Cohen's winning entry is from the September 8, 2005 Washington Post and was carried locally in the Cincinnati Enquirer on Sunday, September 11, a day that deserved better. Gentle readers will find it here.
What distinguishes Cohen's column in a crowded field is its amazing range of left-wing boilerplate, combined with a journalistic vigor that barely attempts to conceal the massive internal contradictions of its argument, let alone its loose grasp on facts. Complete enumeration of the winner's distinguishing features would dwarf the column itself. So we can only summarize:
- Cliché 1: Conservatives are heartless. Cohen argues that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, who Cohen says has not failed, has not learned as much as people like Cohen, who has failed and learned from their failure. He will be unable to empathize with the little guy. Cohen is apparently under the misapprehension that Roberts is running for legislative office, or maybe seeking an appointment as National Psychotherapist, or will even serve as a trial judge who hands down sentences to criminals and can consider their circumstances for a measure of mercy. But the Supreme Court decides matters of law on the basis of the law, not empathy or life experience. At any rate, Roberts college summers working in a Gary, Indiana, steel plant don't count for Cohen.
- Cliché 2: Bush is stupid. Cohen avers that Roberts is bright but implies that the President is dumb. We are apparently to draw the conclusion that Roberts, who possesses two Harvard degrees, is demonstrably brighter than Bush, who has one from Yale and one from Harvard. Or perhaps that Harvard law grads are smarter than Harvard business grads. Cohen, a proud graduate of night school, apparently knows how to make such judgments but doesn't tell the rest of us, who are incapable of grasping the sophisticated means.
- Cliché 3: Creation is ignorant. At any rate, Cohen's proof that Bush isn't smart is Bush's remark that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in schools. Calling ID a "non-theory" and implying that genuine thought excludes it outright, Cohen doesn't even bother offering the only justification for such cavalier dismissal, the positivistic notion that only "scientific" knowledge really counts. SWNID readers have encountered this insincere feint before.
- Cliché 4: "Science" is the only knowledge that counts. But Cohen compounds his move with the hysterical remark, "What next, alchemy and chemistry?" Seldom does one see an analogy drawn between a seriously held philosophical viewpoint, informed by science ("metascientific" is the term used for ID by Alvin Plantinga) and supported by a long intellectual tradition going back at least to Aristotle, not to mention Genesis and the Psalms, and a completely unscientific, magical tradition with no currency whatsoever. Of course, an insistence on the primacy of science would discount his entire insistence that Roberts is flawed because he isn't flawed, but enough of that.
- Cliché 5: Conservatives are damned if they do and damned if they don't. [Note to gentle readers: this is not swearing but proper use of a term found in the King James Version of the Bible.] Nevertheless, the very fact that Bush has failed prior to running for office seems never to have counted in Bush's favor with Cohen. Since neither success nor failure will commend a public figure to him, perhaps he favors those distinguished by radical mediocrity.
- Cliché 6: Everything is a federal case when the President is a conservative. Cohen offers that coldness to the human condition led to the failed evacuation of New Orleans, then in the next paragraph offers "The poor? It's as if the idiots up and down the line never heard of them. It's as if no one at the top of the Federal Emergency Management Agency or at the White House knew they existed. Check that. They knew, but it was theoretical: Oh, they'll manage." This deft juxtaposition perpetuates the notion that FEMA and the White House were responsible for developing and implementing the evacuation of New Orleans, despite the very public record that such responsibilities are local, with FEMA offering support when asked by the locals.
- Cliché 7: Republicans are all megarich dolts who don't know reality when it bites them. Cohen cites Barbara Bush's delightfully upbeat but ultimately silly remark about the Astrodome refugees coping well because they are poor and used to bad stuff. Though one might expect the notoriously outspoken and now quite elderly matriarch to be given a pass on this one (as Hamilton County Democratic Party Chair Tim Burke will be for this one: "It always seemed to me in a rather non-scientific study that the greatest overvoting ... was in poor, lesser-educated, African-American precincts"), she has become a useful cipher for her son, who is assumed to be a lifetime member of the Silver Spoon Club.
Cohen's virtuoso blending of these voices into a single column, published nationwide, has earned him this prestigious award. We congratulate him on this success, made possible only by his obvious and abject failure.
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