Cable News Confidential (Interview with Jeff Cohen)

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

By Don Hazen, AlterNet

http://alternet.org/story/41803/

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Hazen: We've got a couple of clips of you going at it with Robert Novak (VIDEO: For Vengeance, and Feminist Weenies), who's been at the center of the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame scandal. Tell us a little bit about the Prince of Darkness.

Cohen: That's the funny thing about the Prince of Darkness -- he was always good for me. When you're on cable news and you're in an ideological debate, it's great to be going up against someone who seems to concede the center, and almost pushes himself to the extreme. Like when we did our debate on the death penalty and he's basically saying, "I don't care if it's a deterrent, I want vengeance." I'd already compared him to the ayatollahs of Iran, and I'd said that Western democratic countries had all moved toward the abolition of the death penalty, and he sort of said those countries are maybe too civilized.

There was an important moment -- the exact quote is in the book -- where I asked him during a break, "Are you further right of Pat Buchanan?" He said, "Well, Buchanan is taking liberal democratic principles now. I was an Eisenhower Republican in the '50s and I've moved further right every year since." He's boasting about it. When I heard that, I thought to myself, there's no one close to that on TV who can say, "I was a Kennedy Democrat in the '60s and I've moved further left every year since." What you have on TV is usually the conservative Democrats debating the conservative Republicans...