Norman Solomon has a quick, and desperate (I feel desperate about most things in America these past years... don't you?) look back at what the pundits said in the ramp up to WAR!.

The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion is bound to attract a lot of media coverage, but scant recognition will go to the pundits who helped to make it all possible.

Continuing with long service to the Bush administration's agenda-setting for war, prominent media commentators were very busy in the weeks before the invasion.

At the Washington Post, the op-ed page's fervor hit a new peak on February 6, 2003, the day after Colin Powell's mendacious speech to the UN Security Council.

I cannot give these creeps a lot of time - but will take the first one off the top... one known to all...

Here is what Solomon selects from the months of blather Richard Cohen extruded onto the pages:

Post columnist Richard Cohen explained that Powell was utterly convincing.

"The evidence he presented to the United Nations - some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail - had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them," Cohen wrote.

"Only a fool - or possibly a Frenchman - could conclude otherwise."

Fortunately it was a pretty fast google to turn up the day, just this past January, that Richard Cohen joined the (also) staged performance at the Oprah show - to declare his rage over betrayal - and high profile lying... to the American people. Flag, motherhood, and some kind of pie, were just around the corner...

It was over that earth shattering issue: James Frey of A Million Little Pieces.

Take a gander:

Oprah: Richard Cohen is a Washington Post columnist who wrote in the case of James Frey:

"The liar whose memoir turns out to have a good deal of fiction alongside fact."

[Richard Cohen also] said, "Oprah is not only wrong but deluded."

And I was impressed with that. I was impressed with that because I thought sometimes criticism can be very helpful. So thank you very much. You were right. I was wrong. What do you want to say?

[I feel so much better about America, don't you? -Marisacat]

Richard Cohen: I would say to the publishing industry, you guys have got to cut this out. You're not little shops anymore with two or three people working with quills. You're part of large corporations. Hire somebody for $25,000, $30,000 a year as a fact checker.

A fact checker would have found out in a half an hour that some of this book didn't work because the book doesn't pass the smell test. … When it doesn't pass the smell test, you give it to a fact checker.

Work it out. Somebody could have done what The Smoking Gun did. They could have done it. Publishers have to do it from here on end.

There is a difference between truth and fiction. We find this out all the time. Now we're finding it out again.

This was a betrayal of his readers. It was a betrayal of you.

More from Richard Cohen

Feel better? About America?

About publishing? Media? Truth, Reason, Logic, Art, Beauty? Eros? Thanatos? Feel better, possibly, about the Commerce Clause, with Roberts and Alito well ensconced?, No? Your childrens' future?

Richard Cohen took a public dump of his bottled up ethical angst. LOL, such professional drama...

Really he just adjusted his de rigueur South Seas pearl choker. In light of everything, it was not pretty. Frey is not WAR!. Not by a long shot. But Richard sits pretty... on a dog pillow at WaPo.

*My apologies to the Poodle breed, excellent and wonderful dogs, if not overbred (which is not their fault). I like them, from the tiniest teacup to the most elegant standard poodle. And cockapoos, labradoodles too.

I just disdain humans who want to be poodles.