The World's Stupidest Pundit

It's Richard Cohen. Surprised?

Richard Cohen needs to find a vat of boiling oil in which he can take a nice, long dip.

Former senator John Edwards did that Nov. 13 in a Post op-ed article, and Sen. Joseph Biden uttered the "M" word Sunday on "Meet the Press." "[The vote for the war] was a mistake," said Biden. "It was a mistake," wrote Edwards. Yes and yes, says Cohen. But it is also a mistake to call it a mistake.

Why? Well clearly because

it is a mistake, if that's even the right word, to lack the courage of your convictions, to get swept up in the zeitgeist and dig in your heels even harder-- not as a consequence of hardening conviction but of accumulating doubt.

So admitting that the war was a mistake is equivalent to or worse than warmongering on false pretenses and slaughtering thousands of innocent people. So although

Rumsfeld raised a truly horrible specter: "Imagine a Sept. 11th with weapons of mass destruction" that would kill "tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children." Imagine a defense secretary who thought he was propaganda minister.

He's not the real villain here.

Well, those explanations are still lacking. But so, too, are those from Democrats who say they made a "mistake" in supporting the war.

This is no different from what Bush is trying to do: The intelligence was bad, not his wretched judgment.

As we clearly learned from this week's lesson, John Edwards = Dick Cheney. To top it all off, Cohen tries to absolve himself from any responsibility by asserting that

I wrote that the Bush administration would pay dearly if it was going to wage war for specious reasons. "War plans are being drawn up in the Pentagon," Iwrote. "But explanations are lacking at the White House."

If Cohen wanted the administration to pay for its crimes he would not have written that drivel about Fitzgerald doing better work for the country back home, as opposed to getting to the bottom of the pit of lies that started this war. Instead, he is more content to dodge the role he played and blame those who at least had the courage to find their convictions and admit they were wrong. Sounds like a propaganda minister to me.