RICHARD COHEN proves his elitist bona fides in attacking Newt Gingrich.

He has a doctorate in the social sciences and taught briefly at the college level. He has been married three times, divorced twice and confessed to an extramarital affair. He has never worked for a profit-making organization, never served in the military and lives in one of Washington's poshest suburbs. He is the very personification of his much-reviled "cultural elite."

And what does this have to do with his political opinions?

The most obvious repellent characteristic of the cultural elite is that it is out of step with the views of most Americans -- or, as Gingrich put it, "Americans oppose the views of academic elites."

Of course, Cohen is just ‘ordinary folk’.

This business about socialism has become a conservative trope -- as loony on the right as is some of the left's admiration for Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. The current issue of Commentary, a magazine that virtually created the neoconservative movement, devotes about 4,500 words to the subject. It asks: "What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?" To which any sane person would have to reply: "Not a Very Good One."

But not for lack of trying.

Gingrich [is a] luftmensch. This is a wonderfully descriptive Yiddish word for a fellow who has no visible means of support -- who lives off the air itself.

And of course it doesn’t apply to a columnist whose only means of support is hot air.

Read the whole thing and pay attention to the subtext: “I am Richard Cohen. I am unbiased, squarely in the center of the political spectrum. I am fact-based and secular, free of odious superstition. My opinions are solid, based on extensive research and verified fact. Everyone I know is like me. Etc., etc. Therefore anyone who disagrees with me is a raving lunatic.”

Q.E.D