Richard Cohen wrote an op-ed defending George Zimmerman's actions.
Profiling is good, mmkay?
Black youths are bad, mmkay?
Dark hoodies are bad, mmkay?
Danish tourists are good. Mmkay?
Is Richard Cohen really a human being?
Atrios ranked him as the #8 Wanker of the Decade. That might be a little low for my taste.
Fred Hiatt had to play defense all day after his lunacy hit their pages:
"Richard Cohen’s not a racist, he just thinks it’s reasonable to assume young black men are all criminals," tweeted Slate's Matt Yglesias.
"I totally recognize the hoodie uniform," tweeted The Washington Post's own Ezra Klein. "I wore it at UC Santa Cruz. Weirdly, no one thought I was dangerous."
"Washington Post is scared of young black men," tweeted Circa editor-in-chief Anthony De Rosa.
And Washington City Paper editor Mike Madden tweeted his own summation of the piece: "Post columnist Richard Cohen: '... I am a racist.'"
The Washington Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, defended running the column in an email to The Huffington Post on Tuesday."If I had not published the column, just as many people would be asking why the Post can’t tolerate diverse points of view," Hiatt said.
Has anyone found a Richard Cohen twitter handle?
Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic has a great take down of Cohen's words. The Banality of Richard Cohen and Racist Profiling. Please read the whole thing.
He ends with this.
What you must understand is that when the individual lives of those freighted by racism are deemed less than those who are not, all other inhumanities follow. That is the logic of Richard Cohen. It is the logic of Barack Obama's potential head of the DHS. This logic is not new, original or especially egregious. It is the logic of the country's largest city. It is the logic of the American state. It is the logic scribbled across the lion's share of our history. And it is the logic that killed Trayvon Martin.
