'Facts, Truths and Principles Be Damned'
Press Action
Friday, December 06, 2002
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand12072002/
“So big deal. I caught Cockburn in a glaring, self-serving contradiction. No biggie.”
Those are the words of Marc Cooper in a letter to The Nation published in the Dec. 23 issue of the magazine. He is charging Alexander Cockburn with lacking the “minimal decency” to admit that his commentary about the Workers World Party from 1990 mirrors what Cooper and David Corn, The Nation’s Washington editor, have been writing in 2002.
From my vantage point, it looks like Marc Cooper didn’t uncover Cockburn’s contradiction. I did.
I had forwarded my Nov. 27 article, Cockburn and the Workers World Party, to David Corn and others associated with The Nation because I thought they would appreciate the findings. I didn’t expect one of them to read my piece and then lay claim to the discovery of the contradiction. One of them must have passed my article along to Cooper, a contributing Nation editor, who then took credit for the “excavation” of Cockburn’s 1990 column, as Cockburn described it in his Dec. 5 American Journal column on the CounterPunch website.
Every single word from Cockburn’s Dec. 31, 1990 Beat the Devil column that Cooper cites in his letter to The Nation was highlighted in my Press Action piece. Cockburn’s column was in the 750-word range. Why couldn’t Cooper have picked his own nugget from Cockburn’s column to prove his point? Sure, it’s possible that Cooper may have gone into the vault himself and pulled out the quotes from Cockburn’s 1990 column. Yet, I still believe he was tipped off to Cockburn’s earlier WWP commentary by my Nov. 27 Press Action piece.
In his American Journal column, Cockburn nails Cooper for “yap[ping] like a terrier in a badger’s den on discovering that I decried the Workers World Party for Marxism-Leninism-Bonkerism back in 1990. In a letter to the Nation he gives the impression he himself was responsible for this triumph of excavation, which is odd since, earlier, the press critic Mark Hand had the courtesy to send along to CounterPunch precisely the same stuff I wrote, along with his agreeable commentary which he put up on his site.”
Cockburn explained to me that he thinks my Press Action piece “prompted Marc Cooper suddenly to change his answer to my crit of him in the Nation. Cooper basically rewrites your piece (unless you rewrote his, tho I don’t think that chronology works). He suddenly amended his response weekend after Thanksgiving, crowing at the apparent contradiction but apparently not understanding that things are a bit different between now and then.”
It would have been no big deal if Cooper hadn’t claimed he had “caught Cockburn” in a contradiction. By also taking credit for the discovery, Cooper shows that he is in no position to lecture Cockburn on how he fills his biweekly column in The Nation. “Fact, truths and principles be damned,” Cooper says of Cockburn in his Nation letter. Those words, however, appear to be a more fitting slogan for Cooper.
-- Mark Hand