Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012)

Sad to hear of the death of Alexander Cockburn, one of our sharpest, most belligerent, most progressive left-wing polemicists. You can read his collaborator & friend Jeffrey St. Clair’s obit here in Counterpunch. I started reading him in England in the early eighties when I was writing occasional pieces for the New Statesman, & his work set an example that I was never able to emulate. In The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild expresses a sense of the man close to my own when he writes:

His voice was one of the most eloquent, his pen among the most piercing, of any leftwing writer of the last 35 years…

I didn’t always agree with him—he had his head in the sand on global warming—but I admired his style.

Like many progressives, I’ll miss Alexander Cockburn’s clarity, his fearlessness, his disdain for the Dems, his indictment of the corporate media, and his deft phrase-turning.

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