The War Room Hack Thirty

By Alex Pareene
Salon.com

The War Room Hack Thirty is a list of our least favorite political commentators, newspaper columnists and constant cable news presences, ranked roughly (but only roughly) in order of awfulness and then described rudely. Criteria for inclusion included writing the same column every week for 30 years, warmongering, joyless repetition of conventional wisdom, and making bad puns.

#1 The Washington Post's Richard Cohen

The Washington Post's Richard Cohen has been a columnist since 1976. He's good friends with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. He works one day a week. At a certain point, in that exceptionally privileged and cushy position, his brain disintegrated. He's not so much an old liberal who grew conservative as he is a simplistic old hack who believes his common prejudices to be politically incorrect truths and his Beltway conventional wisdom to be bracing political insight.

That's how we get work like "leave Roman Polanski alone!" and sending me mean e-mails is "digital lynching" and affirmative action punishes all white people and you stupid snot-nosed bloggers don't get that Cheney was probably right to torture people and Barack Obama should read a newspaper instead of a BlackBerry because a BlackBerry is full of lies. All in the singularly smug, grating prose style of a man who knows he's an immovable object in one of the most comfortable positions in all of journalism.

Then there's his relationship with John McCain -- the true measure of a hack. He loved the man, of course, as all reporters once did. But he was no fool! In April of 2008, Cohen claimed that "the man's imperfections have not escaped my keen eye." But, Cohen added after recapping the standard list of McCain flip-flops, "we know his bottom line." Plus he was tortured, and also Honor. By September, Cohen had met "the ugly new McCain," and he was not at all pleased! This ugly new McCain was presumably hiding in the first paragraph of the column, which recounts the tale of John McCain apologizing for his shamelessness eight years earlier.

(More here.)