I'm not sure what, if anything, Jeff Bezos will do to try to turn around the financial fortunes of the Washington Post. But Richard Cohen's column today suggests one small step that the owner of the daily paper in a majority-black city could take—reconsider whether regularly publishing racist op-ed columns is a wise business strategy. 
 
 Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all. 
 
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 I'm sure there's some market niche for columns denouncing miscegenation and race mixing, but is it really the Washington, DC market? That seems very questionable to me. Obviously eliminating Cohen-related expenditures would not, on its own, bring the Post to solvency. But every little bit helps. 
 
 
 
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 UPDATE: For the record, there's nothing conventional about gagging at interracial marriage: 
 
 ||||| With all of the terrible, sludge-brained, doped-out political hacks whose columns we read over and over until every atom of our being must fight the urge to swan-dive off a twenty-story building onto a fence topped with rusty spikes coated with rattlesnake venom, we often forget about the execrable Richard Cohen at The Washington Post. Perhaps this is an act of self-preservation. Then the Bearded Dipwad writes something so perverse we are compelled to stare at it like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, until our faces melt and our souls get sucked from our bodies by razor-toothed demons. Hyperbole, you say? That is only because you haven’t read Cohen’s latest yet. 
 
 I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance…slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children. 
 
 Dear. God. Must we go on? Sure, why not. It seems Richard Cohen saw a movie called 12 Years a Slave, and boy is he shocked! Would you believe that American slavery was not a harmonious lovefest where the darkies happily labored in the fields picking cotton by hand and singing happy Negro spirituals while their benevolent white masters stood by beaming with pride? That slave families were ripped apart forever when one or more members was sold to another owner? That wives were sold away from husbands, children away from their parents? That there were brutal beatings and rapes and daily if not hourly humiliations, all in the name of dehumanizing an entire race of humans? That the reality of slavery was nothing like the way it was portrayed in Gone With the Wind? Richard Cohen is very upset with Gone With the Wind, which for him has now been rendered “irrevocably silly and utterly tasteless” about sixty years after it was rendered so for anyone not afflicted with brain parasites. 
 
 Richard Cohen cannot believe he did not learn any of this in school. What Confederate redoubt in the ass end of Georgia or Alabama did he grow up in? Oh, nice job, Far Rockaway H.S. 
 
 The Bearded Dipwad is most upset with his country for never fully accounting for the horrors it perpetrated while enslaving blacks for centuries. “We obscured, we covered up… As a nation, we like to look pretty, but sometimes we weren’t,” he admits. Well, better late than never, we guess? 
 
 We can’t wait to hear Richard Cohen’s reaction when he watches this DVD of Roots we’re sending him for Hanukkah. 
 
 [WaPo] ||||| Cotton-topped ladies man Richard Cohen hilariously poses as a "liberal" columnist at the Washington Post, despite being... how can we put this gently... a power-worshiping bigot. Don't take our word for it. Please, read the paragraph he wrote today. 
 
 Mr. Cohen's column today centers on the prospects that various Republican contenders for the 2016 presidential nomination may have in the Iowa caucus. Iowa, Cohen notes, is a conservative state, which may pose a challenge for Republicans perceived as moderate. 
 
 Then, out of nowhere, comes this paragraph, which we have bolded for ease of reading: 
 
 Today's GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn't look like their country at all. 
 
 I... I... think, perhaps, that even in the most generous of interpretations, that could have been... more clearly stated? 
 
 Richard Cohen, professional newspaper columnist, knows exactly how "conservatives" with "conventional views" feel about interracial couples: sick to their god damn stomachs. Don't even get Richard Cohen started on lesbians. 
 
 In conclusion, fire Richard Cohen. ||||| Focused crawls are collections of frequently-updated webcrawl data from narrow (as opposed to broad or wide) web crawls, often focused on a single domain or subdomain. 
 
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 1. Boring conventional political column 
 
 2. Inscrutable, unfunny joke column 
 
 3. "I am scared of black people" column 
 
 4. "I am shocked and outraged that people called me racist/idiotic/humorless" column 
 
 We are due for a number four any day now. He probably has one or two pre-written ones, just waiting for those moments when people remember Richard Cohen's existence and read the latest things he has said. Here's today's entry (emphasis mine): 
 
 Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all. 
 
 They're not racist, they're just disgusted at the prospect of miscegenation. And it's a perfectly natural revulsion! 
 
 The trouble with this paragraph is the use of the word "conventional" instead of, say, "retrograde" or "archaic" or "racist." What kind of mind, and person, says "conventional" there? What kind of mind, and person, just automatically thinks of "conventional" "people" as reactionary, racist whites? Neutral, normal people, for Cohen, are always reactionary whites; remember how black kids in hoodies are wearing a "uniform we all recognize"? That "we all" there was doing the same work the "people with conventional views" is doing here. Those choices reveal a man very much out of touch with this era and deeply discomfited by it. (They also reveal a man who is terrified of black people.) 
 
 So, here in the real world, in 2013, the vast majority of Americans "approve" of interracial marriage. Majorities have approved since the mid-1990s. Seventy percent of people over 65 approve of black-white marriage. The "conventional" view, now, is that multiracial families are normal. "People with conventional views" are much more appalled by unreconstructed racism than by seeing a white man and a black woman raise a family together. 
 
 Keep in mind, Richard Cohen is only in his early 70s. He is in his early 70s, and he is from New York City. He is a secular liberal Jewish New Yorker who was in college, in New York City, at the height of the counterculture and New Left and civil rights movements. He did not grow up in the South during Jim Crow, or the lily-white rural Midwest. New York is one of the few American states that never even passed an anti-miscegenation law. If movies are what it takes for Richard Cohen to learn to see people of other races as human, I can only wonder why he didn't see "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which came out while he was attending Columbia University. 
 
 As I recently wrote, Richard Cohen is begging, perhaps subconsciously, to be bought out and allowed to retire. Today it's obvious that whoever edits him has the same desire. I'm not sure how someone other than Cohen could have looked at this column and thought that "people with conventional views" was a normal, acceptable way of describing a minuscule minority of racist white Americans. Please, Jeff Bezos, take heed. People with conventional views -- people with conventional human empathy -- must repress a gag reflex when reading nearly anything Richard Cohen writes. 
 
 UPDATE: I just wanted to add an update here, based on Richard Cohen's response to the uproar that greeted this awful column. You will not be shocked to learn that the man who once proclaimed himself the target of a "digital lynch mob," because too many people were emailing him, is reasonably sure that he is The Real Victim Here. 
 
 "The word racist is truly hurtful," he told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "It's not who I am. It's not who I ever was. It's just not fair. It's just not right." 
 
 Poor thing! 
 
 Just to clear things up, Cohen is not grossed out by interracial relationships, everyone: 
 
 When asked if he believed that people who do “have a gag reflex” at the idea of interracial marriage are in fact racist, he said that he did. “I could have picked a better word, but it didn't ring any bells with anybody, it didn't ring any bells with me,” he continued. “But there is a context to the column. You've got to read the whole column and if you read the whole column you can't honestly think that these are my views or I endorse the views that I articulated in the column.” 
 
 This is my favorite part of this interview, because here we learn that when you read a Richard Cohen column out loud to Richard Cohen, he is like, no, of course not, who would even think such a stupid thing! He thinks he is defending himself, but he is actually directly contradicting the thing he wrote. Cohen didn't just refer to disgust with interracial marriage as a "conventional view," he explicitly said it wasn't racist. While Cohen can claim to have been describing the views of others when he mentioned gut discomfort with interracial relationships, there's no way to get around the fact that he straight-up prefaced that description with the words, "today's GOP is not racist." 
 
 Again and again, the way Cohen writes about race -- the specific words and phrases he uses -- suggest a man deeply uncomfortable with diversity and modernity projecting his views onto others -- "people with conventional views," this time, and "we all," when he wrote about Trayvon Martin's "uniform." So, no, he does not think he is racist, of course not. He has no problem with mutiracial families! He just sympathizes with people who do, until you point out to him what that sympathy implies, at which point he finally achieves some level of awareness. 
 
 Not too much awareness, though: 
 
 Cohen has been criticized for his comments on race in the past. When asked why he thought it was that he keeps getting caught up in racially charged arguments, he said that it's because people view him as a liberal and find some of his positions unconventional. "Every once in a while I take an unconventional stance as a liberal -- as someone who has always been called a liberal," he said. "If someone on the right wrote this, no one would care. No one would make a big deal about it but because I veer every once in awhile from orthodoxy, or maybe more than once in awhile, I get plastered this way." 
 
 Richard Cohen pondering why he is so often in hot water over remarks relating to race suggests nothing so much as this classic (and NSFW) Onion article. (I believe Tom Scocca was the first person to draw this particular comparison.) Why do I keep getting in trouble when I write nearly anything related to race in America? It must be... because... I am an unconventional liberal...? 
 
 Michael Kinsley is an unconventional liberal who frequently writes contrarian things, and he does not cause a race-related shitstorm every six months. Fox News Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen have devoted the last decade to openly trolling the left and even they manage to avoid constantly getting credibly accused of writing racist things. Lanny Davis hasn't managed to sound as stupid on race as Cohen does every time he writes about it. I think it's something other than unconventionality. 
 
 Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, meanwhile, says he should have probably edited the offending sentence "more carefully," which just seems like a tacit admission that no one is editing Cohen at all. 
 
 I also should add that I left out the fifth Richard Cohen column. As Eamon Murphy pointed out, it is, "weird rumination on sexual norms." (See, for example, this. And, I guess, this.) I deeply regret the omission. ||||| The day after Chris Christie, the cuddly moderate conservative, won a landslide reelection as the Republican governor of Democratic New Jersey, I took the Internet Express out to Iowa, surveying its various newspapers, blogs and such to see how he might do in the GOP caucuses, won last time by Rick Santorum, neither cuddly nor moderate. Superstorm Sandy put Christie on the map. The winter snows of Iowa could bury him. 
 
 From a Web site called the Iowa Republican, I learned that part of the problem with John McCain and Mitt Romney, seriatim losers to Barack Obama, “is they were deemed too moderate by many Iowa conservatives.” The sort of candidates Iowa Republicans prefer have already been in the state. The blog cited Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah (considered to the right of Cruz, if such a thing is possible), Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s recent vice presidential candidate and its resident abacus, and the inevitable Sarah Palin, the Alaska quitter who, I think, actually now lives in Arizona. If this is the future of the GOP, then it’s in the past. 
 
 None of these candidates bears the slightest resemblance to Christie. And the more literate of them — that’s not you, Palin — must have chortled over post-election newspaper columns extolling Christie as precisely the sort of candidate the GOP ought to run in 2016. This is the dream of moderate Republicans, but not many of them vote in the Iowa caucuses or the South Carolina primary, two of the early nominating contests. 
 
 At the moment, it is Cruz, not Christie, who has seized the imagination of Iowa Republicans. Cruz has not only been to the state, but he also was accompanied by his evangelist father, Rafael, a colorful preacher who opposes almost anything, including, of course, same-sex marriage. (“It was Adam and Eve, it was not Adam and Steve,” he recently said.) 
 
 Cruz the younger is not merely tea party to the nth degree, he is a Christian conservative as well — and for 22 percent of Iowa’s “likely 2016 caucusgoers,” polled by the Des Moines Register, that’s who they think stands the best chance of winning the presidency. The No. 1 choice (44 percent) was “a candidate focused on civil liberties and a small government rooted in the U.S. Constitution.” Christie can passably argue that he is that, but no one is going to call him a Christian conservative. After all, he opposed same-sex marriage in New Jersey, but he acquiesced. Cruz would not to do that. He’d still be talking — and Steve would still be single. 
 
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 Iowa not only is a serious obstacle for Christie and other Republican moderates, it also suggests something more ominous: the Dixiecrats of old. Officially the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they were breakaway Democrats whose primary issue was racial segregation. In its cause, they ran their own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond, and almost cost Harry Truman the 1948 election. They didn’t care. Their objective was not to win — although that would have been nice — but to retain institutional, legal racism. They saw a way of life under attack and they feared its loss. 
 
 Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all. 
 
 As with the Dixiecrats, the fight is not over a particular program — although Obamacare comes close — but about a tectonic shift of attitudes. I thank Dennis J. Goldford, professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, for leading me to a live performance on YouTube of Merle Haggard singing “Are the Good Times Really Over.” This chestnut, a lament for a lost America, has been viewed well more than 2 million times. It could be the tea party’s anthem. 
 
 For all his positions and religious beliefs, Christie is too Joisey for the tea party — too brash, as well. He would be wise to steer clear of Iowa lest he lose or, worse, follow Romney and take on the deeply conservative coloration of the state’s GOP. That might make him (barely) acceptable to Republican Iowans but anathema to the rest of us. 
 
 Read more from Richard Cohen’s archive.
– Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is raising a lot of eyebrows today with his latest column, which is about Iowa's conservative Republicans and includes, well, this: "People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all." "Cohen hilariously poses as a 'liberal' columnist at the Washington Post, despite being ... how can we put this gently ... a power-worshiping bigot," writes Hamilton Nolan at Gawker. At Salon, Alex Pareene takes issue with Cohen's use of the word conventional: "What kind of mind, and person, just automatically thinks of 'conventional' 'people' as reactionary, racist whites? Neutral, normal people, for Cohen, are always reactionary whites," and Cohen himself is "terrified of black people." Two other writers—Matthew Yglesias at Slate and Ezra Klein at Cohen's own paper—point out recent Gallup polls finding that the conventional view, actually, is very much in favor of interracial marriage. Nolan and Yglesias both seem to think Cohen should be fired, and Twitter definitely wants to see him get the boot. "Obviously eliminating Cohen-related expenditures would not, on its own, bring the [struggling] Post to solvency," Yglesias writes. "But every little bit helps." Indeed, Cohen has a history of sparking outrage with his columns. See: The time he finally realized slavery was actually pretty awful, and Wonkette responded gloriously. The time he sympathized with George Zimmerman and noted that Trayvon Martin did, after all, appear to be "wearing a uniform we all recognize." The time he linked Miley Cyrus' twerking to the Steubenville rape case.