Here's a pettish attack on Times columnist Roger Cohen by Atlantic blogger Jeffrey Goldberg, following Cohen's swipe at Goldberg. Goldberg titles it, "A Memo to Roger Cohen."
is: Never attack your critics, particularly in personal terms. Columnists for the Times have scaled the Mt. Olympus of punditry; when they attack their critics they demean their lofty position, and inevitably draw
more attention to the criticism
than it would otherwise receive. Roger
Cohen never learned this rule.
It goes on. This strikes me as an impish and unstraightforward attack. Impish because: all that Cohen did was call Goldberg Netanyahu's "faithful stenographer." That's a good sharp line. Doesn't feel very personal to me. It's fun. Fun is always good, in writing. Also, Goldberg is very important. He's a powerful voice. He should be taken on in any terms a writer wants to use that are persuasive, and Cohen is persuasive. I criticize Goldberg all the time because he is so important. Cohen knows the same thing, whether he's on Olympus or just at his desk. As to Goldberg's lack of straightforwardness, well, it's not straightforward. Goldberg is condescendingly offering a lesson in writerly etiquette/establishment manners. I say, Crap. We're writers dealing with a terribly important matter of our country's foreign policy; Cohen should engage his writerly tools, including wit. All that Goldberg's saying in this is, I know the ways of status.
