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.

I sometimes ask myself, who is the intended audience of a Richard Cohen column? Who reads a Richard Cohen column and thinks to himself, “Yes, I agree with this”? I don’t write “thinks to herself” because I cannot fathom the existence of a woman who’d respond approvingly to this defense of Clarence Thomas’ vocal appreciation of large breasts. I think Ginni herself would say it does Justice Thomas no favors to have the support of this guy. And what does Cohen leave out of his defense of Thomas? That he was accused of creating a hostile work environment himself, for making inappropriate comments to a 23-year-old editorial aide in the late-1990s.

There’s no subject on which Richard Cohen is not completely inessential. The looming debt crisis? Caused by kids today and their tattoos and hippety-hop music! The financial collapse? Did you know that Richard Cohen went to high school with Ruth Madoff? ‘Cause that’s all he’s got.

Richard Cohen is the worst hack in the country.

Repeat offenses: Awful attempts at humor, clueless sexism, shameless use of lazy Op-Ed clichés, warmongering, generally being The Worst.
Representative quote:

“First, let me state my credentials: I am a funny guy. This is well known in certain circles, which is why, even back in elementary school, I was sometimes asked by the teacher to “say something funny” — as if the deed could be done on demand. This, anyway, is my standing for stating that Stephen Colbert was not funny at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.”

While it ended up as an obvious exercise in making rubes feel like hip insiders, the Note began its life as an internal memo, and it was a fairly accurate reflection of a shallow, navel-gazing Washington press corps (this nonsense was produced by ABC News, not some horrid blog somewhere), completely asleep at the switch for the majority of the Bush administration, trapped in a bubble of spin and cynicism.

Halperin’s belief in the unerring political instincts of Karl Rove and the godlike omniscience of Matt Drudge eventually made the tone of the Note get a little Pravda-y. Take June of 2006, shortly before Democrats retook Congress, as the Bush presidency began grinding to its miserable conclusion:

Could it be that the Democrats’ inability to come up with a consensus “anti-war” position is more of a midterm problem for them than HarrietMiersDubaideficitsKatrinaearmarksimmigrationgasprices is for the Republicans?

Could it have been? Maybe if Dan Bartlett had met a genie that day!

Repetition of White House spin is a fairly noxious trait in a journalist, but Halperin’s worst quality is actually that he is constantly wrong. He is a professional political analyst, yet he often seems to be completely, 100 percent wrong about even the horse-race aspects of politics that he specializes in. He kept promising, in 2006, that Bush’s approval ratings would once again surge past 50 percent. Remember when John McCain “suspended his campaign” to fix the economy? Mark Halperin said McCain won the week.

The book Halperin wrote before “Game Change” was “The Way to Win,” his preview of “the way to win” the presidential election in 2008. His advice was to emulate Karl Rove and worship Matt Drudge — the key to victory seemed to involve a lot of Matt Drudge — and the 2008 election as it actually happened made the whole book (which he co-wrote with Politico co-founder John Harris!) look utterly ridiculous.

But then “Game Change” happened, with its depressing “deep background” stories of politicians saying rude things behind closed doors, and because the political-media industry still loves that stuff, Halperin is now an MSNBC contributor, in addition to his much more ignorable role blogging reliably incorrect counterintuitive takes on the prevailing CW over at Time.

All we at the War Room Hack Thirty ask for is a little accountability. At the very least, Halperin’s TV chyron should read, “ALWAYS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING.”

Repeat offenses: Obsequious relationship to power, Drudge-baiting, awfulness, self-promotion, getting everything wrong.
Representative quote:

“To see what the future could look like, click here.”

(The link, posted the night before the selection of Joe Biden as Barack Obama’s running mate, led to a photo of Sen. Obama with Sen. Dick Lugar.)

Correction: Minor hack Mark Helprin was the former Dole speechwriter, of course. I apologize for the error.

(Oh wait, what’s that? What Obama needs to deal with Iran is “a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm”? Hm. And your message to the people of Iraq? Oh, right, it was, “suck on this.”)

Matt Taibbi’s reviews of Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” and its follow-up, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded, are essential reading for anyone baffled by Friedman’s apparent inability to construct sentences without falling into three metaphor-shaped holes, whereupon he commences digging deeper with his many shovels.

But for some reason, his are the airport bookstore selections of presidents and CEOs. The man has lately decided that he is done with democracy itself, and he’d much prefer it if “reasonably enlightened” people (like the Chinese Communist Party) could just impose “politically difficult but critically important policies” from on high. This is the secret wish of nearly every “moderate” pundit on this list, but — confidential to Tom, you’re not supposed to wish for totalitarianism out loud.

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.

Repeat offenses: Conflation of wealth with virtue, horrible jokes, repetition, warmongering, easy generalizations in lieu of research or analysis, cabdriver-on-the-street columns, mixed metaphors, generally awful prose, random capitalization of Certain Words when he’s Trying to Coin a Catchphrase.
Representative quote:

“And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.”

Would that we could return to a time when partisan venom didn’t rule — like, apparently, the Reagan administration. You know, the one with Iran-Contra and Robert Bork. It doesn’t matter when, specifically, you decide that moderation or bipartisanship or serious journalism died. It doesn’t even matter what killed it! All that matters is that at some point, things were better, and now, sadly, they are less good, but they could still get better again, if we all appeal to our better natures.

And then sometimes David just up and writes something truly insane, like his recent column about how President Obama needs to start a good old-fashioned war to get the economy humming again.

Repeat offenses: Radical centrism, repetition of conventional wisdom, pathological need to demonstrate that “both sides do it,” hatred of partisanship/democracy.
Representative quote:

It may seem perverse to suggest that, at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback. But don’t be astonished if that is the case.