DONT ASK, DON’T THINK

Several of you have urged me to link to this column by Richard Cohen. It’s a great one. Cohen has championed sanity wth regard to gay people for a long time. He’s a model of empathy and reason. His passion on the complete insanity that requires the military to fire twenty Arab linguists for being gay is well-taken. (Here’s one way to tell a conservative homophobe: he’d rather fire gay linguists than win the war.) And his observation of the callow dismissiveness toward the truth about Abraham Lincoln is also right on the money. Cohen shows me how many straight people are indeed capable of understanding and seeing through the artful casuistry that sadly tarts up so much prejudice on the right. (Speaking of which, Philip Nobile will be on O’Reilly tonight. Can you imagine the derision of Tripp’s thesis that will ensue? Let’s just see if Nobile says what he once wrote: that he believes that most Lincoln historians have been homophobes and that Lincoln was certainly bisexual. And let’s see whether he discloses – as he didn’t in the Standard – that after he quit the Tripp project, he tried to sell a rival book making the same case.)