Richard Cohen Can’t Help Race-Baiting, Defending Harassment

Richard Cohen can’t help it, can he?

In his last pre-election column (11/7/16), the Washington Post pundit issues a warning against the Republican Congress as “a ravenous parliamentary beast determined to ignore the most pressing concerns and instead traffic in investigations.” Because he’s Richard Cohen, he has to throw in a hefty helping of false equivalency:

Democrats, too, know how to investigate. They smeared Clarence Thomas, managing to turn a mediocre lawyer into a monumental martyr, but in general they don’t have quite the taste or talent for inquisition as does the GOP.

That’s it—that’s Cohen’s example of how Democrats do it too, that they “smeared” a prospective Supreme Court justice by investigating credible allegations of sexual harassment. (Those who remember the hearings recall that most of the smearing was directed at Anita Hill, Thomas’ accuser.)

Cohen himself was accused of “inappropriate behavior” toward a female staffer in 1996—and later wrote a column (10/25/10) saying that allegations against Thomas should be forgotten, on the grounds that “we all did and said terrible things when we were young.” On the basis of his self-serving rejection of sexual harassment investigations, Cohen’s column is headlined “The Gangs of Washington Are Drawing Their Knives.”

But Cohen does acknowledge that a President Trump could give cause for investigation—in his inimitable way:

Among other things, he has your average Nicaraguan army officer’s grasp of our Constitution. He might order the return of torture — measures “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” he has said.

“Your average Nicaraguan army officer”? It’s not surprising that Cohen evokes Latin America as a symbol of disregard for civil liberties, because he’s notorious for his racialized view of the world. This is a writer who once said of Iranians, “These Persians lie like a rug,” and insisted that “only a fool—or possibly a Frenchman” would have doubted claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

It’s also not surprising that as his example of Latin American–style oppression, he picks Nicaragua—a country that in 1979 overthrew a US-backed dictatorship and then endured years of retaliatory terrorism secretly directed by Washington—because he’s a Cold War liberal who applauded (Washington Post, 12/30/92; Consortium News, 12/30/15) when George Bush Sr. pardoned the officials who had carried out and covered up the covert assault on Nicaragua. (Cohen also cited the fact that he saw Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, one of the indicted officials pardoned by Bush, pushing his own cart at the grocery store: “Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense—which is the way much of official Washington saw him.”)

Checking the latest Amnesty International report on Nicaragua, the human rights group doesn’t mention torture as one of that nation’s rights problems. But torture does come up in the report on the United States:

In 2014, President Obama acknowledged that torture had been carried out following the 11 September 2001 attacks (9/11) under a secret detention program authorized by his predecessor and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). However, accountability and remedy for the crimes under international law committed in that program remained absent.

So maybe Cohen should have said that Trump had “your average CIA officer’s grasp of our Constitution”—that would have been more fair. But then, unlike Amnesty, Cohen (Washington Post, 1/27/09) doesn’t think CIA officers who tortured should be prosecuted:

It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs—not time-stampers who take no chances.

Maybe the expression Richard Cohen is looking for is “your average Washington Post columnist’s grasp of our Constitution.”

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter: @JNaureckas.

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