[Peace-discuss] Cockburn is a twit

[n.dahlheim at mchsi.com]

Cockburn is permanently on my bad list.  His spurious denial of anthropogenic climate change despite the 
reams of evidence and peer-reviewed studies of the data makes me sick.  I consider acceptance of the 
science on global warming a litmus test for living in the world of reality.  My second litmust test is 
accepting the reality that the Administration was the driving force behind the 9/11 attacks.  I don't so 
much care what people's opinions are beyond those two points...  But, these two issues demonstrate 
whether a person is grounded in the world of verifiable facts as one would be if they were a forensic 
investigator or a well-trained scientist.  


----------------------  Original Message:  ---------------------
From:    "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu>
To:      Peace Discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Subject: [Peace-discuss] The peace movement, the Democrats & the Iraqi resistance
Date:    Mon, 27 Aug 2007 04:48:58 +0000

> [From Alexander Cockburn]
> 
> ...Right now I don't think the peace movement is advancing the end of 
> the war in Iraq by a single day. In fact goodly chunks of it are 
> effectively protracting it, by marching in lockstep with the Democratic 
> Party whose overseers strive on an hourly basis to tamp down unseemly 
> criticism of what the Party's congressional representatives could be 
> doing. What they have substantively done since the Democrats took over 
> the Congress is to have given the green light to the "surge", to 
> continued funding for the war, to the next Pentagon budget.
> 
> Take the "netroots". The organizers of the recent Yearly Kos event 
> wouldn't even schedule a strategy session on ending the war in Iraq. 
> They denied John Stauber's request that they put on the official 
> schedule a strategy session organized by Stauber's Center for Media and 
> Democracy, featuring speakers from Iraqi Veterans Against the War. Set 
> that wimp-out by MoveOn next to this paragraph from a New York Times 
> news story from Des Moines, Iowa, published August 12. "Four years after 
> the last presidential race featured early signs of war protest, 
> particularly in the candidacy of Howard Dean, a new phase of the debate 
> seems to be unfolding, with antiwar groups giving the Democrats latitude 
> to take positions short of a full and immediate withdrawal. Neither 
> MoveOn.org nor its affiliated group, Americans Against Escalation in 
> Iraq, have sought to press Democrats here in Iowa to suggest anything 
> short of ending the war immediately"...
> 
> The mass mobilizations of 2003 seem light years away. In 2005 UFPJ 
> raised over $1 million and in 2006 it raised $575,000. Those budget
> numbers were provided at a UFPJ conference. The difference came from
> failure in small donations and internet donations. [In comparison, the 
> front groups claim to be spending $12 million (Americans Against 
> Escalation in Iraq) and $15 million (Freedom Watch). --CGE]
> 
> Of course there's no fizzle. People here aren't being driven crazy by 
> the war the way we were by the slaughters and bombings of Vietnamese in 
> the war then. The horrors pressed down on one every day. Of course 
> people were ultras, which is where the long-march radicals should always 
> start out The alternative is to come out of the womb squealing about 
> "the excesses of the left" and spend the rest of your life like Todd 
> Gitlin writing op eds to that effect.
> 
> It was even the same somewhat in the Central American interventions of 
> the 1980s. You could read about contras disemboweling a rural organizer 
> from the FSLN and tremble that it might be the same person you just met 
> on a solidarity tour, either up here or down there...
> 
> Isn't it the ultimate in cynicism to use the Iraqi resistance's 
> successes as a stick with which to beat George Bush and the Republicans, 
> but not the Democrats, while simultaneously saying that you'd rather not 
> think about the Resistance, because it seems Not Very Nice. If you are 
> too scared to look, you'll never find out anything. In mid-July 
> important Sunni-led insurgent organizations gathered in Damascus to 
> prepare a negotiating position in advance of US withdrawal. Leaders of 
> three of the groups met with Seumas Milne of the UK Guardian and 
> denounced al-Qaida, sectarian killings and suicide bombings against 
> civilians. You can either try to inform yourself of what exactly the 
> elements in the Iraqi resistance are actually doing, or you can take the 
> route Pollitt did in her hysterical outburst, where she stigmatized the 
> resistance as composed of "theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard 
> Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs". (The Nation 
> 1/13/07 <http://www.thenation.com/blogs/anotherthing?pid=213916>. How 
> come she forgot to add "raghead"? I guess it wasn't PC.
> 
> 	###
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