“I used to get a lot more on the right,” said columnist Richard Cohen, who broke with liberals when he supported the Iraq war. More recently, the left has picked apart columns that are perceived as being favorable to John McCain.
“If you’re a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face,” Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics “were born too late, because they would have been great communists.”
This led Yglesias to whimper:
It’s extraordinary how commonplace these kind of sentiments are among prominent media figures. Cohen clearly relishes his self-conception as an independent thinker. And presumably the whole reason he’s glad to be a Washington Post columnist in part because that gives him a large audience of people who care about politics. Given all that, of course people will sometimes disagree with him! But that’s now how he sees it, and certainly he sees no need to engage with his critics on the merits — instead, they’re just like Communists!
Oh good Lord. The original quote from Cohen was in an article about the nutroots attacking the MSM for their "bias" in favor of McCain. Think about that a second. Cohen is a columnist. He gets paid to present his opinion. Evidently to the nutroots, and Yglesias as well it seems, expressing an opinion critical of the Chosen One (TM) is in itself evidence of "bias."
Cohen evidently noticed the change in the way the nutroots reacted to his writing in the aftermath of his support of the war in Iraq. This has continued into his election writings and Cohen clearly links the two. He proved himself to be "ideologically suspect" by breaking with nutroot orthodoxy and so he continues to be vilified. He remarked that is exactly what Communists used to do and he's right. The fact that point seems to have escaped Yglesias doesn't say too much about his acumen.
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