Three Cheers For Richard Cohen

Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist, deserves three cheers, or more, for his column today.

It is an extended, and persuasive, dump on the Democratic Party generally and Al Gore personally as

the personification of a Democratic Party that has found it impossible to move off the racial dime, often staying silent or complicitous when others waved the bloody shirt of ol’ time racism — usually just to propel African Americans to the polls.

Finally, a columnist of some prominence in a major national publication has had the courage to say that

the Democratic Party is just as likely to play the race card as the Republican Party. Take a principled stand against this or that civil rights program and you’re going to be denounced as a racist.