No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul.

Alexander Cockburn

Categorized in : Cheer Medicine Horse

They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.

Alexander Cockburn

sick war firsts

The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.

Alexander Cockburn

cynical prejudice law

There is never finality in the display terminal's screen, but an irresponsible whimsicality, as words, sentences, and paragraphs are negated at the touch of a key. The significance of the past, as expressed in the manuscript by a deleted word or an inserted correction, is annulled in idle gusts of electronic massacre.

Alexander Cockburn

massacres keys past

Be careful about Burma. Most people cannot remember whether it was Siam and has become Thailand, or whether it is now part of Malaysia and should be called Sri Lanka.

Alexander Cockburn

thailand sri-lanka people

A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.

Alexander Cockburn

soul religious prayer

Cockburn's personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing - debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin's gulags, claiming that 'the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class', when aspects of his father's convictions can be glimpsed.

Alexander Cockburn

party writing father

There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state.

Alexander Cockburn

radio-waves corporations tvs

Republicans know well that a change of rhetorical pace is necessary. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their amplifiers, just like Palin. They're like a couple having a fight at a funeral; politely sotto voce, then suddenly bursting out fortissimo with their plaints and accusations.

Alexander Cockburn

party couple running

Pose a political threat to Business As Usual, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, someone will try to kill you.

Alexander Cockburn

political usual trying

In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers, the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Alexander Cockburn

panthers crush black

Are you more likely to tolerate drivel than you were four years ago? I think the answer is yes. Four years of Reagan has deadenedthe senses against a barrage of uninterrupted nonsense.

Alexander Cockburn

answers years thinking

Can it be that a generation of school children is growing up heedless of the simple truth that the Pentagon's centrla role for many years has been to buy weapons that don't work, against threats that don't exist?

Alexander Cockburn

growing-up peace children

The art of politics is to separate actions from consequences

Alexander Cockburn

consequence action art

So much for the crusade against drugs . . . all America is actually doing is consolidating its position as the biggest dealer in addictive and lethal substances on the planet, waging war on all rivals, whether they take the form of the Thai domestic tobacco industry or the Colombian cocaine cartels.

Alexander Cockburn

drug war america

A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

Alexander Cockburn

deception self war

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Alexander Cockburn

valleys imagination travel

Nothing can inspire religious duty or animation but religion.

Alexander Cockburn

religious inspire religion

Regulation of sexual behavior

Alexander Cockburn

regulation behavior social

Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery.

Alexander Cockburn

treachery gossip despair

No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

Alexander Cockburn

journalist inquiry foundation