Alexander Cockburn Has Died

[eridani]

1. No R.I.P. for Alex Cockburn

http://www.nationofchange.org/no-rip-alex-cockburn-1342970838

Alex was a scourge of the capitalist elites and their fawning apologists in the corporate media, of course, but he also played an important role as a merciless critic of those so-called progressive journalists who lost their courage, sold out or were simply wrong on an issue. If it was just a matter of disagreeing about a specific issue -- say climate change, where Alex remained a skeptic -- he could be courteous and respectful in his dismissal of an argument, but woe to those, like the late Christopher Hitchens, or even his own editors at the Nation magazine, whom Alex concluded had sold out their own leftist principles.

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As a journalist who once wrote that his early Catholic school education had effectively “inoculated” him against religion, I’m sure Alex is not “resting in peace” and idling about in some heavenly Eden, but in the event that both he and I are wrong and there is an afterlife, I’m equally sure that Alex isn't just ambling around in a toga there. As he demonstrated with his scathing demolition of the banking industry and the LIBOR scandal (penned on his deathbed and published shortly before he died, but conveniently ignored by the New York Times in its Sunday obit) he'd more likely be busy continuing to fire off his always devastatingly witty editorial fusillades at the powerful and their journalistic enablers here on this mortal coil.