Thursday, July 26, 2012

Pissing off the right people (and others as well)

Phil Nugent writes a thought-provoking obit for Alexander Cockburn, including some delicious barbs aimed at also-departed former colleague and rival Christopher Hitchens. (The link to Cockburn's own obit for Hitchens is worth following, and I think he got it right, and I admit to having once been one of those anarcho-fanboys who bought that damned Mother Teresa book.)

Cockburn was a smart, funny, provocative and sometimes just-plain-wrong curmudgeon, but always an essential read, and his old Press Clips column in the Village Voice was the unsung ancestor to all those snarky lefty news-deconstructing blogs I can't face the day without. Someone (I'm not holding my breath expecting the current Voice owners to do it) needs to compile those columns in book form.

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