[Marxism] Alexander Cockburn digs a deeper hole

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I can just see Alexander Cockburn bawling out a Nation Magazine intern 
last week. “Look, when I told you to find an article by Zbigniew 
Jaworowski, I assumed that you would have sense enough to not go near 
Larouche with a ten foot pole. Don’t you know how embarrassing it is for 
me to have to explain myself now?”

Of course, if Alexander Cockburn was a bit less lazy, he’d have vetted 
the material before it found its way into the pages of the Nation 
Magazine. I guess he was snookered by the innocuous-sounding title of 
Larouche’s magazine: 21st Century Science & Technology. With his 
characteristic pugnaciousness, he now chooses to brazen it out and make 
Jaworowski sound legitimate.

He writes, “I strongly doubt that Jaworowski knows much or indeed 
anything about the more sinister and odious aspects of the LaRouch [sic] 
enterprise, and sent along his paper because they asked him to.” Of 
course, the issue is not so much whether Jaworowski is the babe in the 
woods that Cockburn alleges, but whether we should have expected more 
from Cockburn himself. As probably the highest-profile radical 
journalist in the U.S. since John Reed, one might have hoped that he 
would have rolled up his sleeves and examined this material more 
closely. It seems, however, that it his very elevated reputation that 
subverts his ability to examine his work critically. As should be 
obvious from Woody Allen’s movies, this is an occupational hazard of the 
high and mighty.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/06/17/alexander-cockburn-digs-a-deeper-hole/

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