Andrew Young

There was a silent auction going on at the DMI benefit.  One of the prizes was you get to be editor of the Nation for a day.  Kos opened his speech by saying that if he won the first thing he was going to do was fire Alexander Cockburn.

I didn't get the joke.  But most everybody else laughed.  Maybe it was a "Hey the famous guy made what he thinks is a witty remark" laugh.  Probably, though, there's some history between Kos and Cockburn I'm not in on.  I'm usually not in on these things.

At any rate, maybe Kos' poke at Cockburn explains why Andrew Young began his introduction of Wynton Marsalis talking about Jimmy Carter.

Young, Carter's ambassador to the UN, is the chair of DMI's board of directors.  He knows Marsalis from way back.  Knows him from when he was a kid.  Knows him because he was friends with Marsalis' father, jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis.  Ellis and Young went to the same high school.  Young was ahead of Ellis and he told Wynton that he likes to kid Ellis about how he failed to take care of the school.  "I left your daddy in charge of the place, and a year later they closed it."   I suspect this was where Young had planned to begin his speech.

But before he got there he talked about Jimmy Carter, I'm guessing because of Kos' shot at Cockburn.  It reminded Young he didn't much care for Cockburn either.

Way back, in 1975, Cockburn wrote an article in which he accused Carter of being a racist.  That made Young mad.

"Jimmy Carter was a lot of things," Young said, "But he was not a racist."

Young wrote something defending Carter on that score.  Short time after it appeared somebody from Jimmy Carter's campaign called Young and asked him if he'd like to help out.  Young was skeptical.  No way in hell an obscure ex-governor of Georgia gets himself elected President of the United States, Young told the Carter aide.  The aide said, come down and talk to the Governor anyway, see what you think after that.

Next thing I know, Young more or less told us, I'm the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

Young is still proud of his service, still proud to have worked for Jimmy Carter, still proud to call Carter a friend.

"We achieved all our foreign policy objectives, we didn't start any wars, and we did it without killing anybody or getting anybody killed," he said.  This is mostly true.  I don't think it's right not to count the soldiers who got killed in the botched attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran.  But in the main it's true.

That's why we all cheered.

Young went on, "I don't know why that's all considered weak, but it is to some people."

Some people would rather the United States failed on all fronts, just as long as they could feel good that we'd killed a lot of our enemies while we failed.

Failure is strength, success is weakness, war is peace.
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At the DMIBlog, Mark Winston Griffith looks at another incongruous moment in Young's speech---Young, responding to Anna Burger's criticisms of Wal-Mart at one point in her speech, decided to warn progressives that attacks on Wal-Mart can sound like attacks on Wal-Mart shoppers.

Comments

[Jim]

I don't read the Nation regularly, but from what I gather Cockburn is the incarnation of every right-winger's fantasy of a blame-America-first left-winger. He and Alterman also have a running feud, I believe. Markos Zuniga, contrary to brooksian histrionics, is fairly conservative as Democrats go. His upcoming book is entitled, I think, "Libertarian Democrats."

As for 'strong' vs 'weak', Clinton said it a while ago: strong and wrong sells. After 9/11, the majority of Americans wanted to hit somebody back, to feel like we had done something. I think a real leader could have explained to people that a "war on terror" is fought mostly through behind the scenes intelligence and international police work. It's not visually or viscerally satisfying, but it works. But Bush could never explain this, because he doesn't understand it. He doesn't appeal to the lowest common denominator, he is the lowest common denominator. So we got Shock and Awe, and 90(+)% of military personnel in Iraq believing we're they're because of Saddam's role in 9/11. And now, we need someone to explain that we're looking for the least bad solution to the mess Bush created. Not exactly inspiring campaign rhetoric. That's why I'm afraid, as bad as things are, it still has to get worse before it gets better.

[sfmike]

I don't always agree with Cockburn, but I've been reading him since his stint in the 1970s and 1980s with "The Village Voice" when it was worth reading, and he's one of the bravest voices and most original thinkers around. He's also one of the wittiest writers on the planet, and when he and James Wolcott did columns in tandem for the Voice, I'd buy it at marked up prices every week in San Francisco just to be sure to read the two of them.

As for Mr. Zuniga and his Kossacks, let's just say I'm feeling very ambivalent about them these days.

[The Heretik]

War indeed is peace, today more than most.

[Kevin Wolf]

Count me along with sfmike as a Cockburn fan. He is indeed witty, an unrepentant leftist, and cheerfully skeptical of many "left" or "progressive" positions. He's a good man to have on our side because he takes nothing for granted and worships no sacred cows.

Case in point, this recent column about bloggers - which may be another reason for Kos's comment.

You don't have to agree with Cockburn but it pays to read him.