Richard Cohen says:

"Wherever I go -- from glittering dinner party to glittering dinner party -- the famous and powerful people I meet (for such is my life)"

This is lamentable for a true journalist. it would be good to talk to some real people.


"I loathe above all the resurgence of racism -- or maybe it is merely my appreciation of the fact that it is wider and deeper than I thought."

It has never gone away. Witness West Virginia, Pennsylvania and all of those spurious
"white working-class voters" which may be mythological in terms of the strength of their numbers but the kind Hillary talked about.

" I am stunned by the numbers of people who have come out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black."

Equal numbers of people have come out to support Obama because he is the best candidate, not because he is black. That's Ferraro's racist crap.

" I am even more stunned that many of these people have no compunction about telling a pollster they voted on account of race -- one in five whites in Kentucky, for instance."

The polls can't be accurate to determine this. Kentucky has been known to be racist
but generalizations are for poll-makers, not for thinking people.

"Those voters didn't even know enough to lie, which is what, if you look at the numbers, others probably did in other states. Such honesty ought to be commendable. It is, instead, frightening."

I am not stunned by this revelation. We are not far away from lynch mobs and slave-owners in our history.

"I acknowledge that some people can find nonracial reasons to vote against Obama -- his youth, his inexperience, his uber-liberalism and, of course, his willingness to abide his minister's admiration for a racist demagogue (Louis Farrakhan) until it was way, way too late."

This statement is in itself racist crap. Youth doesn't mean Obama is not intelligent and would make a good president. McCain has had experience of the wrong sort to make a good president. He's still fighting PTSD. Being a denizen of the Hanoi Hilton is not a good enough qualification. Obama has separated himself fromj Farrakhan and his former minister but right-wing smear merchants like Cohen continuously bring up these falsehoods as if they were some kind of "fact".

"But for too many people, Obama is first and foremost a black man and is rejected for that reason alone. This is very sad."

I don't agree that this is true for too many people. There are legitimate reasons to question Obama about his speech before AIPAC where he sounded like Hillary and McCain as hawkish on Iran. He doesn't oppose incursions into Pakistan and Afghanistan sans diplomacy. There are those who play the race card but the fact that a black man is nominated is evidence that the attitudes of Americans toward race have changed.

"I loathe what has happened to Hillary Clinton. This person of no mean achievement has been witchified, turned into a shrew, so that almost any remark of hers is instantly interpreted as sinister and ugly."

Hillary destroyed her own credibility by insisting that votes in Michigan and Florida
be counted for her. She has peppered her speeches with "I" so much that it's hard to
see how she represents much else. She has attempted to fabricate stories about her role in the settling of Irish peace talks and her visit to Bosnia.

" All she had to do, for instance, was note that it took Lyndon Johnson to implement Martin Luther King's dream, and somehow it became a racist statement."

The implication in this remark was that somehow King, being a black man was not as
effective as LBJ, a white man in implementing this "dream". To paraphrase her, it took a white man to get in done. If this isn't racism, I don't know what is.

"The Obama camp has been no help in this regard, expressing insincere regret instead of a sincere "that's not what she meant."

It is clear what she meant. She was playing the "race card".

"I loathe also what Hillary Clinton has done to herself. The incessant exaggerations, the cheap shots, the flights into hallucinatory history -- that sniper fire in Bosnia, for instance -- have turned her into a caricature of what her caricaturists long claimed she already was. In this campaign, Clinton has managed to come across as a hungry hack, a Janus looking both forward and backward and seeming to stand for nothing except winning. This, too, is sad."

Sad but true. It was about winning for her rather than considering the Dem Party or the electorate.

"I loathe what has happened to Bill Clinton."

He did it to himself.

"I loathe what has happened to the press. I loathe the incessant blogging and commenting and talking and yapping and hype."

Corporations own the media now. This is what you must expect if you rely on conventional news. As to blogging, Cohen obviously has not read all the blogs.

" I hate that Clinton's observation that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June ran on and on when everyone save some indigenous people in the Brazilian rain forest knew what she meant."

This is the height of racism, some how bringing in indigenous people who may have not thought that Hillary was clear on her point and that bringing up RFK's assassination was insensitive, crude, boorish and implied that the country needed her "in case something happened".

" I hate that for days these same outlets discussed the relevancy of whether John McCain could be constitutionally barred from the presidency because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. This, too, is sad."

The only reason that this ever came up was because the Right-wing is obsessed with their vision of what constitutes American citizenship.   This is really a non-issue though.

"What is perhaps most surprising, and sad as well, is what can be seen in the rearview mirror. There, reduced to a speck, is the once-huge expectation that the next president would be a Democrat."

I think it is a hope rather than an expectation since the GOP have totally ruined our country.

" -- but has (and so the GOP will remind us all) kept the nation safe from another attack. No small matter, it will turn out.

this last statement is ridiculous because the NIE had information that could have prevented 911. How did this so-called president keep us safe? By ignoring the warnings in the presidential briefings.

"So I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us, turned rancid since the cold, pristine days of Iowa only five months ago. We were, with apologies to Bob Dylan, so much younger then."

I see this as a misplaced rant that has very little force behind it. Of course racism and mysogyny are rampant. But so is the hope of a new America by those who have rejected these things. This is a specious article by someone who has a subtle axe to grind.
His jaundiced eye is blinded by his own prejudice.

BB, this article is bullshit.