fair. It's just not right." 
 
 Poor thing! 
 
 Just to clear things up, Cohen is not grossed out by interracial relationships, everyone: 
 
 When asked if he believed that people who do “have a gag reflex” at the idea of interracial marriage are in fact racist, he said that he did. “I could have picked a better word, but it didn't ring any bells with anybody, it didn't ring any bells with me,” he continued. “But there is a context to the column. You've got to read the whole column and if you read the whole column you can't honestly think that these are my views or I endorse the views that I articulated in the column.” 
 
 This is my favorite part of this interview, because here we learn that when you read a Richard Cohen column out loud to Richard Cohen, he is like, no, of course not, who would even think such a stupid thing! He thinks he is defending himself, but he is actually directly contradicting the thing he wrote. Cohen didn't just refer to disgust with interracial marriage as a "conventional view," he explicitly said it wasn't racist. While Cohen can claim to have been describing the views of others when he mentioned gut discomfort with interracial relationships, there's no way to get around the fact that he straight-up prefaced that description with the words, "today's GOP is not racist." 
 
 Again and again, the way Cohen writes about race -- the specific words and phrases he uses -- suggest a man deeply uncomfortable with diversity and modernity projecting his views onto others -- "people with conventional views," this time, and "we all," when he wrote about Trayvon Martin's "uniform." So, no, he does not think he is racist, of course not. He has no problem with mutiracial families! He just sympathizes with people who do, until you point out to him what that sympathy implies, at which point he finally achieves some level of awareness. 
 
 Not too much awareness, though: 
 
 Cohen has been criticized for his comments on race in the past. When asked why he thought it was that he keeps getting caught up in racially charged arguments, he said that it's because people view him as a liberal and find some of his positions unconventional. "Every once in a while I take an unconventional stance as a liberal -- as someone who has always been called a liberal," he said. "If someone on the right wrote this, no one would care. No one would make a big deal about it but because I veer every once in awhile from orthodoxy, or maybe more than once in awhile, I get plastered this way." 
 
 Richard Cohen pondering why he is so often in hot water over remarks relating to race suggests nothing so much as this classic (and NSFW) Onion article. (I believe Tom Scocca was the first person to draw this particular comparison.) Why do I keep getting in trouble when I write nearly anything related to race in America? It must be... because... I am an unconventional liberal...? 
 
 Michael Kinsley is an unconventional liberal who frequently writes contrarian things, and he does not cause a race-related shitstorm every six months. Fox News Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen have devoted the last decade to openly trolling the left and even they manage to avoid constantly getting credibly accused of writing racist things. Lanny Davis hasn't managed to sound as stupid on race as Cohen does every time he writes about it. I think it's something other than unconventionality. 
 
 Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, meanwhile, says he should have probably edited the offending sentence "more carefully," which just seems like a tacit admission that no one is editing Cohen at all. 
 
 I also should add that I left out the fifth Richard Cohen column. As Eamon Murphy pointed out, it is, "weird rumination on sexual norms." (See, for example, this. And, I guess, this.) I deeply regret the omission. ||||| Richard Cohen's column in Tuesday's Washington Post— arguing that George Zimmerman was right to assume Trayvon Martin was a criminal, because he was a black male—is racist and wrong. More important, it's wrong because it's racist. That is, it's not that Cohen is "wrong" in the oh-that's-so-politically-incorrect sense. It's that he's wrong because the assumptions he makes about race and crime are not based on facts. 
 
 Cohen appears to believe all black men are the same, and that they are violent. Cohen says he's "tired" of politicians and activists "who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist." He justifies Zimmerman's assumption that Martin was a criminal by citing statistics about crime in New York. "In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects—almost all of them young men," Cohen writes. "We know them from the nightly news." While New York's stop-and-frisk program has been criticized for disproportionately targeting minorities, Cohen says, "if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk." If police "ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work." 
 
 "Urban crime" is shorthand for young black people committing crimes in big cities on the verge of collapse. But Martin wasn't killed in Cabrini-Green. He was killed in Sanford, Florida (population 53,570), inside a gated community called the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which has about 260 townhouses. The alleged crime was a suburban crime. And, just for the record, it was not the black kid who was just acquitted of it. 
 
 Cohen is trying to conjure images of urban blight in the 1980s—back when, as Matt Yglesias points out, Cohen argued that it was okay for jewelry store owners to refuse to let black people in because they were afraid of crime. Today, Cohen writes that even the black male president should be scared of black males: 
 
 In his acclaimed Philadelphia speech on race, [President Obama] cited his grandmother as “a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street.” How about the former Barry Obama? When he was a Columbia University student living on the lip of then-dangerous Harlem, did he never have the same fear? 
 
 The thing is, a lot has changed since the 1980s. Reading Cohen's column, you'd get the impression that there was an epidemic of crime committed by black people. Too bad he didn't read Jamelle Bouie's article in The Daily Beast a day earlier, about "the Myth of Black-on-Black Crime." Crime rates have been dropping for 20 years. (Just for the record, New York's murder rate in 2012 was the lowest since the 1960s.) If black people were predisposed to committing crimes, Bouie points out, "you would still see high rates of crime among blacks, even as the nation sees a historic decline in criminal offenses. Instead, crime rates among African-Americans, and black youth in particular, have taken a sharp drop." Fewer than 10 percent of black kids in Washington, D.C., the home of Cohen's employer, "are in a gang, have sold drugs, have carried a gun, or have stolen more than $100 in goods." 
 
 Cohen is upset that no one is talking about the epidemic of black violence that isn't real. "Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?" he asks. "Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment... It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life." 
 
 It is unacceptable to complain that "nobody is talking about X" when you have an Internet connection. You can find people talking about anything. Email me, and I can point you to the top 10 '90s nostalgia GIF tumblrs. But you wouldn't need to dig for people saying we should be afraid of black violence—warning, say, that black people would riot if Zimmerman were acquitted. You could just flip on Rush Limbaugh. 
 
 Studies have shown poverty has more to do with crime than race does. More unexpectedly, research published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2001 found that people are more likely to think their neighborhood has a higher crime rate if more young black men live there. The Retreat at Twin Lakes is a multi-ethnic neighborhood—about half white, 20 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent black, The Daily Beast's Amy Green reports. George Zimmerman had called police 46 times. He organized the neighborhood watch. Cohen writes, "There’s no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy—the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason." With his column, Cohen is perpetuating the attitude that made that tragedy possible. 
 
 Update: Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt tells the Huffington Post, "If I had not published the column, just as many people would be asking why the Post can’t tolerate diverse points of view." He added, "I think if people want a 'conversation about race,' as is frequently suggested, they should be open to a range of views and perspectives." There are a range of issues where on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand makes sense, because there are compelling arguments and data on both sides: campaign finance, defense spending, charter schools. But it's a little tone deaf on this issue: some people think black teenagers are dangerous monsters, some people think holding that opinion is an unconscionable danger to black teenagers. 
 
 Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at ereeve at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire. 
 
 Elspeth Reeve ||||| In the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has penned a controversial column in which he defends George Zimmerman's suspicion of Travyon Martin and calls on politicians to acknowledge that a disproportionate amount of crimes are committed by black males. 
 
 In a somewhat befuddling line, Cohen wrote that he "can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize." 
 
 "A hoodie," Cohen told POLITICO when asked what he meant by that line. "It's what's worn by a whole lot of thugs. Look in the newspapers, online or on television: you see a lot of guys in the mugshots wearing hoodies." 
 
 I pointed out that Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, is also known to wear a hoodie. 
 
 "Right, so it's the uniform of billionaires and thugs," Cohen said with a chuckle. 
 
 Cohen's column has been met with some criticism on Twitter, and it's fair to expect that we'll see a handful of "shame on you" columns (like this one) within the hour. Cohen said he anticipated this return-fire before the piece had even been published. 
 
 "This is not the first time I've dealt with the issue," he told me. "Each time, the counter-argument is that I'm a racist." 
 
 (WATCH: Zimmerman trial juror speaks out) 
 
 Indeed, in 1986 the Washington Post had to apologize for a column Cohen wrote in which he "sided with city jewelry store owners who refuse to allow young black men to enter their shops because of a fear of crime." 
 
 When I asked Cohen about this, he corrected me: "I didn't say 'black men,' I said 'young black men who were dressed in a certain way,'" he said. (The column actually just referenced "young black males," regardless of attire.) 
 
 Cohen says he's not a racist, and described Martin's death as a tragedy. "I think it was atrocious," he said. 
 
 But he also said it was unfair to accuse someone of racism simply because they thought a young black man in a hoodie might be a criminal. 
 
 "What I'm trying to deal with is, I'm trying to remove this fear from racism. I don't think it's racism to say, 'this person looks like a menace,'" he explained. "Now, a menace in another part of the country could be a white guy wearing a wife-beater under-shirt. Or, if you're a black guy in the South and you come around the corner and you see a member of the Klu Klux Klan." 
 
 The Washington Post is standing behind Cohen. 
 
 "I think if people want a 'conversation about race, as is frequently suggested, they should be open to a range of views and perspectives," Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial page editor, told the Huffington Post. 
 
 "If I had not published the column, just as many people would be asking why the Post can’t tolerate diverse points of view," he said. 
 
 Read more about: Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, Richard Cohen ||||| Cohen said he believes the keynote speaker will encourage a conversation about the healing of race relations and the role people can play to bring about racial healing. He anticipates Dolezal will help bring about similar discussions. She is expected to participate in a structured conversation with representatives of the NAACP and African-American Studies professors from area universities to “allow a fuller understanding of how she has come to view racial identity and what we might learn from her perspective,” according to Jireh Management. 
 
 
 
 [...] 
 
 
 
 “We are not trying to win everybody, but we are trying to remind everyone what the true values are in life,” he said. “When we talk about MLK, we talk about a man that sacrificed his life to make sure that equality was experienced for all man and that justice was given and forgiveness.” 
 
 
 
 Dolezal, who was born to white parents, drew national attention last year after resigning as president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Wash., following allegations that she lied about her racial identity. 
 
 Hurricane Matthew continued to confound forecasters Wednesday, as the storm’s movement slowed and its expected track shifted to the east, away from North Carolina’s coast. [...] 
 
 
 
 The forecast changed in part when Matthew slowed down over the Caribbean, reducing the influence of an upper-level trough of low pressure that had been expected to steer the storm northward into the Carolinas, said Ryan Ellis, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Raleigh. There’s still some uncertainty in the models, Ellis said, as well as factors, such as its interaction with land along the coast, that could change the storm’s strength and trajectory. “This has been one of the hardest ones to predict that I can remember,” Ellis said. 
 
 "College is about learning, and it is our expectation that the members of the Marching Pirates will learn from this experience and fulfill their responsibilities. While we affirm the right of all our students to express their opinions, protests of this nature by the Marching Pirates will not be tolerated moving forward." The university's chancellor, Cecil Staton, held a different tune. "While we acknowledge and understand the disappointment felt by many Pirate fans in response to the events at the beginning of today's football game, we urge all Pirate students, supporters and participants to act with respect for each other's views," he said. 
 
 Republicans worry that Mr. Trump’s difficulties in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, where Republican incumbents are caught between their own base and moderate voters appalled by the party’s nominee, could hand Democrats those decisive seats. Senator Kelly Ayotte, the Republican up for re-election in New Hampshire, demonstrated the vise she is in this week when she said at a debate that Mr. Trump would represent a good role model for children, only to recant a few hours later. 
 
 Compounding their difficulties, Republicans are also fending off a challenge to Senator Richard M. Burr in North Carolina, a state Mrs. Clinton is determined to win, and have also become just as worried about Senator Roy Blunt’s prospects in Missouri. Strategists in both parties who have seen internal polling say Mr. Blunt, whose seat initially seemed safe, is now trailing his Democratic challenger, Jason Kander, a deft campaigner who has been helped by Mrs. Clinton’s narrowing deficit in the state. 
 
 
 
 But Newton’s offensive teammates all repeated Rivera’s “next man up” mantra and expressed their faith in Anderson. The 11-year veteran has made only two starts in six seasons with Carolina: He beat Tampa Bay twice in 2014 when Newton was sidelined with injuries. “Me and D.A. were just joking the other day how ironic it is he’s always playing against Tampa Bay whenever Cam gets injured or something,” Webb said. “Just going to go out there and have fun. 
 
 Sunday’s 48-33 loss to the Falcons dropped the Panthers to 1-3 and gave them two more losses than they had all of last season. Of the seven teams that have gone 15-1 or better, none has started as poorly as the Panthers the following season. Since the NFL went to the current, 12-team playoff format in 1990, 27 teams that were 1-3 or 0-4 through four games made the playoffs. But only one reached the Super Bowl – the 2001 Patriots, who won it. 
 
 Good morning. who is white , is speaking on a panel during the town's Martin Luther King Day celebration. From the Cary News Dolezal is not black. There's little she can add to a conversation about the black experience during an event that's ostensibly supposed to celebrate it. And while her case is certainly interesting, the idea that giving her a platform keeps with the true spirit of what MLK was fighting for is horribly missing the point.There's also this tidbit:I know we're living in a post-Gawker world , but those weren't allegations, those were facts. That actually happened.The MLK Dreamfest is in January, so we'll see keep you posted on updates.Looks like we might be looking at another false alarm . From the N&O:So yeah, keep an eye on it.A day after an ESPN affiliate announced it wouldn't carry this weekend's ECU gam e, E CU officials announced that the protest would "not be tolerated."When even the father of Georgia's voter ID laws thinks you're undermining freedom of speech, you should probably take a step back and reassess the situation. And given that ECU is a public institution, you can conceivably make a case that First Amendment rights are being violated.From the New York Times North Carolina's own flailing Senator Richard Burr gets a shout-out, too.Right now, Democrats are in the driver's seat to take back a slim majority of the Senate, as they're expected to pick up seats in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, and Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania and Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire hold slim polling leads against Republican incumbents there.A bad month by Trump, though, could mean the difference not just in North Carolina, but (as the Times notes) Nevada and Missouri, as well. Even if the Democrats get the best possible scenario of an eight-seat swing in the Senate to give them fifty-four seats, they'll still be six seats shy of a filibuster-proof majority; given how bleak 2018 looks for liberals, however, they're going to need all the help that they can get.Newton's still in the NFL's concussion protocol, so the Panthers may have to trot out Derek Anderson, who's luckily one of the better backups in the league. From theAs you may be aware, the Panthers have sucked this year.The Buccaneers are 1-3 too, so this is as good of a time as any to stop sucking.That's all for today. Go forth and be merry.
– Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is raising a lot of eyebrows today with his latest column, which is about Iowa's conservative Republicans and includes, well, this: "People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all." "Cohen hilariously poses as a 'liberal' columnist at the Washington Post, despite being ... how can we put this gently ... a power-worshiping bigot," writes Hamilton Nolan at Gawker. At Salon, Alex Pareene takes issue with Cohen's use of the word conventional: "What kind of mind, and person, just automatically thinks of 'conventional' 'people' as reactionary, racist whites? Neutral, normal people, for Cohen, are always reactionary whites," and Cohen himself is "terrified of black people." Two other writers—Matthew Yglesias at Slate and Ezra Klein at Cohen's own paper—point out recent Gallup polls finding that the conventional view, actually, is very much in favor of interracial marriage. Nolan and Yglesias both seem to think Cohen should be fired, and Twitter definitely wants to see him get the boot. "Obviously eliminating Cohen-related expenditures would not, on its own, bring the [struggling] Post to solvency," Yglesias writes. "But every little bit helps." Indeed, Cohen has a history of sparking outrage with his columns. See: The time he finally realized slavery was actually pretty awful, and Wonkette responded gloriously. The time he sympathized with George Zimmerman and noted that Trayvon Martin did, after all, appear to be "wearing a uniform we all recognize." The time he linked Miley Cyrus' twerking to the Steubenville rape case.