Which brings us to the case of Richard Cohen. He is not someone who controls words. They control him. His first sentence shows it: he wanted to indulge in some wordplay, and the fateful play he chose was on the word “mistake.” For this is how he opens, and from that series of wretched remarks, prompted not so much by mastery of language as by a wretched inability to use language, so that the word “mistake” piles on not only other “mistakes” and “mistakes” but also piles on, at the same time, the outrage to history and the truth.