Hearsay on abortion

Peter Kilander peterk at enteract.com
Sun Aug 15 07:59:22 PDT 1999


Michael Pollak:
>double take. Where he's [Alex Cockburn] really shined in recent years IMHO
is on topics
>that have been written to death, like Monica or Kosovo, where the facts
>are not in doubt and where style is the difference. And where it's a
>pleasure to have someone stoke your flagging outrage back to full heat.

His recent Beat the Devil column on Columbia is exemplary in my opinion. http://www.counterpunch.org/colombia.html The general thrust of his argument has been made before, most notably by Chomsky, but he really hits the nail on the head.

Something I've noticed (and I haven't seen anyone else mention) is that he seems to condone the use of violence. Just off the top of my head, in his book The Golden Age Is in Us, you can find an admiring appraisal of Edward Abbey and he concludes that if the reason Oswald assassinated Kennedy was to get the U.S. off of Cuba's back, it worked. Also, in his most recent attack on Hitchens, he wrote:

"A good many years ago we were discussing the German Baader-Meinhof gang, some of whose members were on the run at the time. Hitchens, as is his wont, stirred himself into a grand little typhoon of moral outrage against the gang, whose reckless ultra-leftism was, he said, only doing good to the right. "If one of them came to my front door seeking shelter," Hitchens cried, "I would call the police in an instant and turn him in!" Would you just, we remember thinking at the time."

What bothers me about Cockburn - and I'm no expert - is his apparent meanness. Calling Doug an "urban weenie." In his attack on Hitchens he writes: "Yet, in her affidavit, filed after her husband's from the west coast where she has been staying, Carol Blue ..." Insinuating marital problems is the lowest of the low.

smooches, Peter



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