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One more thing. I got a chuckle out of this graf in Annis's CounterPunch article today:
"The most detailed account of discord over the ceasefire in U.S. ruling circles was provided in the Wall St. Journal on February 23. Professor Stephen Cohen also spoke of this in his weekly interview on the John Batchelor radio program on March 2. Cohen says there is open discord within U.S. ruling circles between those prepared to live with a ceasefire and those who want to sink any such prospect."
Unlike most people on the left, I've listened to WABC radio over the years mostly to monitor the right and for laughs. That is where Rush Limbaugh held forth until his ratings bottomed out.
Batchelor is the station's resident intellectual and is very respectful of his mostly scholarly guests, including many on the left (but not too far left.) He has never had on a single African-American guest, however, in the 15 years I have been listening to him on and off. Nor anybody like Noam Chomsky.
He is about as hard-core a Christian Zionist you are going to find. Malcolm Honlein, a major figure in the Israel lobby, is a frequent guest and the two have co-hosted shows from Israel when it was bombing Gaza.
Apparently, Batchelor is one of those rightwingers like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen who has a soft spot for Putin. Batchelor's style is not to offer much in the way of his own analysis but to allow guests like Cohen to go on at length answering friendly questions in the Charlie Rose style.
Cohen is rather a sad case, in my view. I don't know about him but I've heard that Katrina vanden Heuvel is a lush. So I can imagine him and her going through the martinis at night. Unlike most professors emeriti, Cohen writes nothing nowadays and uses the Batchelor show to get out his ideas, such as they are. In his day, he wrote some brilliant stuff, including the Bukharin bio but now he strikes me as a shadow of his former self with a strange attraction to a thug like Putin. But then again this would not be the first time that the Nation magazine has had an orientation to the Kremlin. In the 1930s, it was effectively a Stalinist magazine and has now returned to its roots unfortunately.
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