Dear Nation Readers

Dear Nation Readers

Dear Nation Readers, here I go again: I too like reading Katha Pollitt, Eric Alterman (when he posts), Calvin Trillin, etc. — I like it when The Nation is at its best, leftish but non doctrinaire —but the magazine owes readers an accounting.

Or does anybody still care enough about The Nation to notice and demand it? Perhaps not.

In any case, publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, and her husband, Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, have repeatedly used the magazine as a platform for their views that any difficulty between the United States and Russia is all the responsibility of the United States.

Putin harbors no grand anti-democratic, anti-Western designs.

There is no Russian  cyber-strategy aimed at the West.

Russia did nothing to encourage Brexit.

Nothing to encourage anti-democratic regimes in Hungary and Poland.

Nothing to help Trump win in 2016.

One could go on.

Perhaps this is a throwback to the Cold War, when some lefties attributed the whole contretemps to the West, the United States in particular.

Perhaps it is a testament to the fact that, whether you are left or right — true I am addressing the left —  learning is hard, when historical circumstances shift strangely and radically.

Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen evince no propensity for learning. They are still defending and foolishly upgrading  an ideology that may have made some sense once upon a time, or not.

The Nation owes readers an accounting.

On the other hand, given lack of demand for it, maybe nobody  cares.