I'm not sure that it's so much that Cohen has "abandoned" moral consistency and introspective ability, it's that he never really had them.  If he had those sort of traits, The Post would never have let him on the page, or would've forced him out like Colman McCarthy.

  Cohen wouldn't be such an issue if his point of view wasn't being packaged by the Post as "liberal". He is who he is -- a self-loathing faux-liberal entirely too trusting of and deferential to the Bush administration.

 Most true liberals, of course, quickly recognized this administration for the lie factory that it is. And we have been proven right on just about every issue.

 The problem is that the TRUE liberal point of view, thriving so much in the blogosphere, is almost completely unrepresented in the commercial media. Instead, a weak, waffling equivocator like Cohen gets slotted into the role of the "liberal" -- reinforcing the myth that liberals have no values and no ideals.

 If the Post published true progressive writers like Matt Stoller, or Digby, or David Sirota, or Glenn Greenwald, or one of several dozen others, Cohen's rants would be irrelevant. It's the lack of true liberal voices in the commerical media that make Cohen's blatherings so damaging -- and therefore worthy of all-out attacks from us.  

The lefty sphere has been attacking the Post and other rags for their pro-regime bias (and for good reason) every since there's been a lefty sphere.

So why is it noteworthy that a Post hack peddles the latest pro-regime CW? (Apart from that it concerns the lefty sphere.)

And

There's a hatred of democracy and popular participation that has crept into our punditocracy, political class, and political bloodstream.  

Implying that, at some time in the past, it hadn't started to creep yet? You've hardly refuted the null hypothesis there - my bet (equally lacking in evidence!) is that there's always been such a hatred among many of those mentioned, but it's got less publicity - perhaps because there weren't lefty bloggers back then - or it's passed out of collective memory.

The Patron Saint of the Hamilton Project, for instance, loathed democracy with a will, I seem to recall...

 Richard Cohen is putatively a "liberal" writer, but he spends more time kvetching about liberals than going after the very low-hanging fruit of the many misdeeds of the Bush administration.

There's a reason the blogosphere is fed up with this guy -- he's presented as someone who speaks for us, and he does exactly the opposite.

Have you ever seen Will or Krauthammer devote columns to whining about Rush Limbaugh's listeners and cautioning that they're terrible for the Republicans?

 

william rivers pitt addresses cohen's issue with angry e-mails :

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050906 R.shtml