Richard Cohen has some harsh words for his critics:
“I used to get a lot more on the right,” said columnist Richard Cohen, who broke with liberals when he supported the Iraq War. More recently, the left has picked apart columns that are perceived as being favorable to John McCain.
“If you're a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face,” Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics “were born too late, because they would have been great communists.”
Unfortunately for Cohen, he was born in an era where the term "communist" doesn't apply to people who believe all property and means of production should be owned collectively and administered by the state, but is instead a pejorative term that applies to anyone who disagrees with your right-leaning political beliefs. Alternatively, Cohen could have been born in time to be an adult during the Red Scare, where accusing your critics of being communists was more popular and infinitely more devastating to their livelihoods. As it stands, accusing other people of being communists in America today usually means you don't actually know what communism is, which if you're a newspaper columnist, reflects poorly on both you and your employer.
--A. Serwer
