Author Archive

The Crooks in the White House

Written by Alexander Cockburn on July 9, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

The Crooks in the White House Sunday morning brought more ringing pledges to protect the public weal: "If anybody violates the law, we go after them," SEC chairman Harvey Pitt told Sam Donaldson on ABC’s This Week. In an earlier incarnation Pitt was one of the guys who successfully lobbied the SEC to make it
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The Incredible Shrinking President

Written by Alexander Cockburn on June 25, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Because it’s 30 years since Watergate we’ve been treated to plenty of photos of Richard Nixon, mostly at the moment he was leaving office. I was happy to see him go, but today am sad that for obvious reasons the National Archives will never be in a position to release Nixon’s unvarnished comments on the
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Bad Law, Bad Sound, Good Beer

Written by Alexander Cockburn on June 11, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

There’s a wonderful phrase I came across the other day in the intro to Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. He quotes the historian Arnaldo Momigliano as saying of the great Russian scholar of the ancient world Michael Rostovtzeff, "Those who have known him have known greatness.
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Summer Lightning Speak memory! Or maybe, mutter memory! When …

Written by Alexander Cockburn on May 28, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

In London you could walk (and you surely still can) across Hyde Park as summer took hold and trip across couples coupling behind every shrub. Walk over to Green Park of an evening and you’d find members of Parliament or senior civil servants trolling for guardsmen. They nailed the assistant chief of Scotland Yard thus
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Move Palestine to Texas?

Written by Alexander Cockburn on May 14, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

I’d guess it was the most explicit call for ethnic cleansing by a prominent American since Sherman’s designation of the only good Indian being a dead one, or the declaration of California’s second governor, John McDougal, in his first message to the California legislature in 1851 to the effect that "A war of extermination will
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Willie, Billy & UFOs

Written by Alexander Cockburn on April 30, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Austin, TX – You’d think luscious young things (and there are none more luscious than West Texas girls fresh out of the pickup) would disdain an old geezer like Willie Nelson, in his late 60s with the gray braids. He looks the sort of guy you not only wouldn’t bring home to Mom, but might
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The West Bank & Barbecue

Written by Alexander Cockburn on April 16, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

For those of you eagerly awaiting further uproar from this columnist on the unspeakable assaults on Palestinians on the West Bank, the carnage in the camps, the siege of the Holy Church of the Nativity by Sharon’s troops, a word of warning: this column contains reflections on barbecue, a subject that arouses even more passion
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Should The Priests Flee?

Written by Alexander Cockburn on April 2, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

When Oscar Wilde was packed off to Reading Jail in 1895 for sodomy, the railway trains to Brighton and Dover were soon replete with panicked gays fleeing England to Paris. Thousands of Catholic priests here, many of them in retirement, must be asking themselves whether it might be prudent to remove themselves from the jurisdiction
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Billy Graham: War Criminal

Written by Alexander Cockburn on March 19, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

There’s a piquant contrast in the press coverage of Billy Graham’s conversations with Nixon, as displayed on the tapes gradually released from the National Archive or disclosed from Nixon’s papers. Back in April l989, a Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It was dated April 15, 1969, and was drafted after the evangelist met
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Why Did the WSJ Send Pearl?

Written by Alexander Cockburn on March 5, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Daniel Pearl’s dispatches reminded me somewhat of Peter Kann’s in the days when he was The Wall Street Journal’s most lightheartedly stylish reporter, before assuming the imperial purple and becoming the company’s CEO. It was Kann, back in the late 1970s, who traveled to Afghanistan, reported that the place was a dump covered with flies
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