Digital non sequitur

Richard Cohen rides the wah-mbulance in today's WaPo, complaining about how nasty those mean people in the blogosphere are. And to a certain extent, he's right: just because Cohen didn't find Colbert funny doesn't mean he's a presidential lapdog. It means he doesn't have a very good sense of humor - Colbert was hilarious.

No, what proves that Cohen and his colleagues at the WaPo and other traditional media outlets are presidential lapdogs is their slavish insistence upon regurgitating administration talking points and refusing to ask the tough questions, lest they offend the gatekeepers who dole out access to inside sources (who, in turn, keep feeding the cute baby reporter birds more fallacious talking points). Cohen and his media counterparts didn't find Colbert funny because they were the butt of his jokes - and that's never very fun, now is it?

Now for non sequitur time: from the thousands of e-mails he's received, Cohen infers this:

But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble -- not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before -- back in the Vietnam War era. That's when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

The hatred is back. I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations. I can appreciate some of it. Institution after institution failed America -- the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have. Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that's going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice -- once because they couldn't stop it and once more at the polls.

There's a few problems with Cohen's cutesy little attempt at placing the nastiness in his inbox in historical context. First, in 1968, there wasn't a sitting GOP president with an approval rating of 31%, nor a sitting GOP Rubber-Stamp Congress with a flair for corruption that would make Caligula shiver that has been fucking things up for over 10 years. Gas prices were not at historic highs. And to be sure, LBJ wasn't yucking it up with the press about that little Gulf of Tonkin mishap.

It's too early to tell what this sort of anger bodes for the 2008 presidential elections. What it does tell us is that the majority party is in trouble in this year's mid-term elections. Should the GOP lose their majority in either house, investigations into the myriad abuses of power are sure to follow - and if you think people are angry now...

As for centrist Democrats feeling the wrath of the angry Left - these centrists have been "leading" the party to failure for the past decade. They are complicit in the deaths of over 2,400 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis. They are complicit in packing the Supreme Court with conservative ideologues. Yeah, we have a lot of reasons to be pissed at the centrists. And Lieberman might be a bellweather of things to come.

Times are a-changin', and pundits like Cohen, mired in the short-sighted CW of the Beltway cocktail party crowd, may be in for a rude awakening from those of us who aren't members of the chattering classes.