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. ||||| 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. ||||| 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: ||||| The day after Chris Christie, the cuddly moderate conservative, won a landslide reelection as the Republican governor of Democratic New Jersey, I took the Internet Express out to Iowa, surveying its various newspapers, blogs and such to see how he might do in the GOP caucuses, won last time by Rick Santorum, neither cuddly nor moderate. Superstorm Sandy put Christie on the map. The winter snows of Iowa could bury him. 
 
 From a Web site called the Iowa Republican, I learned that part of the problem with John McCain and Mitt Romney, seriatim losers to Barack Obama, “is they were deemed too moderate by many Iowa conservatives.” The sort of candidates Iowa Republicans prefer have already been in the state. The blog cited Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah (considered to the right of Cruz, if such a thing is possible), Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s recent vice presidential candidate and its resident abacus, and the inevitable Sarah Palin, the Alaska quitter who, I think, actually now lives in Arizona. If this is the future of the GOP, then it’s in the past. 
 
 None of these candidates bears the slightest resemblance to Christie. And the more literate of them — that’s not you, Palin — must have chortled over post-election newspaper columns extolling Christie as precisely the sort of candidate the GOP ought to run in 2016. This is the dream of moderate Republicans, but not many of them vote in the Iowa caucuses or the South Carolina primary, two of the early nominating contests. 
 
 At the moment, it is Cruz, not Christie, who has seized the imagination of Iowa Republicans. Cruz has not only been to the state, but he also was accompanied by his evangelist father, Rafael, a colorful preacher who opposes almost anything, including, of course, same-sex marriage. (“It was Adam and Eve, it was not Adam and Steve,” he recently said.) 
 
 Cruz the younger is not merely tea party to the nth degree, he is a Christian conservative as well — and for 22 percent of Iowa’s “likely 2016 caucusgoers,” polled by the Des Moines Register, that’s who they think stands the best chance of winning the presidency. The No. 1 choice (44 percent) was “a candidate focused on civil liberties and a small government rooted in the U.S. Constitution.” Christie can passably argue that he is that, but no one is going to call him a Christian conservative. After all, he opposed same-sex marriage in New Jersey, but he acquiesced. Cruz would not to do that. He’d still be talking — and Steve would still be single. 
 
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 Iowa not only is a serious obstacle for Christie and other Republican moderates, it also suggests something more ominous: the Dixiecrats of old. Officially the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they were breakaway Democrats whose primary issue was racial segregation. In its cause, they ran their own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond, and almost cost Harry Truman the 1948 election. They didn’t care. Their objective was not to win — although that would have been nice — but to retain institutional, legal racism. They saw a way of life under attack and they feared its loss. 
 
 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. 
 
 As with the Dixiecrats, the fight is not over a particular program — although Obamacare comes close — but about a tectonic shift of attitudes. I thank Dennis J. Goldford, professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, for leading me to a live performance on YouTube of Merle Haggard singing “Are the Good Times Really Over.” This chestnut, a lament for a lost America, has been viewed well more than 2 million times. It could be the tea party’s anthem. 
 
 For all his positions and religious beliefs, Christie is too Joisey for the tea party — too brash, as well. He would be wise to steer clear of Iowa lest he lose or, worse, follow Romney and take on the deeply conservative coloration of the state’s GOP. That might make him (barely) acceptable to Republican Iowans but anathema to the rest of us. 
 
 Read more from Richard Cohen’s archive. ||||| 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 ||||| Cotton-topped moron Richard Cohen is, of course, an awful newspaper columnist. We're used to his steady stream of ill-concealed bigotry, horny romance diatribes, and routine contempt for the entire idea of "journalism." But now, Richard Cohen is forging bold new frontiers of fucked up sexual obsession. 
 
 "Miley Cyrus, Steubenville and teen culture run amok," goes the headline of today's column by elderly Washingtonian Richard Cohen. Richard Cohen, a man who has publicly defended the child rapist Roman Polanski and the sexual harasser Clarence Thomas and who was once reprimanded for sexually harassing a 23 year-old colleague, is who we all turn to for the final word in sexual morality, particularly as it concerns The Youth. 
 
 Miley Cyrus twerked. I had to look up the word since my indefatigable spell checker had no idea what I meant. I discovered from Wikipedia that twerking “involves a person, usually a woman, shaking her hips in an up-and-down bouncing motion, causing the dancer to shake, ‘wobble’ and ‘jiggle.’ ” That’s precisely what Cyrus did at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, for which she has been amply and justifiably criticized. She’s a cheap act, no doubt about it, but for me her performance was an opportunity to discuss one of the summer’s most arresting pieces of journalism — a long New Yorker account of what became known as the Steubenville Rape. Cyrus should read it. 
 
 VILLAIN: a young entertainer gyrating suggestively onstage. Remember that. Cohen forcefully condemns this cheap hussy, Miley Cyrus, who needs to learn a thing or two about propriety. 
 
 Richard Cohen then, for reasons known only to Richard Cohen, launches into a disquisition on the Steubenville rape case, which was the subject of this story by Ariel Levy. What lessons does Richard Cohen draw? 
 
 The first thing you should know about the so-called Steubenville Rape is that this was not a rape involving intercourse. The next thing you should know is that there weren’t many young men involved — just two were convicted. The next thing you should know is that just about everything you do know about the case from TV and the Internet was wrong. 
 
 This was not a rape "involving intercourse," you see. It was not a rape-rape. Cohen graciously allows this: "And yet what indisputably did happen is troubling enough. A teenage girl, stone-drunk, was stripped and manhandled. She was photographed and the picture passed around. Obviously, she was sexually mistreated." She was sexually mistreated, sure. But it's not like this was a rape, involving intercourse. 
 
 The New Yorker story that Cohen bases all of these conclusions upon notes that the victim in the Steubenville case was photographed "naked and apparently passed out, with what looked like semen on her chest." During the trial, two young men "were accused of putting their fingers in her vagina while she was too intoxicated to give consent." One said that he recorded the other "fingering her" as she was passed out. Later, he said that the same young man “knelt over top of her, trying to shove it in her mouth.” 
 
 So you see, this is not real rape, "involving intercourse." This is just a rape involving a passed out drunk girl being fingered and ejaculated upon and orally raped and recorded. Richard Cohen finds this distasteful, yes—but not as distasteful as that young harlot, Miley Cyrus, whose sexual gyrations are the real culprit here: 
 
 So now back to Miley Cyrus and her twerking. I run the risk of old-fogeyness for suggesting the girl’s a tasteless twit — especially that bit with the foam finger. (Look it up, if you must.) But let me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them. They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not sexuality but sexual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy. Cyrus taught me a word. Now let me teach her one: She’s a twerk. 
 
 So now back to Richard Cohen and his writing. I run the risk of reasonable humanity for suggesting the man's a lecherous fool—especially that bit with the rape. But let me also suggest that acts such as Richard Cohen not only objectify women but debase them. They encourage a good-old-boy culture that has set journalism back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not critical thought but thoughtless criticism, a vapid and self-regarding editorial outlook that deprives reading of all pleasure. Cohen taught me a word. ("Wikileaks.") Now let me teach him one: He's a skeezeball. 
 
 [Washington Post.]
– 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.