Requiescat In Pace, Alexander Cockburn
I’m thrilled that we got to read your obit of Hitchens but sadly disappointed that we would never get to read Hitchens’ obit of you.
If there’s a place where we can argue in the afterlife, I hope that you two are going at it even now.
We’ll be poorer for not having you be one of the few sane voices when everyone else was crazy (even if it came with the price of you being one of the few crazy voices when everyone else was more or less even-keeled).
Rest in peace.
Peace is the wrong thing to wish for Cockburn; it would amount to eternal torment. He’d be much happier in a heaven of strife, conflict, and evils he can blame on God for being Jewish.Report
…I don’t get it.Report
This righty always liked mega-left Alexander Cockburn. Called ’em like he saw ’em. R.I.P.Report
It’s hard to love Alexander Cockburn. He was, at heart, always a Communist. His famous feuds with Hitchens overshadow his longer legacy of genteel cuddling-up to some extremely nasty characters, a charge he would often level at others. Allow me to enumerate a few: George Galloway and that whole sorry paleoconservative crowd over at Chronicles Magazine.
Cockburn was a creature of his times. I really ought to shit on him as he shit on Christopher Hitchens’ corpse and corpus but simply can’t be bothered. Cockburn suffered in silence, lest anyone take pity on him. The great pity is that few ever observed what a petty little monster Cockburn became over the years, a shrill echo of his idiot father who was clearly an agent of Stalin. The apple did not fall far from the tree: Alexander Cockburn’s tendentious and one-sided writing ( when he wasn’t outright cheering on the likes of the Front National in France ) would do much to poison honest conversation from the Left and within it, too.
Well he is gone, that vicious monkey. The Communists cranked the organ and Cockburn danced along, if somewhat awkwardly. Following Churchill’s dictum about socialism for young men and conservatives for old, Alexander Cockburn would in time do and say everything he’d once condemned, following Christopher Hitchens into American citizenship and a painful death by cancer.
A pair of bookends, Hitchens and Cockburn, endlessly contradictory and self-contradictory. The world will not see their likes again … hopefully. Seldom have such eloquent men been used to such evil ends but with Cockburn, it was family tradition.Report
“[Cockburn] became a true heretic to the Left in 2007 when he declared that supporters of global warming were promoting a fraud: Their “pied piper,” he said, was a “hypocritical mountebank” named Al Gore. (Cockburn was an enthusiastic supporter of Ralph Nader against Gore in 2000.)
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/310230/alexander-cockburn-mellowed-radical-john-fund
Poor Alex. The Left is a tough town.Report