Salon‘s Alex Pareene is totting up the most notably awful hacks in U.S. political commentary. Based on the title of the series, there will eventually be 30. So far he’s got 10:
- Richard Cohen
- Mark Halperin
- Thomas Friedman
- David Broder
- Marty Peretz
- Marc Thiessen
- Jonah Goldberg
- Maureen Dowd
- Laura Ingraham
- Peggy Noonan
Here are some quotes.
On 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.
On Thomas Friedman:
He’s a silly, simple-minded man whose success leads a cynic to the conclusion that the world is run by similarly silly, simple-minded men.
On David Broder:
He has a simplistic understanding of politics and no understanding of the electorate except as an abstract concept. His hatred of partisanship is actually a thinly veiled disdain for popular rule itself. He defines extremism as principled adherence to any sort of ideology. When he wants to understand what The Voters are thinking, he asks a think tank academic. Despite his disdain for the fiery populists that the idiot voters repeatedly send to our sadly broken Congress, he remains convinced that The American People are a wise and noble breed who long for sensible, bipartisan moderation in all things.
On Marc Thiessen:
In the growing pantheon of “Bush speechwriters hired as columnists,” Marc Thiessen’s moral depravity set him apart. The man wrote a book about how the Bush administration was right to use torture. In addition to being a morally unsupportable argument, the book was full of falsehoods and misinformation. For this, instead of being shunned by polite society, Thiessen is treated as just a serious man on one side of a contentious issue.
Glenn Greenwald tweets some Richard Cohen hackishness that was left out of the final cut because the film was already too long.
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