Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, who has a long and thickly apologized-for track record for this sort of thing, wrote a spectacularly wrong-headed -- but assuredly, to some people, nuanced and open-minded, and not at all smug and self-righteous -- column about the Zimmerman verdict that has raised holy hell on the Intertoobz. (The best account of the tsuris brought on by Cohen's 1986 defense of racial profiling can be found in Jill Nelson's Volunteer Slavery, her account of her time at the Post, which included the magazine column in question.) This caused Dylan Byers, "media" reporter for Tiger Beat On The Potomac, to seek Cohen out and ask whether the columnist would like to extend his remarks. Unfortunately, the answer was yes.

In a somewhat befuddling line, Cohen wrote that he "can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize." "A hoodie," Cohen told POLITICO when asked what he meant by that line. "It's what's worn by a whole lot of thugs. Look in the newspapers, online or on television: you see a lot of guys in the mugshots wearing hoodies." I pointed out that Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, is also known to wear a hoodie. "Right, so it's the uniform of billionaires and thugs," Cohen said with a chuckle.

Ha, ha. Funny man. Richard Cohen is a funny man. Just ask him.

"What I'm trying to deal with is, I'm trying to remove this fear from racism. I don't think it's racism to say, 'this person looks like a menace,'" he explained. "Now, a menace in another part of the country could be a white guy wearing a wife-beater under-shirt. Or, if you're a black guy in the South and you come around the corner and you see a member of the Klu Klux Klan."

Yes, and let us suppose that a black man in, say, St. Louis felt so threatened by a white-guy in a "wife-beater undershirt" that he felt no choice but to follow the dude and, when the dude objected to being followed, the black man iced him with a concealed pistol. Want to bet where the black man is spending the next 25 years? Not in Richard Cohen's kitchen, that's for sure. And hoodies, per se, equal Klan robes? Where does this guy buy his mushrooms and can I come with him next time?

Stop digging, big guy. Seriously.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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