….Richard Cohen, for a lead paragraph in his WaPo column that cried out for a friend or an editor to say, “Hey, Richard, um, no, I think we should cut this, it makes you sound not so good

“:

“I sometimes think the best thing that ever happened to me was, at the time, the worst: I flunked out of college. I did so for the usual reasons — painfully bored with school and distracted by life itself — and so I went to work for an insurance company while I plowed ahead at night school. From there I went into the Army, emerging with a storehouse of anecdotes. In retrospect, I learned more by failing than I ever would have by succeeding. I wish that John Roberts had a touch of my incompetence.”