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September 9, 2005

Richard Cohen Finds John Roberts' Flaw

Posted by Dave Blount at September 9, 2005 6:55 AM

The left-wing punditocracy can rest now. Richard Cohen has finally found something wrong with John Roberts. As revealed in yesterday's Washington Post, the problem with Roberts is... he's too perfect.

"His record is appallingly free of failure," Cohen complains. "I wish that John Roberts had a touch of my incompetence."

I'm glad Cohen doesn't have a touch of Roberts' competence — he might stop writing such amusingly idiotic editorials.

Cohen admits that Roberts' record is flawless. But while admitting it, he amazingly tries to spin this as a bad thing.

There's no point in my proving that Cohen is a flake and a fool. Cohen has done the work for me:

Just before writing this column, I came across an obituary for Theodore Sarbin, a social psychologist who died Aug. 31 at the nice age of 94. Sarbin's claim to newspaper space was his 1988 report recommending that the military stop discriminating against gays and lesbians. This is the sentence that caught my attention: "As a young man, he rode the rails as a hobo, an experience he would later say helped him identify with people on the margins of society." The best Roberts could do in this respect was to work summers in a steel mill. He shared the work — but not the plight.

So according to Cohen, an ex-bum "social psychologist" whose only accomplishment is wishing the military were some kind of San Francisco bathhouse is more qualified than Roberts to be Chief Justice because Roberts has never been a derelict and the only hard labor he ever did is work in a steel mill.

Reading Cohen leaves me crushed by a sense of futility. If I write for a hundred years, I will never be able to capture the sheer asininity of moonbattery as well as Cohen can in just a few sentences.