Most writers have more than their equal share of vanity, or amour propre as Rousseau called it. How else could they stand the lashings of doubt and criticism and yet, every time, get up again to say, “Look at me!”

But to earn and continue justifying readers’ attention, the better ones do more than simply call attention to themselves. They reason, persuade, advance evidence, and use all their might to squeeze words until the hidden reality of human affairs comes out. Unless they are total hacks, they do.

Richard Cohen, not for the first time, strikes me as being much closer to the latter than the former. (On this subject, again, I must part ways with my respected colleague JVL, whose esteem for Cohen I just can’t explain.)

Exhibit A: Today’s column. “‘Dreamboat’ ISO Electorate” is as cute as its title. Cohen’s argument is that candidates and voters are like single white females trying to bait suitors with self-advertisements.

That is sum total of today’s column—a precious analogy that would really wow the editors at Sweet Valley High Newspaper.

Exhibit B: Thursday’s column. Cohen argues Bush should be impeached for going to war in Iraq. The counts of the impeachment would be the names of the American soldiers who have died in Bush’s mad crusade.

This is not even not-serious. It’s a parody of soapbox politics, in which the preacher barely pretends he would call forth the most massive prosecutorial procedure of American politics to punish George Bush.

And for what? In Cohen’s words: For being a crusader. In the words of people not looking to gild their threadbare partisanship into yet another column: For believing he might accomplish some good.

To call this lame might dignify it with a suggestion of effort and failure. Instead, Thursday’s column was not even meant to succeed, to persuade, to provoke thought, to do anything to justify Cohen’s invincible amour propre.

Every time I get really down on the blogosphere, someone comes along and proves me wrong. Mark Blumenthal may be the It Blogger right now, but don’t hold that against him. His post on exit polls–what they are, how they work, and how they should be evaluated–is concise, illuminating, and all-around terrific. Fine work, Mark.

I stumbled across this post on The Corner from someone named KJL:

“Do not, again, do not take any exit poll resports too seriously. JUST GET OUT THE VOTE. Exit polls not always reliable, ESPECIALLY early ones. AND, this isn’t over until the polls close. So please get to work while there is still time.

“DO NOT get depressed. DO NOT get mad. JUST GET OUT THE VOTE.

“I contend this is the most important election of many of our lifetimes. I’m almost willing to make a deal and give the Dems 2008 if we can have this one.”

Hey, KJL, calm down. You’re starting to sound like Yglesias and Josh Marshall and the rest of the lefty activist / journalists. National Review is better than that.

Make sure you read this report about Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered by an Islamic militant for making a movie critical of Islam’s treatment of women.

Just an observation: When movies are made about how terrible the Catholic church is, their directors are generally celebrated. The studio which releases them might occasionally face a toothless boycott, but that’s the extent of it.

Islam is different from Catholicism, of course. As President George W. Bush said on September 17, 2001, “Islam is peace.”

Steve Hayes is all over voting problems in Wisconsin. Among them:

* This morning, Milwaukee Republicans showed up at headquarters to find the tires slashed on 30 of their get-out-the-vote vans.

* One voter who found seven other people registered under her address.

Here’s how far the media is going to avoid mentioning bin Laden’s direct threat to American voters.

Jefferson Morley (whom we’ve on occasion praised) today does a roundup on international opinion regarding the bin Laden tape. He links to the strikingly incomplete and, now we learn, mistranslated al Jazeera transcript of the bin Laden message. Not that Morley is unaware of the charge that al Jazeera has misconstrued bin Laden to threaten states in general, when he is threatening individual American “states.”

Later in the article Morley links to, and quotes from, Yigal Carmon’s account on Memri, in which the first two sentences read: “The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera [1] on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to ‘each U.S. state,’ designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words ‘ay wilaya’ (which means ‘each U.S. state’) [2] to mean a ‘country’ or ‘nation’ other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state.”

Amazingly, Morley characterizes Carmon’s article to mean only that “bin Laden [ is] mounting a diplomatic offensive to make his ever-present threat of terrorism more effective.”

Howard Dean’s old Blog for America keeps chugging along. It has two posts up so far this election day. The first one is titled Dean, Man of the Year, is a paean to the once-imposing former governor. The second is titled Election Day 2004, and is a call to arms. What’s striking is that neither of these posts mention John Kerry. Not once.

Dean’s embrace of Kerry has always been weak. Even at the Democratic National Convention, when Dean spoke he dismissed Kerry as being only “part” of the solution to fixing America. After today, something is going to happen to the Deaniacs, and no matter what that something is, it won’t be good for the Democratic party.

As always, George Will is sublime. I’ll be spending a lot of time surfing around lefty websites today–if you see anything noteworthy, please pass it along–but I suspect none of them will be as calm and clear-eyed as Will is about the state of our Union.