Alex Coburn, A Vicious Leftist Meets His Maker

David Horowitz wrote the following article.
Alex Cockburn is dead of cancer at the age of 71. Alex was an influential voice in a generation of leftists who did an enormous disservice to this country and the world at large by carrying on a political tradition and promoting a political cause that killed 100 million people in the 20th Century – in peacetime – and consigned more than a billion others to immeasurable and unnecessary poverty, even starvation, by imposing on them the crackpot socialist schemes of Karl Marx and his misguided disciples. Alex’s father Claud was also a noted writer and both an agent of and propagandist for Stalin’s bloody regime. Alex exhibited in his own person many of the worst Stalinist traits. He was personally vicious in attacking political opponents and even friends, such as Christopher Hitchens, about whom he wrote one of the most disgusting columns I have ever read – although in fairness it must be said that Christopher himself was a master of this particular form of literary abuse.

On the other hand, Alex had worthy sense of humor, which even a target like myself could appreciate, and was a clever writer though inferior as a stylist to Christopher whom he obviously envied and paid back with insults. It could be said of Alex that he was also a gutsy individual who, like Christopher, on occasion displayed independence of mind – a rarity among leftists who are normally incapable of challenging the progressive herd. Alex’s most notorious deviation from orthodoxy was his refusal to support the idea that human beings are responsible for climate change, a cardinal tenet of the progressive faith. This caused the obituary writer for the Los Angeles Times,[1] which like most of our metropolitan papers has become a left-wing tabloid, to say of him “his thoughts on global warming aligned him with the far right” – as though matters of science should be subject to a political party line.
Needless to say, the Times obit failed to mention the fact that Alex and his father were shills for Communists, or that Alex was anti-American and an anti-Semite and a cheerleader for the Islamo-fascists of Hizbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood who are bent on destroying us. Despite the unfortunate resurgence in our time of the vile ideologies of the 1930s and 1960s to which he devoted his life, Alex was at the end a bitter and spiteful man. This was the predictable fruit of a life spent badly in recrimination and anger.