When Richard Cohen was a child — back in the good old days when people stoically died of everything, and our best days (The Beatles/Civil Rights) were still ahead, and there were bookstores filled not with these Blackberries, but real books, the kind a person could read without a telephone, or a pager, or such things — his psychotic father would push him outside in the middle of the night, on a primitive bicycle (no Prius for him!), its basket loaded with the printed, rubber-banded stacks of wood-pulp produced by our nation’s best newspaper publishers, a torrent of cold rain pounding upon the child’s prematurely white hair, a deadly pothole concealed by a puddle of dirty street water, and then BLAM!, the morning’s papers sinking to the bottom of the asphalt crater, the wood pulp thirstily soaking up the rain juice, the work of America’s better journalists blurring into inky clouds of failure. The elder Cohen, snarling with rage, grabs little Richard and begins lashing him with whatever’s at hand — a garden hose, a dog leash, and finally, savagely, the bicycle chain. This is why GM should fail.
When I was around 12, I was a paperboy for the now-defunct Long Island Press. One Thursday, when the paper was heavy with shopping inserts, a storm hit, and my papers and I wound up in a puddle. My customers would not pay for a paper not delivered, and the Press insisted on billing for those I had received. The CFO of my company, a.k.a. my father, took one look at my books and pronounced me bankrupt. He would say the same thing about General Motors and Chrysler.
There. That is all you need to read of Richard Cohen’s latest descent into senile rage and shame. His dad beat the shit out of him, for spilling some worthless papers from Long Island, so tens of thousands of American workers and hundreds of auto-parts suppliers should be cast aside, to die. Think about it.
This dreadful column was posted last night. We read it, and shook our heads, and walked away in mild bewilderment. Does Cohen intentionally avoid reading any actual news? What else can explain the column’s attempt at a snappy, big-idea close which does nothing but prove he hasn’t followed even the basic headlines of the past couple of days, about how the Federal Government — which has been propping up these very troubled auto manufacturers for a year straight — is seriously considering letting GM go into bankruptcy, with the much-mentioned comforting caveat that the government itself would honor car warranties if all else fails? Look:
Bankruptcy can save the industry.
Is there a downside? Sure. No one knows whether anyone will buy the cars of a bankrupt company. (The government could guarantee the warranties.) Will it further hurt the economy? Probably, but who really knows? But bankruptcy acknowledges a reality — GM and Chrysler are broke. I wish them luck — but no more of my money.
The government could guarantee the warranties! Oh Richard, you are not just America’s finest Op-Ed Columnist, you are an economic genius and policy wonk of the highest caliber. Where’s that Krugman? Let’s kill him. That Nobel Prize belongs to you.
Jesus, even David Brooks managed to pick up on the Basic Headline News in his column on the same (?) subject, also posted last night.
Enough about missing the actual news you claim to be opining about — Richard Cohen simply does not care for the 24/7 news cycle with its Kindles and telegraphs. Cohen’s real point is about those awful people who work in the Auto Industry. Did you know that all of them have been conspiring against Richard Cohen (representing America) since basically the beginning of time? Those goddamned people, they should all be jobless and homeless:
We may not understand what AIG did — what’s a credit-default swap, anyway? — but we sure as hell know what GM did: It made a lot of lousy cars. So did Ford and Chrysler. They made cars with utter contempt for the customer. The industry at one time even opposed seat belts and air bags, and it designed cars that were not safe. I know things have changed, but I remember. I remember.
Yes, Richard, you have nailed it! The American auto industry has always operated on a central tenet: “utter contempt for the customer.” Henry Ford had it tattooed on his wife’s back. Billy Durant actually wrote this phrase in the blood of his customers, on the walls of his Detroit palace. They hated America. They hated you.
Also: “We may not understand what AIG did — what’s a credit-default swap, anyway?” Oh man.
The wheels are off [Richard Cohen/Washington Post]
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{ 67 comments }
Maybe Novak can run him down in his Corvette.
Richard Cohen rides a Segway powered by thought and a gryphon to work on alternate weekdays.
P.S. Next person to see him on the street in DC or wherever the fuck he lives must… and I stress this as a categorical imperative… knock him down, take his wallet, pull out the money, and say THIS IS GOING TO CHEVY! LIKE A ROCK, BITCH! before dashing off.
P.P.S. He’s right about Ford, but also as it pertained to the Jews.
They’re crunchy, crispy little fishy critters!
As a former Long Island paperboy (though Newsday, not the Long Island Press), and latter as a Long Island “broadcast journalist” I now understand that it is Richard Cohen’s fault that the Long Island Press failed.
Did he send his column out by fax blast?
Wait, wouldn’t Little Richard’s Paper Company have survived the puddle recession if he had access to a credit line that could have provided the capital needed to purchase the next day’s supply of papers? A debt that would have been quickly repaid, given the demands of his paper-hungry neighbors? Or is he implying that GM’s cars are, like Little Richard’s papers, easily ruined by rain. Tutti Frutti, also.
Hooray! It’s Curmudgeon Hour!
Do you think somebody at the Post took him aside this morning and informed him that he was advocating decisions that were made a full day and a half ago? Would he just say “Obama can say what he wants, but I remember. I remember.” and gaze off into empty space for a while?
“I wish them luck — but no more of my money.” That’s funny, that’s what I wrote on the WaPo subscription mailer.
Cohen’s outta of a job once people realize that the joke of having their birds crap on his face wears thin after a week or six months or so.
[re=277492]Noodle Salad[/re]: Let’s be fair: newspapers would not be ruined by merely sitting still OR moving on a perfectly dry, smooth surface, on a clear, warm, but not excessively sunny day.
The industry at one time even opposed seat belts and air bags, and it designed cars that were not safe. I know things have changed, but I remember. I remember.
He apparently didn’t remember that he had already written “I remember”.
Said it before, will keep saying it again -
my friend got a real masters degree in journalism, spent years taking amazing photos in far away dangerous places and winning awards, and late last year got laid off.
This dick Richard Cohen still gets paid to write this shyte.
Die newspapers, die!
Twelve year old Richard failed to learn one important lesson: he should not have anything to do with newspapers.
Now wait just one gosh-durned minute. I hate BlackBerries and I like newspapers. But I’m not an old crank! Well, ok, I’m pretty old. And cranky. But I’m not Jewish! I think. I don’t remember, I don’t remember.
Cohen’s just lucky he’s not a paperboy today — he’d be in debt for tens of thousands of dollars after throwing all those Kindles on his customers’ front porches.
And I don’t care what he says about lousy cars. I love Honor Harrington, my beautiful red Chevy Impala.
>>We may not understand what AIG did — what’s a credit-default swap, anyway? — but we sure as hell know what GM did: It made a lot of people middle class.
And that, for Mr. Cohen, is GM’s greatest sin.
[re=277508]Min[/re]: Who knew that the key to making your American car unappalling was to give it a kickass name?
[re=277498]Zadig[/re]: True, the Post is usually shipped “preruined” with a Cohen column.
Like Ed Begley Jr.’s go-cart, Cohen’s car is powered by his sense of self-satisfaction.
The room where Billy Durant wrote “utter contempt for the customer” in blood on the wall is the highlight of the Billy Durant home tour and really the highlight of any visit to Detroit.
The world is fucking desperate for a sexy, reliable electric car and you can’t build ONE GOOD MODEL with all of Detroit’s combined brains. If you build it, they will come
Jesus H. Christ. I can understand saving banks and insurance companies, but why save a car company that doesn’t even make cars that we want to buy? Posters of ’57 T-Birds don’t pay the bills, and future sales WILL come from future designs.
Sounds like little Dickey must have driven some of the Big 3′s finest.
I’m guessing that he was once a proud owner of an Edsel, Convair, Pinto, Cadillac Cimarron, Gremlin, Explorer, and Aztec to get that kind of hatred for the Big 3.
Sound likes the intern he sexually harrassed bought a new GM ride with the settlement money. Let go, Richard!
[re=277521]ManchuCandidate[/re]: He simply does not care for these new cars without fins.
I enjoy this non-sequitur, wherein Cohen is subtextually pleading for the world with its fast-paced gadgetry to slow down for his decaying mind to process:
“Recall [Geithner's] confused explanations of how he learned of those AIG bonuses. Those of us who cannot find our keys in the morning ought to have nothing but sympathy for a man who is now running a large part of the American economy. Of course, he might not have been paying attention. He can’t pay attention to everything.
This is where bankruptcy comes in. It slows things down. It’s a process.”
So I am to be convinced to allow the American manufacturing sector to completely dissolve on the strength of some bonkers old-timey fable about what a shitty paperboy Richard Cohen was?
And thank you Ken, a thousand times thank you, for the glorious mental image of Richard Cohen’s father, face contorted with rage, beating his son mercilessly with a bicycle chain, pausing only occasionally to take a pull from the bottle of cheap bourbon in his left hand. The cries of the young Richard will warm the dark recesses of my soul for hours.
this was quite the epic blog. i say leave the bastard in the rain with his soggy newspapers that he obviously never read while an all electric chevy volt runs him over and saves the industry.
[re=277499]Min[/re]: Cohen likes to sit in his GM in a closed garage, with motor running. It lets him sleep.
[re=277536]S.Luggo[/re]: And here you have hit on the true tragedy of electric cars; sitting behind the wheel of your Volt for days in the garage wondering why death won’t come.
If GM’s cars suck so bad, then why do the Chinese buy every Buick they can get their hands on? 1.3 billion Chinamen can’t be wrong. The suckiness of American cars is somewhat overrated, while the suckiness of the auto industry business model doesn’t get enough credit. There are too many car companies making too many cars that last too long for anybody in the U.S., Japan or Europe to really succeed in anything other than a boom economy (when people buy new cars to show off). Audi, Toyota, etc., are all losing money right now, too. The only money being made is in the poorer parts of Asia, and Latin America, where the markets aren’t (yet) saturated with reliable used cars.
The more he writes, the more I am tempted to read his article in the voice of Phil Hartman’s Frozen Caveman Lawyer.
“Look, look, I’m just a simple frozen news-paper reporter. I see these Blackberries, and I wonder, what tree spirit has possessed these tiny automatons? How do they magically communicate through the air? I lack the basic knowledge of your world and its complicated “credit-default swaps.” What do those words mean?”
Anybody who thinks Detroit made a lot of lousy cars ought to look at the homes for sale in Baltimore now!
You can sleep in your car, but you can’t tune a bicycle!
[re=277512]Zadig[/re]: Oh, yes, the name is crucial. Before Honor, I had a Grand Prix named Lionel Luthor, and that car was an utter bastard. Wrecked it three weeks after I got it.
Sheeit. At least Twitter and Facebook are shorter. They’re certainly no less self-indulgent than Cohen’s twaddle, which reads like Norman Rockwell on crack.
Guy’s channeling Paul Harvey or something. The usual mindless metaphors contrasting those crazy gubmint wonks with the staid respectability and common sense of the good ole days.
Hopefully, the newspaper industry won’t get a bailout. They’re doing their best to make even Detroit look good. Hell, I’m 55 years old and even I can’t read this shite.
[re=277552]Dave J.[/re]: Bravo Dave J., Bravo…
Am I a bad person for rooting for Richard Cohen’s father in this parable? I’m not normally pro-child abuse, but…
[re=277521]ManchuCandidate[/re]: the Edsel was a beautiful thing, actually.
Ah RIchard, I remember, I remember too. I remember “only a fool or a Frenchman” and “some things are better left in the dark,” and I can’t believe any publication on earth would print your lamentable brainfarts.
Just whom this fuckstick reminds me of has been bothering me for a while, but I’ve finally got it figured out: Abe Simpson, but with George Lucas’ hairstyle and James Joyce’s glasses. That covers all the bases–old, out of touch with the mainstream, and no one knows what the fuck he’s writing about.
I tried one of those newfangled “Kindles” myself, but it didn’t burn well at all. It didn’t burn well at all.
I thought Henry Ford’s wife’s lower back tat would have been more about showing utter contempt for the Jews (like Richard Cohen).
Cohen is right. Fuck the big three. Bring back the Yugo, STAT.
There’s nothing quite like hearing someone compare the bankruptcy of a major corporation, which employs tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, to a stupid goddamn kid with a paper route circa 1912.
My dad sold me his 2005 Mustang convertible for $5. (He didn’t sell it because it’s a piece of crap; he sold it because he can no longer drive it.) I love the car: it’s sexy, it has a great big honkin’ V-8, and it’s got a kick-ass sound system. However, it also has a Zip-loc bag in the glove compartment that’s full of ALL OF THE BITS THAT ARE ALWAYS FALLING OFF.
“This is where bankruptcy comes in. It slows things down. It’s a process.”
Intellectual bankruptcy, that is. If Richard Cohen — Mr. Chapter 7 Involuntary Liquidation — is Opinion Leadership no wonder the country’s going to hell.
Another step down the Slippery Slope to a World Currency. Wingnutz take note. Also.
[re=277552]Dave J.[/re]: “Look, look, I’m just a simple frozen news-paper reporter. I see these Blackberries, and I wonder, what tree spirit has possessed these tiny automatons? How do they magically communicate through the air? I lack the basic knowledge of your world and its complicated “credit-default swaps.” What do those words mean?”
You left out the punch line: “But I do know we should just let the largest American manufacturing industry go the way of the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are confusing and scary. Scary!”
[re=277599]loquaciousmusic[/re]: Back when I used to drive a car (back when I lived in the States – good public transport is one of the things I love about Europe)I, too, always kept a zip-loc bag in the glove compartment, but it was filled with something else.
Also, I once had a paper route myself. You should have gone ahead and delivered the soggy papers. Let the customers and the company work it out, you stupid twat. Most 12 year old paper boys figure that out by themselves.
[re=277626]gurukalehuru[/re]: You had a bag of dicks in your glove compartment?
“The industry at one time even opposed seat belts and air bags . . .”
I think Master Cohen may have taken the industry’s opposition to air bags personally.
I suspect this is Cohen’s attempt at rallying the masses as in “You low class losers could never understand what a credit default swap is, so quit pretending you do, and get off of AIG’s case. Now what you CAN understand is that American cars suck, so that’s what you idjits should concern yourselves with!”
As you say, “Oh Man!”
Let’s give a Kenosha Chrysler lineworker, retrained, a crack at Dick Cohen’s over-leveraged gig at WaPo a whirl.
At least that person would have more than a passing knowledge of practical Six Sigma techniques…
He was never happy after Emily Litella spurned him.
[re=277551]Lazy Media[/re]: Yeah, they actually make the things over there, and they look a lot better than the murcan version. Of course, the Chinese have not permanently associated the Buick brand with that 81 Electra that granny fires up once a week to go to her medical appointments.
“The industry at one time even opposed seat belts and air bags . . .”
Someone remind me, since my knowledge of Cohen is primarily from particular analyses by esteemed bloggers Greenwald and Wonkette: what is Cohen’s take on government regulation, on such things as, say, CAFE standards, crash-resistant bumpers, and, oh, seat belts and air bags?
[re=277658]schvitzatura[/re]: I’d rather read Ben “Rivethead” Hamper than Cohen, anyway.
“:Jesus H. Christ. I can understand saving banks and insurance companies, but why save a car company that doesn’t even make cars that we want to buy?”
Anybody that “understands saving a bank,” might not understand modern banking.
[re=277709]Uncle Glenny[/re]: He has no idea, I’m sure. But he sure remembers being thrown from the car all the time, by his dad, on the highway. That had less to do with seatbelts and airbags than Richard Cohen imagines ….
[re=277551]Lazy Media[/re]: Srsly. Nissan Sentras handle worse than my Ford “Freeway Flip” Explorer.
Oh man he’s old and senile! And totally right: Detroit hates all of us.
Not only did they stoically die of everything, but then they came back to life and died again just to prove they were tough. AND, they did it while walking 10 miles to school in a snowstorm.
I remember. And Pepperidge Farm remembers.
If only Henry Ford had focused more on quality and less on anti-Semitism, the company might not be in this position.
[re=277901]imissopus[/re]: In his defense, the strategy did prove successful for Volkswagen.
[re=277571]comradepaulson[/re]: “Am I a bad person for rooting for Richard Cohen’s father in this parable? I’m not normally pro-child abuse, but…”
26-year olds are allowed to have paper routes too. It usually is a part of one of those special programs Trig will become familar with
[re=278107]Bruno[/re]: If Richard Cohen isn’t careful, Chris Elliott might play him in a sit-com!
[re=277551]Lazy Media[/re]: I’ve been to China several times in the last year or so – those Buicks are nothing like the shoddy Buicks here….
Now that Chrysler is officially filed for bankruptcy protection, the eyes of scrutiny are on GM, whether or not this company could get out of a probable bankruptcy. Good luck, Chevy, GMC, Dodge and all other GM brands.
@gmdoll
Yes, I’ve seen that in CBS Evening News where Chinese execs are choosing American cars over Asian brands ’cause of their luxurious label.
shinn
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