Alexander Cockburn has finally walked off the cliff once and for all. As if is anthropogenic warming denialism wasn’t enough. Now - in last weeks Nation - he has described the lunatic Ron Paul as "my favorite" and "a candidate leftists can and should support". Any last shred of respect I had for Cockburn has finally left the building.
It’s worth (re)quoting George Monbiot:
I have followed Alexander Cockburn’s writing for many years and I have admired it. His has been an important and persuasive voice on many progressive issues. But I can no longer trust it. I realise that he is blinded by a conviction that he remains right whatever the facts might say. In his determination to admit nothing, he will cling to any straw, including the craziest fulminations of the ultra-right, and he will abandon the rigor and scepticism that once informed his journalism. I feel this as a loss. I am sure I am not the only one.
Craziest fulminations indeed. "Leftists" who support Paul should question themselves.
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He's a real character.
Alexander Cockburn, Village Voice, January 21, 1980: "If ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too."
Alexander Cockburn, 'FDR Knew It Was Coming,' New York Press
http://www.nypress.com/14/23/news&columns/wildjustice.cfm
"Pearl Harbor the movie offers fresh opportunity for those who correctly believe that Roosevelt knew of an impending attack by the Japanese and welcomed it as a way of snookering the isolationists and getting America into the war."
I bet he got teased a lot for that name.
And in other news, elementary teaching degree holders believe almost to an individual that dividing anything by two results in two equal parts. Some kind of conspiracy?
In addition, there is Mr. Cockburns' counterpunch web site, a source of antisemitic rants in the style of stormfront and rense.