Apt observations here:

Syndicated
columnist Richard Cohen declared in the Washington Post on July 25 that
an-eye-for-an-eye would be a hopelessly wimpy policy for the Israeli
government.

"Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that
proportionality is madness," he wrote. "For Israel, a small country
within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any
enemy’s back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is
suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good
enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to
reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights."

Cohen likes to sit in front of a computer and use flip phrases like
"punch out your lights" as euphemisms for burning human flesh and bones
with high-tech weapons, courtesy of American taxpayers.

In mid-November 1998, when President Clinton canceled plans for air
attacks on Iraq after Saddam Hussein promised full cooperation with
U.N. weapons inspectors, Cohen wrote: "Something is out of balance
here. The Clinton administration waited too long to act. It needed to
punch out Iraq’s lights, and it did not do so."

The resort to euphemism tells us a lot. So does Cohen’s track record of
sweeping statements on behalf of his zeal for military actions funded
by the U.S. Treasury.

On February 6, 2003, the Washington Post published Richard Cohen’s
judgment the morning after Colin Powell made his televised presentation
to the U.N. Security Council. "The evidence he presented to the United
Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely
bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not
only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a
doubt still retains them," Cohen wrote. "Only a fool — or possibly a
Frenchman — could conclude otherwise."

Cohen’s moral certainties are on a par with his technical ones.  While
he condemns rockets fired into Israel, he expresses pleasure about
missiles fired by the Israeli government. That the death toll of
civilians is far higher from Israel’s weaponry does not appear to
bother him. On the contrary, he seems glad about the killing spree by
the Israeli military….

Meanwhile, in the real world, the vast majority of the victims of the
Israeli onslaught are civilians being subjected to collective
punishment.

Cohen — like so many others in the American punditocracy — depicts
the death of an Israeli civilian as far more tragic and important than
the death of an Arab civilian.

There’s something really sick about such righteous support for civilian death and destruction.

Osama bin Laden, meet Richard Cohen.

Richard, meet Osama.

Notice, of course, that the same sick performance is carried out on hundreds of highly trafficked blogs every day…proving (yet again) that the blogosphere, despite its self-important self-image, simply replicates in large measure the pathologies and dishonesties of the traditional media and the public culture.