America's Concern Troll

You know it's nice and all you write this either eight or six and a half-years after the event:

But what we don't know is whether any of that is worth the life we see on the nightly news or read about in the newspaper.

Each day, when I read the names and pause to wonder about their lives, I have to wonder when I will be able to stop reading -- when there are no more names to read or simply too many of them?

But why on earth were you incapable of discerning this possibility -- hell, probability -- when the same author wrote this not so very long ago:

We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing -- the fighting -- were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.

A man with the intellectual and moral chops slightly higher than Jonah Goldberg would realize the second line of thinking is directly contributing to the first. But that, sadly, gives Cohen slightly too much credit. For his moral conscience is on the same level as the Pantloads.

"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

But hey, they're both now richly rewarded paragons of the modern commentariat, surely rewarded for their far-seeing morality and reasoned judgment -- and love of the Simpsons, Star Trek and dislike of Colbert. That'll show us.