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TheAltlantic.com: Cohen on McCain: He Can Do Know Wrong (4/23/08) by Matthew Yglesias
The Washington Post's purportedly not-right-wing columnist, Richard Cohen is caught in a "war is peace moment," asserting that John McCain is "an honorable man who has fudged and ducked and swallowed the truth on occasion... but always, I think, for understandable although not necessarily admirable reasons." Yglesias writes that "you're looking here at a press that's hopelessly invested in the doomed epistemology of character."We can't know what lurks in the hearts of pols, but we can make inferences based on their behavior. But all politicians' behavior is mixed. So we (and by "we" here I mean "Richard Cohen") read that behavior through our preexisting beliefs about their character. And since we "know" that McCain is honorable, he fudges and ducks and swallows etc. for "understandable" reasons, whereas other, lesser politicians are just soulless scumbags. Of course McCain's reasons are understandable—he wants to win!
The capsule version: this is "just another way of observing that we're looking at a press corps that's hopelessly in the tank for John McCain."
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