Matthew Yglesias mocks Richard Cohen for comparing his liberal critics to Communists:

It’s extraordinary how commonplace these kind of sentiments are among prominent media figures. Cohen clearly relishes his self-conception as an independent thinker. And presumably the whole reason he’s glad to be a Washington Post columnist in part because that gives him a large audience of people who care about politics. Given all that, of course people will sometimes disagree with him! But that’s now how he sees it, and certainly he sees no need to engage with his critics on the merits — instead, they’re just like Communists!

The whole mindset is bizarre but also bizarrely widespread. You’d think that people who write for a living about public affairs wouldn’t be so thin-skinned.

Isn’t this partially a function of ideological proximity? Liberals are sensitive to Cohen because he’s supposedly a liberal columnist but is more of an establishment hack in practice. Similarly, Cohen is sensitive to liberal disapproval because his personal views seems to tend toward the center-left. By contrast, I assume conservatives have always disliked Cohen but they ignore him and he does the same. It’s not unlike what happened to Joe Klein when he started blogging a few years ago and found out that liberals were unhappy with him.