Alexander Cockburn

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5 responses to “Alexander Cockburn”

1. 

   antigon

   July 23, 2012

   “Like Hitchens, he was a clever writer but with no real depth.” – Faranda giving true scope to his blog’s title.
   Nonsense, TF. Alexander Cockburn’s “populist brand of anarcho-syndicalism — the leftist equivalent of ‘crunchy conservatism’ — set him apart from the bullhorn-shouters and sloganeering ideologues of the haute cuisine Left. His passing, after a two-year battle against cancer, marks nearly the end of what remained vital and interesting about the American left in this country. There is simply no one even remotely like him. As Jesse Walker described his first encounter with Cockburn’s prose: ‘I had never read anything like this before.’
   “What’s particularly poignant about his passing,” J. Raimondo’s obituary astutely continues, “is that we’ll never read anything even remotely like it again. With his death, a certain current in American politics, with its roots on the left, has lost its only remaining voice…He wrote, not with the pen of an ideologue, but with an eye to the telling detail, the humorous aside, that made his prose stand out from the usual automatic writing that substitutes for real political commentary.”
   Here’s proof that, unlike Hitchens, he was both perceptive as well as erudite:
   “But what is a conservative meant to think? Since the major preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right to kill embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward those gasping in the thin air of senility? There is a strong eugenic thread to American progressivism, most horribly expressed in its very successful campaign across much of the twentieth century to sterilize “imbeciles.” Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic device. Women in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the inconvenient twins, triplets or quadruplets when they show up on the scan.
   “In 1972, a year before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion on demand nationwide, virtually all children with trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, were born. Less than a decade later, with the widespread availability of pre-natal genetic testing, as many as 90 percent of women whose babies were pre-natally diagnosed with the genetic condition chose to abort the child.
   “One survey of 499 primary care physicians treating women carrying these babies, however, indicated that only 4 percent actively encourage women to bring Down syndrome babies to term. A story on the CNS News Service last year quoted Dr. Will Johnston, president of Canadian Physicians for Life, reacted to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) pre-natal testing endorsement as another step toward eugenics.’The progress of eugenic abortion into the heart of our society is a classic example of “mission creep,”‘ Johnson said. ‘In the 1960s, we were told that legal abortion would be a rare tragic act in cases of exceptional hardship. In the ’70s abortion began to be both decried and accepted as birth control. In the ’80s respected geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt for and abort Down’s babies than to raise them. By the ’90s that observation had been widely put into action. Now we are refining and extending our eugenic vision, with new tests and abortion as our central tools.’
   “So if we have mission creep in the opening round, what’s to persuade people that there won’t be mission creep at the other and the kindly official discussing living wills won’t tiptoe out of the ward and tell the hospital that the old fellow he’s just conferred with is ripe to meet his maker. The author of the provision – now dropped – in the health bill before Congress – for ‘end of life’ counseling was Democratic Rep Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. Blumenauer has denounced the ‘death panel’ description as a ‘terrible falsehood’…But Blumenauer is hot for ‘death with dignity, as a speech he made in Congress in 2000 makes clear: ‘A major concern [in an attempted revision of the Balanced Budget Act]is a provision that would criminalize decisions doctors make on pain management for the most seriously ill and overturn Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act. Oregonians have twice voted to support the assisted suicide law. H.R. 2614 not only is an attack on the Democratic process, but also threatens to pain management. There is evidence that doctors are increasingly hesitant to prescribe pain medications to terminally ill patients for fear of being accused of unlawfully assisting a suicide. The on-going attempts by Congress to criminalize the doctor-patient relationship are a threat to pain management in all fifty states.’

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2. 

   antigon

   July 23, 2012

   “Evidently a leftist happy to take money from whoever…” – Faranda
   That’s not just folly, TF, not just ‘the usual automatic writing that substitutes for real political commentary,’ not just a libelous violation of the 9th Commandement – it’s lousy grammar too.
   Did I mention folly? Cockburn was *the* leading leftist opponent of climate change drivel, which t’aint where the money is.
   Nor is Cockburn’s following commentary, on the same subject, other than standard fare from what might have been the one of this country’s last journalists capable of independent thought…
   “In today’s political climate, it has become fairly dangerous for a young scientist or professor to step up and say: ‘This is all nonsense.’ It is increasingly difficult to challenge the global warming consensus, on either a scientific or a political level. Academies can be incredibly cowardly institutions, and if one of their employees was to question the discussion of climate change he or she would be pulled to one side and told: ‘You’re threatening our funding and reputation – do you really want to do that?’ I don’t think we should underestimate the impact that kind of informal pressure can have on people’s willingness to think thoroughly and speak openly.
   One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.
   I think people have had enough of peer-reviewed science and experts telling them what they can and cannot think and say about climate change. Climate catastrophism, the impact it is having on people’s lives and on debate, can only really be challenged through rigorous open discussion and through a ‘battle of ideas’…”

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3. 

   antigon

   July 23, 2012

   Dear TF – Sorry, 9th Commandment – against bearing false witness – according to the King James translation.
   Eighth according to the Church entrusted to determine the proper order.

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4. 

   antigon

   July 23, 2012

   “[Cockburn] was an extraordinarily provocative, polemical, elegant columnist and writer. And he certainly was someone who never wavered in dissenting from what was the conventional line,” said Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.
   She should know. He often gave her platitudes the skewering they deserved.
   I’m endeavoring to give you a comparable favor, dear TF.

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5. 

   tom faranda

   July 23, 2012

   Well Ricardo, this just proves “there’s no accounting for taste.” I confess to not payig much attention to Cockburn since he ended his Wall St. Journal column, many years ago.

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