Alexander Cockburn RIP

[Madeleine Maudlin]

Goddam, last week it's Joe Klein, this week it's Harold Meyerson, was I
even high school when those names meant something?

Unlike those two old farts, and maybe the Kathleen lady, I don't know her,
Cockburn will be remembered.  We could all whine now about how that's not
the issue! but of course it means something.

Anyway, by way of defending Alexander Cockburn, who I was long fond of and
always will be, allow me, for him, to call you and all you quasi-left
wankers what you are: a bunch of pussies.

You know you people might actually get somewhere if you had a charming,
well-spoken *benevolent dictator* forming your laws and running your
country....


On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 11:00 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/loving_totalitarianism_hating038785.php
>
> My memories of Cockburn, while much dimmer than Kathleen’s, are bright
> on two persistent features of his noisy writing: he was a stubborn
> defender of totalitarianism, long after the time when anyone could
> plead ignorance about the fundamental nature of life in the Soviet
> Union, and was an equally stubborn detractor of liberalism, from
> various perspectives. So I’ll pass along the assessment of someone who
> did know him quite well, and did not consider the charm, the
> occasional literary flair, or the erratic service to good causes (or
> more usually, against bad causes) enough to obscure what the man loved
> and hated. This is from Harold Meyerson at TAP:
>
> ----------------------
> Like Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz, he found his comfort
> zone on the fringes of the political spectrum, whether left, right or
> simultaneously both. The son of Claud Cockburn, a Communist Party
> journalist whose misrepresentations of the Spanish Civil War prodded
> George Orwell to write Homage to Catalonia, Alex never ceased casting
> Stalin in the best light possible, consistently downplaying the number
> of Russians (including virtually all the original Bolsheviks) who died
> by his hand. Alex also periodically issued forth with defenses of
> Brezhnev, which was more remarkable yet: While Stalin retained a few
> nostalgic apologists, Brezhnev had virtually none. I still remember
> one column in which Alex enthused about the rise in the number of
> refrigerators in the Soviet Union in the days of the beetle-browed
> Leonid—a blast from the Frigidaire Faction of Kelvinator Kommunism….
>
> [C]ontempt for liberals and social democrats was a hallmark of
> Cockburn’s work. It was surely one reason why for several years The
> Wall Street Journal opened its op-ed page to him every week: The
> editors had found a left-wing columnist who detested liberals and
> liberalism as much they. It informed, if that’s the word, Cockburn’s
> attacks on Al Gore and his paeans to Ralph Nader during the 2000
> presidential campaign, and his more recent crusade for climate-change
> denialism. Like Hitchens (a more felicitous writer) at his worst, and
> like Horowitz (an immeasurably less felicitous one) consistently,
> Cockburn lived on and for the extremes, a nasty pen at the ready, and
> bile on tap for all occasions.
> -------------------------------------------
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Madeleine Maudlin
> <madeleinemaudlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "Denialist"?
> >
> > God that's pathetic.
> >
> > What an awful, degenerate human Kathleen Geier must be.
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 1:02 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/alexander_cockburn_rip038739.php
> >>
> >> I was saddened to hear today about the passing of left-wing
> >> journalist/provocateur Alexander Cockburn, who died of cancer at the
> age of
> >> 71. Cockburn was a difficult, frequently exasperating figure. First,
> some of
> >> the awful things: as this right-wing website gleefully notes, the man
> ended
> >> his days as a climate change denialist. Throughout his career, he took
> great
> >> delight in viciously attacking Democratic politicians, which is
> something
> >> that I’m not against in principle, but it never made any kind of sense
> to me
> >> that the very people he went after most ferociously were often
> stalwarts of
> >> the most leftward precincts of the Democratic party, such as his
> perennial
> >> punching bag, Bernie Sanders, who is after all probably the closest
> thing we
> >> have to a genuine fire-breathing social democrat in the U.S. Congress.
> >>
> >>
> >
>
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