In responding to Alexander Cockburn’s atrocious commentary on
climate change over the past few years, my tone has been
characteristically acerbic. Since Cockburn is one of my major
writing influences, it should come as no surprise that I often
take the same tone that he does. But all the while when I am
responding to him, it is hard for me to suppress a feeling of
sadness and worry that his outstanding mind is beginning to fade.
When I first ran into his writing in the Village Voice in the
early 1980s, after having resigned from the SWP, I was amazed at
his investigative reporting skills. Like a radical version of
“Sixty Minutes”, he had a way of digging up the dirt on any number
of malefactors. That’s why I am so dismayed by his seeming
inability to check the sources he uses in writing about climate
change. Perhaps he is unaccustomed to using search engines on the
Internet but when he decided to cite Zbigniew Jaworowski as an
expert on climate change, he apparently failed to turn up this
character’s long standing relationship with the Lyndon Larouche
cult, something I was able to do in less than 15 minutes. I fear
that he is so into his climate change denialism that he lacks the
ability to fact-check his own material. Since he is such a
dominating figure, I doubt that his partner Jeff St. Clair has the
backbone to take him on even though it is quite likely that he
disagrees with him.
read full article:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/alexander-cockburn-and-the-oregon-petition/
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