What Rhymes with "Jackass"?

With the death of Johnnie Cochran yesterday from a brain tumor, I'm struggling. I mean, a brain tumor? It boggles the mind. No matter how hard I try, I can't come up with a cute little saying to rhyme with "brain tumor."

Wait. Wait. How about: "If you die of a brain tumor, don't you tell Chuck Schumer"?

Nah. Too political. OK, got it: "A brain tuma kill ya faster than a tame puma."

Nope. Not there yet. Aha! Finally: "It's no lame rumor, I died of a brain tumor." Eureka!

OK. OK. I'm making heartless jokes at the expense of another human being and his grieving family. Completely reprehensible no matter what I think of the man. But can we eulogize for a second about how Johnnie Cochran, in his defense of O.J. Simpson, contributed more to the racial divide in this country than anyone in the last 20 years who didn't take a club or boot to Rodney King's head?

I'm all for the US Consitution and every man's right to a spirited defense in a speedy trial by his peers. But every defense attorney has the option not to take a case. And if they do, to proceed within the bounds of common decency.

There is just no way I would accept O.J. Simpson as a client after examing the facts of the case and learning without any doubt that the man was a brutal double-murderer. And in this case, I don't speak of the courtroom standard "reasonable doubt" but the unadulterated certitude that Cochran, Shapiro, et al must have quickly determined about their client's guilt. His blood and the victims' blood were at the crime scene and his house. Game over.

But, clearly to bask in the sickening glow of The Second (or Maybe Third) Trial of Last Century, Cochran not only stepped up to the microphone, but spewed nothing but hateful, paranoid bullshit to a jury preconditioned and eager to buy it.

It's one thing to defend your client to the best of your ability and another to fire race cards around the courtroom like Ricky Jay aiming at watermelons. O.J. had long abandoned the black community, dated and socialized almost exclusively with white folks and was often protected by the Los Angeles police when they responded to his wife's desperate 911 calls after he hit her.

But Cochran gleefully engineered a defense that painted the LAPD as so racist that they were willing to frame a man they believed to be innocent (risking the death penalty themselves under California law, by the way). The faces of white crowds recoiling in horror while black faces beamed with joy and pride as the not guilty verdict was read still haunt me to this day. It was as though from the Middle Passage to the Plantations to Jim Crowe to Martin Luther King, Jr. to stacks of civil rights legislation, we'd arrived nowhere, with nothing to show.

I don't fault Johnnie Cochran for freeing a guilty man. The primary blame still rests with D.A. Gil Garcetti and the fumbling, hairstyle-altering, flirtatious prosecution tag-team rejects Christopher Darden and Marcia Clark. Can also blame star-struck, loony Judge Lance Ito. And blame surely rests with a jury so set on righting past racial wrongs that they couldn't apply sense to the case at hand.

But why was race even a subject in this trial, which was about the slaying of two people in the prime of their lives?

If the answer's "Cochran" would you be shocked, man?