Cohen Finally Gets It Right

Richard Cohen's willfully blind "pox-on-both-houses" style of writing normally irritates me -- but today he wins me over with a hearty condemnation of Hillary Clinton's flag-burning bill. Money quote:

Star-Spangled Pandering: "The First Amendment is where you simply do not go. It is sacred. It protects our most cherished rights -- religion, speech, press and assembly -- and while I sometimes turn viscerally angry when I see the flag despoiled, my emotions are akin to what I feel when neo-Nazis march. Repugnant or not, popular or not, it is all political speech. Her sponsorship of the flag measure calls for reconsideration all around -- either by Hillary Clinton and her support of the flag bill or by liberals and their support of her."

His point is that Hillary is really a centrist rather than a liberal, but her bill goes beyond what centrists should advocate and in fact "courts reactionaries." I tend to agree, but Cohen undercuts himself by mentioning that 70% of Americans support a flag-burning ban. I haven't verified this (it's an outrageously high number, but not implausible and possibly dependent on the way the question is asked). Nonetheless, there are some areas of lawmaking you just don't pander to the crowd, and the First Amendment -- as Cohen points out -- is one of them.