"The liberal Internet has been in a righteously indignant tizzy (my favorite kind) today over a new column from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen..."

"... (there’s even a hashtag, #FireRichardCohen, for ease of expression). Cohen has long been derided for lame op-ed writing and general 'unreconstructed,' 'power-worshiping' bigotry. But many readers and critics, including my Slate colleague Matthew Yglesias, apparently found today’s piece — a familiar rehearsal of the resistance Chris Christie, a relative moderate, might encounter during a GOP presidential campaign in more socially conservative contests like Iowa and South Carolina — to be the final, actionable offense."

Good lord! Liberals got themselves into a vortex.

I just wanted to say — as I've said before...

That's WaPo columnist Richard Cohen, or as we call him around here: the never-slept-with-Althouse Richard Cohen.

UPDATE: I wrote another post on this topic, here.

"To Be or Not to Be."

RLC emails to say that the great old Jack Benny/Carole Lombard movie (directed by Ernst Lubitsch) — which we loved in the 1970s — is out in a Criterion Collection edition. He notes the 97% positive rating by the critics collected at Rotten Tomatoes, and I see that the 3% negativity is accounted for entirely by the one review that comes from 1942, when the movie was released. It's Bosley Crowther in the NYT:

Perhaps there are plenty of persons who can overlook the locale, who can still laugh at Nazi generals with pop-eyes and bungle-some wits. Perhaps they can fancy Jack Benny, disguised be-hind goggles and beard, figuratively tweaking the noses of the best Gestapo sleuths.

Carole Lombard is, Crowther tells us, "very beautiful and comically adroit." Twice, in this short review, he informs us that this is her last movie. He writes the strange phrase "the feelings which one might imagine her presence would impose are never sensed." She's beautiful and dead, so he thought he was going to have feelings, but he's forced to see her there with that big old ham, the "radio comedian," Jack Benny:

Too often does he pout or grow indignant or pull a double-take. Of course, the script en-courages the old Benny legend of "ham." Once a German officer comments, laughing loudy, "What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland." That gives you a couple of ideas about this film.

How dare Jack Benny get the last of the beautiful and adroit Carole Lombard!

"Who was the better war poet, Rupert Brooke (i.e., WWI romantic jingoism) or Emily Dickinson? Answer: Emily Dickinson."

In the comments to this morning's post about J.D. Salinger, Richard Lawrence Cohen (my ex-husband) paraphrases something Salinger once said.

That got me looking for Emily Dickinson's war poems, but I got distracted thinking about something else I read this morning, the obituary for the actress Julie Harris. She played the part of Emily Dickenson in a 1977 play called "The Belle of Amherst." A quick search on YouTube turned up a fine print of the entire 90-minute play. It probably shouldn't be there, and I won't embed it, but here it is.

"When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them."

"When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined. They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates."

A super-short fiction by RLC, written a few years ago, but long after the time when I was married to him. These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

"Rules for Radicals"? Rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." There's marriage for you!

Why was I reading that old post? Because when I read that wonderful garden club politics article out loud, I said it was like a compressed novel and Meade said it was like one of RLC's super-short fictions which you can read the best of in book form or read at his blog. The one about married couples reading marriage therapy books simultaneously is just what's at the top when you click the "fiction" tag.

I was also considering blogging "If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock" — a propos of the fuzzy pink socks that played a central role in the news story of the week, how North Korea is about to drop a nuclear bomb somewhere Mitch McConnell's people considered quoting things Ashley Judd wrote about herself.

"So I will not be writing the scenes of the well-meaning but ineffectual school guidance counselor giving the teenager advice that ironically pushes him closer to destruction..."

"... the casually incomprehending teachers joking about him in the lounge; the parental arguments caused by the stress of having to deal with an unfathomable evil in their house (plus the deadpan authorial hints that maybe they had something to do with it); the school classmates taunting him and driving him further into fury... You can imagine all this as well as I can."