Muhammad Cohen

Category: US politics

  • Media, don’t help Trump distract from disaster

    CBS White House correspondent Weijia Jiang deflected attention from the Trump administration’s disastrous Covid-19 response by alleging an anti-Chinese insult. Media needs to keep focused on what really matters.

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming, contributor to Forbes, columnist/correspondent for Asia Times, and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

  • GOP sins will tar flawed Democrats

    As Iowa caucus results emerge, voters must realize Republicans will expertly project GOP wrongdoing and unpopular policies onto their opponents. In the Democratic presidential field, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg seem especially vulnerable to this GOP jujitsu.

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming, contributor to Forbes, columnist/correpsondent for Asia Times, and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

  • Happy FU Day, today and every day

    Greetings for Felix Unger Day, November 13. For Americans, thanks to our elected officials in Washington, now every day is FU Day.

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a contributor to Forbes, editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

  • Racism, cynicism Kellyanne Conway calling cards

    Donald Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway grabbed my attention during the 2008 presidential race. After media questioned the Democratic contenders about an Obama-Clinton dream ticket, and the two candidates generously conceded the other would make a strong running mate, Conway appeared on CNN’s AC 360 to sneer, “Hillary Clinton says Barack Obama can ride in the back of her bus.” It was an extraordinarily cynical, racially inflammatory remark, projecting racism onto someone else who had displayed not an iota of it. I was so shocked by her racial Molotov cocktail that I wrote to CNN, where I once worked as a news producer, to suggest they ban Conway from their airwaves.

    In this campaign, Conway’s cynicism on racial issues has blossomed, continually trying to convince minorities turn their backs on their champions in favor of a proven antagonist. The Trump campaign berates Clinton for failing to achieve economic and educational equality for minorities and even Jay Z’s lyrics, while ignoring Trump’s record of housing discrimination, demonizing the Central Park Five even after exoneration and leading the birther movement that claimed President Obama wasn’t born in the US. Now, under Conway’s tutelage, Trump talks about a rigged election and voter fraud, specifying minority areas, pandering to the far right and dog whistling to white supremacists.

    On the final Sunday of the campaign, Conway wouldn’t correct a fake story about voting hours being illegal extended for “certain groups” in Clark County, Nevada. Confronted with the truth – officials followed standard procedure, allowing voters already on line by closing time to vote – Conway claimed she didn’t have “all the facts,” though that didn’t stop her from putting her false spin on the story. She also refused to repudiate the fantasy narrative of an “assassination attempt” on Trump in Reno, when the only person really in danger was the protestor who tried to display a “Republicans against Trump” sign.

    With Conway and her ilk in ascendancy spouting cynical venom – and, compared with Donald Trump’s rants, seeming reasonable – there’s little danger of the country ever coming together. Which, of course, means more work for Conway.

    As in 2008, I once again ask the media to just say no to Conway and deny her and her clients the oxygen of publicity. Someone with such blatant disregard for truth and for decency doesn’t deserve anyone else’s megaphone.

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes, editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

  • Ask not what’s happened to America since JFK

    I’d just walked into my second grade classroom after going home for lunch. Oddly, a radio was on a table at the front of the room, with a voice saying, “…and we pray for the health of our president.” I wondered, why are we praying for that? What could happen to President Kennedy? Then I heard what had happened.

    The assassination of John F Kennedy has become a great dividing line in the America of my lifetime. It was the nation’s first great television event, profoundly sad black and white images shared by every American live: the caisson carrying the president’s casket down Pennsylvania Avenue, the riderless horse with the boots upside down in the stirrups, John-John’s salute, Oswald’s surreal shooting in the Dallas Police Headquarters basement. Then, in living color, came Vietnam, the riots in cities across America, the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy that made us all question what kind of country we were living in, questions that only deepened with escalation of the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal.

    Yes, much of the Kennedy presidency and legacy is about image, not substance. (The highs and lows of the Kennedy years are well chronicled in Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis and The Best and the Brightest.) In the early 1980s, I was waiting for rush tickets at New York’s Public Theater. As the curtain was about to rise and our chances for tickets evaporate, in walked Jacqueline Kennedy on the arm of her post-Onassis companion Maurice Tempelsman. I was struck by how tiny and fragile she looked, short and so thin, the quintessential “social x-ray” of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. She wore the facial expression of someone whose shoes were too tight.

    Or maybe it was her just profound disappointment at where America had gone since the heady days of Camelot and where it was going. The clarion call of JFK’s inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” would be ridiculed in today’s toxic political atmosphere. Ask yourself, is this the America you want?

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.