Alexander Cockburn "In Depth" on C-Span2

Alexander Cockburn recently sat for three hours on C-Span2 (watch it here), only to be pelted with call-in questions about 9/11 conspiracies and Mitt Romney's chances.

It is a rare event for any radical commentator to be asked to appear on TV, even C-Span. You certainly can't expect to see an Alexander Cockburn on CNN. When the networks invite you to "Meet the Press," they don't mean the radical press; they seldom invite even a mainstream investigative reporter to sit among the talking heads, and they really don't want anyone to talk "in depth" about anything.

The problem for any real journalist who appears on TV is that practically no one in the medium's vast audience has ever seen or heard of him; many of Cockburn's callers had trouble believing that anyone who appeared "on the air" did not hold either conventional or conspiratorial positions. They appear to expect everyone to be a Democrat, a Republican, or a crackpot. Anything else is "outside the debate."

Cockburn's wit (and his unfailing courtesy) bore up well under the nuttiness and tedium. He patronized no one and offered sage advice to a 16-year old caller who described herself as a "cynic."

He was rewarded for his patience with a sharp reminder from his host that Thomas Friedman, whose views Cockburn refreshingly dismissed as not worthy of serious analysis, is after all a "best-selling author."

The ultimate insult came later, however, when a conservative blogger who watched the show described the horror of realizing that such an "intelligent looking fellow" is a "liberal."

Even that was not the stupidest thing to be found on the Internet lately. That honor falls to Stratfor's George Friedman -- who invokes a ghastly neocon theory of 'Geopolitics and the U.S. Spoiling Attack' to conclude that, although "we do not dine with the great ... there is an underlying order to U.S. foreign policy that makes the apparent chaos of policymaking understandable and rational."