Little Jeffy Cohen chatted it up with Lila Garrett on Connect the Dots with Lila Garrett (KPFK) last Monday and we couldn't stop laughing after Ruth clued us in to the can't-miss broadcast. Anytime Jeffy speaks, the world snickers. So we did our part to circulate the segment to various friends in and out of the media. As one wag told us, he sounds like Ed Begley Jr.'s less masculine brother.
Another wag (this one at MSNBC) urged us "to tell the truth, Cohen's not a Democrat." No, he's not. He's a weak man, a very, very weak one, hiding in the back of a political closet. They know him at MSNBC very well. Very well. And, on Monday, Jeffy was up to his old tricks.
How so?
Opposition to Barack, Jeffy insisted, is racism ("they resent having a person of color in the White House"). Strange, when over 70% of Americans loved Barack (according to polls at the start of the year), we guess they didn't realize he had an African father. Someone must have scrawled it on the bathroom wall?
Moments later, Jeffy's saying that the Republicans hate Barack the same way they hated Bill Clinton ("they hate everything that even an Obama or a Clinton does, they don't recognize Obama as legitimate, they never recognized Clinton as legitimate") . We're confused. Bill's African-American? Who knew?
For someone seen as incredibly effeminate by so many who've worked with him, we were rather startled to hear Jeffy using the homophobic term "tea b**gers" and we'd suggest that Ithaca College send Jeffy to a diversity training class before allowing him back in front of students.
But all we got was recycled talking points from the echo chamber. We couldn't build a true left wing press so we did the easy thing, re-built the existing echo chamber but from the left. It's so pathetic that 'activist' groups on the left now urge you to use their 'talking points.' Not facts, mind you, "talking points." Suddenly spin is a good thing. Again, the left did not build a media system, it built an echo chamber.
Jeffy Cohen is an asshole and simpering, whimpering asshole and he's also a revisionist. We'll get back to that.
For now we'll note that as 2009 draws to a close, Jeffy Cohen finally finds the courage to tell you what we've been covering since January 2008 [here for one example]: The mythical 'small donors' were not funding Barack's campaign. That was never true. But Jeffy couldn't call it out when it damn well mannered.
Last week he could (finally) say, "Some of us gave him fifty bucks or eighty bucks or a hundred bucks but we have to understand that no candidate in history received more money from Wall Street than did Barack Obama. In that last election, here he's running against John McCain, Mr. Military, son and grandson of Navy admirals, and Obama got hundreds of thousands of dollars more from military contractors than did McCain."
You know what, you asshole, you're not just late to the party, you missed it completely. When it was important, when it mattered, you didn't make a peep. You're a coward and fake, Jeff Cohen. You're a habitual liar who uses deceit and trickery to try to sway the public. In earlier times, you would have been flogged in public . . . for just cause.
Jeffy continued (sounding like us in early 2008), "So we have to clear away this fog of Obama as a community organizer, that was decades ago."
Golly, if Jeffy or Amy Goodman or any of the other WHORES had told the truth when it mattered, maybe a fog wouldn't exist today?
Does the left get how many segments Amy Goodman wasted promoting Barack as a community organizer? Vouched for by various freaks who couldn't own up to being Socialists or Communists or gay but want to be seen as brave and trusting? (Yeah, we're thinking of Scar especially right now.) Now Jeffy wants to show up and declare that was decades ago and doesn't matter? But doesn't want to talk about who took part in pimping that lie? (Pimps includes his own FAIR and their radio program CounterSpin.)
We were rolling when he insisted, "I think it's up to us as individual citizens and as independent journalists to stand up and take a position of independence and to take a newer look at the president."
You know when is a good time to take a newer (or even new) look at a president is? When he or she is a candidate. Not after they've been elected.
Leaving aside the homophobia and the spin, Jeffy didn't say a damn thing we haven't already said over and over here when Barack was still a candidate, when the Democratic Party primaries were still crowded.
So we're really not in the mood for his garbage. He was a coward when it mattered. When Barack set a standard (believe us, others will follow his lead) and rejected public financing during the general election despite pledging to take it, Jeffy was silent. This site was not. Jeffy didn't call it out which makes it that much harder to call the next one out. And there will be more.
What most irritated us about Jeffy -- besides that high-pitched speaking voice -- was that he thought he could get away with lying. He thought he could change what went down, erase it, make it vanish.
No damn way in hell, you asshole Jeff Cohen.
Those of us who took a stand for the truth in 2008 will not allow your WHORING ass to show up now and reinvent history.
We're referring specifically to Jeff's claims that the left was demoralized by Clinton and might end up demoralized by Barack.
No, it wasn't Clinton and it's not Barack.
The demoralization came not from those men. The demoralization came from the WHORES who refused to be independent and who continuously lied.
Yes, the left was demoralized in the 90s. That's not Bill Clinton. Yes, the left is demoralized today, that's not Barack.
The demoralization does not come from the top down.
Let's trace the demoralization because we can do that now and readers, due to the fresh history of last year, will recognize what happened.
When the Democrats were out of the White House (Ronald Reagan's two terms, George H.W. Bush's one term), those on the left (which is more than just Dems) looked for voices they could trust. And as they call out Republicans, you think these voices are brave and independent. But then, these 'independent' voices start selling a candidate, start lying for him (it's only been "him"s thus far) and, when he gets elected, they continue to lie for him.
That is 2008. That is why The Nation today doesn't want to discuss circulation. That is why a friend at another left magazine says that magazine (the one he's at) will be dead in six months. That's why Amy Goodman's podcasts and streaming are way down. It's why MSNBC's ratings are in the tank.
Various people self-presented as 'independent' voices for years in the leadup to 2008 only to reveal themselves to be partisans either controlled by the DNC or willing to be toadies for the DNC.
That, not Barack Obama, is why the left is demoralized.
2008 saw four women make strong strides. Cynthia McKinney headed the Green Party ticket with Rosa Clemente as her running mate. Sarah Palin was John McCain's running mate on the Republican Party ticket. Hillary Clinton got more votes than Barack (or anyone) running for the Democratic Party nomination. Yet not only were these women -- and all women -- not celebrated or seen as a source of pride, they were scorned, mocked and treated in the most biased manner. And where were the left watchdogs?
Usually right there -- hurling invective at the women. Ian Masters openly mocking Cynthia McKinney on KPFK moments after she'd gotten off the phone with them being but on example.
Just as the use of "tea b**gers" by 'progressives' like Jeffy Cohen today indicates there's no real acceptance of out-gays and lesbians in the 'progressive' circles, their embrace of sexism demonstrates there's no real place for women who value women on the left either.
Grasp that, as we've documented, CounterSpin, FAIR's weekly radio program, documented all real and imagined bits of racism but never weighed in on sexism during the campaign until May 2008 was drawing to a close. They must have figured Puerto Rico didn't matter so they could toss in one sentence -- ONE SENTENCE -- about Hillary being called a bitch on a CNN 'discussion' segment.
Who demoralized the left?
Jeff Cohen, why don't you grab your slice of the blame pie.
You demoralized the left by presenting as an 'independent' voice but never finding time to call out the rank sexism. You demoralize the left today by trafficking in homophobic terms.
In the 90s, what really happened, what Jeffy doesn't tell you, is that a lot of people who had audiences ran them off by WHORING for a president. Regardless of whom the president is, it is never the role of an activist movement to prop him or her up. Let's leave that for backwater countries, shall we?
Marianne Wright Edleman gets a lot of mileage out of whining today about Bill Clinton cutting the safety net (with "Welfare Reform") and she used that to trash Hillary and pimp Barack. But when the OLD WHORE forgot to tell you was that she wasn't leading a pushback against that in real time. She was off on her guns-is-bad work. She didn't give a damn about welfare reform when it mattered. If she had, she would have been working to stop it, organizing to stop it, calling it out. The OLD WHORE did what she did (and did it because she -- and her husband who worked for the Clinton administration -- had perks).
Until Barack, Bush was one of the most crooked and devious people to occupy the White House. He occupied it for eight years. During that time, a lot of people found voices who would call the crimes out. And then they watched as Barack started his own list of broken promises (campaign finance reform, one brigade a month out of Iraq after elected, illegal and warrantless spying) and crimes (continuing the illegal wars, continuing Guantanamo, bombing Pakistan, etc.).
And they waited and waited for the 'brave' 'voices' of 2007 and 2006 and 2005 and 2004 and 2003 to speak out. And they waited in vain.
And that's what demoralizes the left.
Barack's Bush. Bush couldn't demoralize the left. Barack can't. But the WHORES who keep lying for him, the ones who are supposed to be of the left, they can demoralize the left.
That's what happened in the nineties and it's what's happened today.
This bothers us because the illegal wars continue.
Jeffy frets about a demoralized left because "the Republicans are going to win at the ballot box."
Who the hell cares at this point?
Jeffy went on, later in the segment, to insist that 'progressive' members of Congress are not a threat to Barack because "they don't believe progressives will ever stand their ground."
Why should members of Congress stand their ground when so much of the left refuses to?
Jeffy wants those member of Congress to "once and for all, [. . .] say enough is enough, we're not voting with you, Mr. President."
But he can't accept the fact that a real revolution would be embracing that the Dems might get less votes. Might be establishing the narrative that Dems will get less votes and get less votes because they refused to honor promises and work for the American people.
When you constantly WHORE for the DNC, you've really got no business lecturing any member of Congress for refusing to stand his or her ground.
But Jeffy's got no reason to speak at all right now. Nor does Norman Solomon, Liar John Nichols, self-loathing lesbian Laura Flanders, Amy Goodman or any of their ilk.
Unless and until they can own their part in pimping Barack, they need to just shut their mouths because everyone knows they did it. No one thinks, "Oh, you brave, Amy Goodman." Everyone just thinks, "Two-bit whore."
And that just demoralizes the left even further.