[lbo-talk] Alex Cockburn going the Hitchens way?

[ravi]

At around 19/6/06 1:04 pm, Carl Remick wrote:
>> From: ravi <gadfly at exitleft.org>
>>
>> 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!
> 
> I think Cockburn is talking about ultimate objective reality and not
> what will appeal to the terminally deluded American public.  The CIA is
> a pack of professional pychopaths who have caused no end of evil in the
> world, so in that sense outing a CIA operative is always reason for
> celebration.
> 

But, Carl, what appeals to the U.S public has a *huge* impact on
ultimate objective reality! A lot more, I will submit, than hoping that
one (or a few) CIA operatives will be outed, as part of a larger scheme,
by the right, and such outing will rid us of the evils of the CIA.

Even if we can demonstrate that the CIA is not even a necessary evil
(that description being the farthest, IMHO, that any USer will
accommodate at this stage), the path to that is not through cheering the
outing (and at least in the minds of the public, putting in danger) of
its employees.

I guess this is a classic revolutionary vs evolutionary (or worse:
Leftist vs Liberal) sort of argument. But even if so, that is not how
Cockburn paints himself or his argument. He does talk about the left and
even of the Democrats in terms of the politics of the day and what
should be our focus, etc. He is not (unlike perhaps some members of this
list) dismissing as irrelevant, and even dangerous, any distractions
from the improbable but only authentic option: the revolution.

	--ravi

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