Monday, May 03, 2010

The Death of a Cynical WPost Editor

By Robert Parry
May 3, 2010

The death of former Washington Post editorial writer Stephen Rosenfeld at age 77 has prompted the usual praise heaped on any well-respected insider at his passing. But little note has been made of Rosenfeld’s role in steering the Post to the neoconservative harbor where it’s now anchored.

Read on.

1 comment:

Mike said...

Let me see if I understand you argument (kudos by the way for making it through one whole rant without mentioning either Israel or the “October Surprise”): Rosenfeld was an apologist for the Indonesian massacre of communists during its civil war because he wouldn’t take Gabriel Kolko’s book, whose reputation as a revisionist is well established, at face value? Is it a bad thing that Rosenfeld chose to look at more sources other than Gabriel “I never found a Red Army massacre that I couldn’t explain away as a big misunderstanding” Kolko when trying to evaluate charges that the United States was instrumental in Suharto’s rise to power?

One wouldn’t normally think that critical thinking and examining multiple sources from multiple perspectives, and dismissing the more lunatic fringe, would be a bad thing. Kolko not only condemned the US for supplying names of suspected PKI members to the Indonesian military (which no one would contest) but he also alleged, in no uncertain terms, that the US was directly involved and responsible for Suharto’s takeover (which LOTS of people disagree with).

That you would harangue Rosenfeld for warmly embracing the “blame America first” crowd is not surprising and only reinforces the shoddiness of your arguments and the lack of rigor in your work that has left you to toil in irrelevance and has put your career in the shitter.