The War Room Hack Thirty is a list of our least favorite political commentators, newspaper columnists and constant cable news presences, ranked roughly (but only roughly) in order of awfulness and then described rudely. Criteria for inclusion included writing the same column every week for 30 years, warmongering, joyless repetition of conventional wisdom, and making bad puns.
The full list can be found here. Pass it along, argue about it, and print it out and glue each pundit’s photo into your scrapbook!
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.
That’s how we get work like “leave Roman Polanski alone!” and sending me mean e-mails is “digital lynching” and affirmative action punishes all white people and you stupid snot-nosed bloggers don’t get that Cheney was probably right to torture people and Barack Obama should read a newspaper instead of a BlackBerry because a BlackBerry is full of lies. All in the singularly smug, grating prose style of a man who knows he’s an immovable object in one of the most comfortable positions in all of journalism.
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.”
I thought we were all done talking about former Bob Dole speechwriter former ABC News political director Mark Halperin, whose star had seemed to stop rising toward the end of the Bush years — but then he attached himself, leechlike, to reporter John Heilemann, to co-write “Game Change,” a lengthy catalog of the 2008 presidential campaign’s moments of least import.
Halperin used to write this thing called the Note, which was an e-mail newsletter that various Washingtonians whom Halperin referred to as “The Gang of 500″ used to read to find out what they themselves thought about the news of the day. It was written as privileged wisdom from Beltway insiders — cryptic references, obscure jokes, endless name-dropping, constant inexplicable plugs for the Palm restaurant — when it was in fact just “whatever a professional political operative recently told Mark Halperin, along with links to political stories in the major papers.”
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.
Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him, pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the second-most-influential business thinker in the country is worrying about carbon emissions. Which is, I freely admit, a nice change of pace from back when he was telling the world that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would lead to a glorious new dawn of freedom/democracy/whiskey/iPods/Old Navy in the Middle East as a whole.
(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.”
The dean of the Washington Press Corps, David Broder has also been What’s Wrong With the Washington Press Corp ever since he stepped off the campaign bus and began applying his wisdom toward the great problems plaguing the country.
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.
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.
While the opinions of publisher/pundit Mort Zuckerman tend to be rather banal, New Republic owner Marty Peretz uses the power of the press to let the world know what he really thinks about Muslims and Arabs. (He doesn’t think much of them.) At least Zuckerman is courteous enough to let professionals look over his work before it’s published. Because Peretz fancies himself both the nation’s foremost authority on Middle Eastern affairs and a scintillating writer, he has named himself editor in chief of the magazine, and his work goes up before a grown-up can look it over.
Did you know that “Arab society” is “hidebound and backward”? That the Druze are “congenitally untrustworthy”? You can learn all that and more at the Peretz Dossier, an irregularly updated encyclopedia of the most ridiculous and inflammatory things Peretz writes about Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis and all the other non-Jews he considers to be dastardly, primitive and incapable of “civilization.”
He’s been hammering home this same, simple point, in the same perfervid language, since he bought the New Republic in 1974. Jack Shafer’s 1991 column on Peretz is a particularly brutal review of his oeuvre. (But because we at the Hack 30 believe in fairness above all else, note Shafer’s column “In Praise of Marty Peretz” from earlier this year, in which it is argued that while he’s a horrid writer and an unrepentant bigot, he’s also fostered a great deal of talent at his magazine over the years. Which is true enough, but also: Peter Beinart.)
My favorite parts of Peretz’s feverish blog are his headlines; they’re generally several sentences long, contain rhetorical questions and ellipses, and seem to preempt the need for any sort of content below them:
- “The Cost (To Us) Even Of Unsuccessful Terror Gets More And More Expensive. And, By The Way, American VIPs Do Not Get Frisked Anywhere.”
- “North Korea’s Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Plant Is Not Just About Pyongyang. It Is Also About Iran. Does Obama Know … Or Care?”
- “The I.A.E.A Is Trying To Get An Inspection of Iranian Nuclear Facilities. Syrian Atomic Capacities Are Almost As Important … And More Concealed.”
- “Yes, This Was Another Instance of Muslim Terror … And It Was Directed At Americans, At American Jews, In Fact.”
- “‘Le Figaro’ Reports That Assad Rebuilt Hezbollah’s Hi-Grade Missile Capacity To 40,000. So Whatever Happened To Obama’s ‘Reset Button’ With Damascus? It Never Was Reset.”
Peretz can’t make it through a simple account of the concerts and dance performances he enjoyed on a recent trip to Tel Aviv without lobbing a few bombs at those judged to have treated Israel unfairly — in this instance, Elvis Costello, the Pixies(!) and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His big finish:
You can tell a lot about the world’s indifference to anti-Semitism by noting how the academy has treated Tutu. The retired Anglican archbishop of Leshoto has been honored with those hortatory degrees by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge and nearly 130 other universities. Shame on them.
Peretz — who was too busy writing cranky things about Muslims in his magazine to, say, be an instrumental force in ending South African apartheid — “holds the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Bard College (1982), Coe College (1983), Long Island University (1988), Brandeis University (1989), Hebrew College (1990), Chicago Theological Seminary (1994), and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1987).” He was honored by the Harvard Social Studies department just last September. Shame on them.
Repeat offenses: Racism, overheated prose.
Representative quote:
I actually believe that Arabs are feigning outrage when they protest what they call American (or Israeli) “atrocities.” They are not shocked at all by what in truth must seem to them not atrocious at all. It is routine in their cultures. That comparison shouldn’t comfort us as Americans. We have higher standards of civilization than they do. But the mutilation of bodies and beheadings of people picked up at random in Iraq does not scandalize the people of Iraq unless victims are believers in their own sect or members of their own clan. And the truth is that we are less and less shocked by the mass death-happenings in the world of Islam. Yes, that’s the bitter truth. Frankly, even I — cynic that I am — was shocked in the beginning by the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq. But I am no longer surprised. And neither are you.
Richard Cohen 
Mark Halperin 
Thomas Friedman 
David Broder 
Marty Peretz 