No, Richard, Your Invertebratedness Did Not Prove Crucial

Richard Cohen is being properly and publicly flayed (oopsy: Liberal using violent metaphor!) for his ridiculously huffy column in today's Post bemoaning the hotted-up responses to his idiotic column last week (you know, the one where he called a bully a comedian playing to a hostile audience, including a man who has sent over 2000 Americans and countless tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens to their death and has asserted his right to disregard any law he deems troublesome). At the risk of being rude, thereby causing American Liberalism to collapse on its own incivility, Richard Cohen may bite me. Jon Chait too.

Now that The Decider!s been recognized by roughly 70% of the American public to be the incompetent ideologue and rogue warmonger and corrupt oligarch and dangerous schizophrenic all of us loons on the Left have been screaming since seemingly forever, now that even the piggiest Republicans are challenging his authority, the "grown-ups" of the Democratic institutions have decided they themselves, holding to their counsel of impotent frustration compounded with craven complicity, are responsible for The Decider!s demise. And it's important, to promulgate the demise, to guarantee that the "grown-ups" get the rewards of that demise, that tut-tutting be kept to a civil minimum. Can't we see how low cowardly silence in the face of war and criminalities has brought The Decider!?

Hence the Stalinist talk. Hence the meme of The Fever Swamp. Hence the outrage, the outrage! that a scrawny comedian with courage didn't play by the rules in the face of a man who recognizes no rules except his own. This isn't about civility, this is about power. Remember the frantic panic at Howard Dean's meteoric rise in primary 2004: nobody worked harder to sabotage Dean - hardly a Leftist, by the way; Left of centerleft by a smidge, maybe, but hardly a Leftist - than the powers of institutional Democrats.

There is nothing that could benefit The Decider! more now than a civil war among Democrats - and look who's starting the civil war: it's not the "uncivil" Left, it's insider Democrats.

I am by no means saying that the grassroot Left and the blogs that support it are more than partially responsible for The Decider!s dismal poll numbers: that Fucktard gets the Fucktard's share of the credit. But it was those of us screaming, shouting, documenting, sharing, and trying to hold anybody to any accountability that made the initial noise about this administration and kept the noise constant and steady and made it louder.

We were told to shut up when The Decider!s power seemed unimpeachable. We're being told now to shut up when The Decider!s power is there to be quashed. We didn't listen when the invertebrates felt hopeless. Why should we shut up now that the same invertebrates sense a backbone?