Isaiah's "The Hot Topics Dumpster" from March 19, 2011.
1) Danny Schechter was insulting Michael Moore on the college circuit when C.I. first came across Danny. (C.I. was on the circuit speaking out against the Iraq War.) Danny had a 'documentary' about the Iraq War. Danny never had a 'documentary' do better than that one. He turned it into a book and anything else to pull in the dollars. But Danny walked away from the war to start his own wars with various women at PACIFICA (insisting they all thought their listeners were too dumb to understand). He whored for Barack and did so gladly. But slowly he began to realize that Barack wasn't ending the Iraq War. By 2011, he knew Barack was a fake and would whine about it in e-mails to us. We really didn't care anymore. (In fact, our attitude was f**k you after he objected to Ava and C.I.'s "Ike Turner (Ava and C.I. feature)" and continued to insist that Tina owed Ike forgiveness. Ava and C.I. know Tina and disagree, furthermore, they think it takes a really stupid f**k to argue that a woman who is terrorized has to forgive her terrorist.) Why wouldn't anyone call out Barack, he'd ask us in e-mail after e-mail even though we were, in fact, calling out Barack and even though he wasn't. Danny would insist to Jim (Jim was the only one communicating with him by then) that the left needed to rise up against Barack but Danny lacked the guts to call Barack out himself. Asked why, Danny infamously replied in one e-mail, ". . . because he's black." Thanks, Danny, we don't miss you one bit.
2) Tom Hayden. The old whore. The original whore. A sexist piece of garbage. Tom loved to gripe to Wally about the joint-posts Wally and Cedric wrote. Maybe Tom, like Danny, couldn't call out a Black man (Cedric)? Tom was a Barack apologist. He was an embarrassment in so many ways. He pretended to care about the Iraq War when he could get media attention by doing so. At one point, Tom had an honest-to-God real thought about the Iraq War. He shared it with Laura Flanders who, after he was off the phone, laughed at him on air, mocked him as wanting to be pen pals with al Qaeda. We defended him. Now we wonder why? Sometime around "Pockmarks of the Soul," we lost all interest in defending him -- or listening to him see
"Letters to An Old Sell Out:
Iraq." As someone C.I. knew, many of us encountered him
and registered our displeasure with him. We saw him as a sell out. He
was used to being called that -- having sold out so many times in his pathetic life:
Oh, it's Tom Hayden. The man, whom the left kicked to the curb in
the early 70s only to see him buy his way back in (on someone else's
dime -- Tom's purse poor, even when extorting), used the Iraq War to try
to give his name meaning after his divorce from
(and Brinx Robbery of)
Jane Fonda meant his name was mud and
he couldn't even hold on to his state legislature seat or get elected a
mayor. It was over for Tom. He would rewrite the sixties repeatedly in
book form but that's all he had to offer until
Bush declared war on Iraq. Like Norma Shearer sizing up Irving
Thalberg, Tom just knew the Iraq War was his road to renewed fame.
3) Howard Zinn was supposed to be a truth teller. He ended up being just another sheep herder, herding the blind off to the Democratic Party. In 2008, he really embarrassed himself and never recovered. Truth tellers shouldn't rally for the War Hawks but Coward did. See "Coward Zinn (1922 -2010)" for more on the sad end of Coward's life. "Excerpt: A People's History of Children's Stories" expresses the same points but with humor.
