Today, I had the opportunity to read Cockburn's piece at CounterPunch, and what stood out most in his rant was its similarity in style to Hitchens' fling rage in all directions with a drunken sneer (and hope something sticks).
He writes:
> The war grinds on, but the pwog Democrats prefer to talk about other
> matters, such as the fact that Rove is not going to be indicted.
> Thank God. the left will have to talk about something else for a
> change. As a worthy hobby horse for the left, the whole Plame scandal
> has never made any sense. What was it all about in the first
> analysis? Outing a CIA employee. What’s wrong with that?
The last sentence alone seems to distance him from reality. What is wrong with outing a CIA employee? In the minds of the American public, I would think, everything! The demonstration that the Republicans sabotaged the military/security apparatus, the very thing that they claim to stand for, and use against Democrats and leftists, would be a significant awakening for the public! IOW, the Plame affair, for leftists, was not about the outing of a CIA employee, but a chance to demonstrate to the public, (a) that conservatives are dangerous and untrustworthy, and (b) they are so in exactly those matters which they claim to be their core value/strength (security, patriotism).
There is also, I think, a confusion of terms, in the above. The left has always talked about the war, protested it, documented it, etc, etc. One cannot jump back and forth between Democrats and "left" as the text above (and the rest of the article) suggests.
And the left, *and* the Democrats, have of course talked about many things other than the Plame affair. They have spoken about immigration issues, the economy, the "culture of corruption", and so on.
> Since 9/11 where has been the good news for the Administration? It’s
> been a sequence of catastrophe of unexampled protraction. Under
> Rove’s deft hand George Bush has been maneuvered into one catastrophe
> after another. Count the tombstones: “Bring it on”, “Mission
> Accomplished”, the sale of US port management to Arabs. It was Rove
> who single-handedly rescued the antiwar movement last July by
> advising Bush not to give Cindy Sheehan fifteen minutes of face time
> at his ranch in Crawford.
Let us deal with this question: Since 9/11, where has been the good news for the Administration? I can think of some answers to that, and I invite your criticism:
a) Significant increase in Bush poll numbers and legitimacy b) Blank cheque from the public for wars and civil rights violations c) Huge benefits for friends and the infrastructure in general d) Gains in the House and majority in the Senate, 2002 e) Re-election, by a wider margin, for Bush, 2004
And that's just off the top of my head. To be honest and complete (something that Cockburn seems to care little about) one has to tie these successes to Rove. But I think if Rove "rescued the antiwar movement" is some sort of significant or meaningful conclusion, the above can stand as-is.
The rest of the article has been well addressed in responses by Yoshie and Dwayne. I will add that Cockburn demonstrates not only a general flippancy of logical argument, but also a shamefully poor understanding of Internet technologies and reality.
I will quote one last bit from the article:
> Welcome to blog world. They’re loonies, beyond any sanction or
> reproof by reality. These people are going to stop a war, change the
> direction of our politics? They make Barbra Streisand sound like Che
> Guevara.
and throw out these bullet items:
a) connection to reality b) stopping war and changing the direction of politics c) Streisand vs Che Guevara
The first two fall under the Hoist-Petard category. The latter in the "Huh?"-loony section.
And we used to think that the invasion of the AOLers was the big problem on the Internet :-(.
--ravi
-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/