"The Last Blue State Skeptic": or "Why Richard Cohen Can Lick My Schwetty Schwetty Schcrotum

A schlemiel is taking his morning stroll when he happens upon a massive pile of what is obviously dogshit.

The moron scratches his head. "Sure looks like shit."
Sticks his nose in it. "Sure smells like shit."
Squeezes the wet turd between his fingers. "Sure feels like shit."
Finally, he takes a big bite of the poop. "Sure tastes like shit."
He's convinced. "It IS shit!" he exclaims.
"And I'm sure glad I didn't step in it."

With that joke in mind, here is the latest craptacular column from Richard Cohen. It's cute.
Because, y'see, Richard Cohen wants on the anti-war bandwagon!

Yes, after months of wiggling his teeny weeny peen-- I mean his RATTLING HIS SABRE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS-- Richard Cohen has decided that "Bush Wanted War." And it only took 3 freakin' years and Helen Thomas to convince him.

Richard says of his epiphany, "So common is the statement "Bush lied" that it seems sometimes that I am the only blue-state person who does not think it is true. Then, last week, the indomitable Helen Thomas changed all that with a single question. She asked George Bush why he wanted "to go to war" from the moment he "stepped into the White House," and the president said, "You know, I didn't want war." With that, the last blue-state skeptic folded."

Just how clueless is Richard Cohen? Well, let's look at the evidence his own column provides:

For the past 3 years, he didn't believe Bush wanted war from day one, even though

"We have it from Richard Clarke, formerly the White House's chief anti-terrorism official, that within a day of the attacks Bush was inquiring if Saddam might have had a hand in them. When told no -- "But, Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this," Clarke told him -- it became instantly clear that this was not the answer Bush wanted."

Nor did Cohen believe it when

"Bob Woodward says in his book, "Plan of Attack," that not only was Bush fixated on Iraq, but by Thanksgiving of 2001, he already had told Don Rumsfeld to prepare a plan for the invasion of that country. "Let's get started on this," the president said, cautioning the defense secretary not to tell anyone."

Nor did this set off the alarm bells in the empty firehouse Richard Cohen calls his cranium.

"As for myself, I was told by a European intelligence official that after flying to Washington right after the 9/11 attacks, he was stunned to discover that talk had already turned to Iraq."

Because you know, Europe is just jealous of us and our freedoms.

Dick, and I DO mean it in the sense of "penis", tells us

"This was particularly true at the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz was obsessed with Iraq, and that seems to have been true of the White House as well. And now we know from various British accounts that close aides to Prime Minister Tony Blair recognized early on that Bush was going to go to war -- and that Blair, his poodle at obedient heel, would follow along. More recently we learned -- again from British sources -- that even though Bush went back to the United Nations for yet another resolution condemning Iraq, he was determined to make war almost no matter what."

But none of this was convincing enough. We know because Richard tells us so: "None of this necessarily means that Bush doctored U.S. intelligence to make a purposely false case that Iraq was seething with weapons of mass destruction."

Oh sure, Dick Cheney's a liar who "in particular -- exaggerated such that their pants must have caught fire, but nothing so far proved that Bush knew he was making a false case." That must have been why they sat together, neither under oath when they testified, right Richard? And "Colin Powell, you may recall, soiled his stellar reputation with a United Nations speech that is now just plain sad to read. Almost none of it is true," but Bush, the man who runs the tight ship, the guyw ith the incisive questions, didn't know ANYTHING AT ALL about this, right? Cohen begins to be a parody of himself: he reminds me of no one else but the defense attorney in the old Cheech and Chong routine, "Stoned in Court." Pardon me while I paraphrase:

"Your honor... sure, my client was apprehended byt he police with 3 lids of marijuana; 6 sheets of blotter acid; dozens of qualuudes, uppers, downers, and hallucinogens. But your honor. This is not as it seems. My client simply...FOUND these drugs, and was on his way to turn them into the police."

Richard leaves us with this final stool sample. "There remains, though, the little matter of what was in Bush's gut -- not his head, mind you, but that elusive place where emotion resides. It was there, in the moments after 9/11, that Bush truly decided on war, maybe because Saddam had once tried to kill George H.W. Bush, maybe because the neocons had convinced him that a brief war in Iraq would have long-term salutary consequences for the entire Middle East, maybe because he could not abide the thought that a monster like Saddam might die in his sleep -- and maybe because he heard destiny calling."

Or maybe he knew that his family stood to earn a bundle through their Carlyle Connections. Or that Dick stood to earn a bundle at Halliburton. Or that he knew that going to war would be good for his polls, like it was for Reagan and his Daddy before him.

So let me boil down Richard Cohen's column for you: "I am a day late and a dollar short. Everyone listen to MEEEE!"


Richard Cohen: Schmuck