What the hell is wrong with Christopher Hitchens?

His latest column is quite possibly the most shameless attempt to suck up to the Bush regime that I have seen yet.

Here is just one excerpt to show you just how bad it is.

"Over the past month, I have hardly been able to open my e-mail without a flood of similarly portentous tripe concerning the "Downing Street Memo(s)." This time, it is not the interior of a Templar Church but the style of a clerk in the British Foreign Office that furnishes "the key to all mythologies." A former CIA hand named Ray McGovern has challenged me to debate about the "smoking gun" contained in the Downing Street palimpsests, and I have agreed, in principle. Other correspondents have helpfully added other "smoking guns" as e-mail attachments. A man named Morgan Reynolds, a former chief economist at the Bush Labor Department and now an instructor at Texas A&M, has proof that the World Trade Center was laid low by a "controlled demolition" and not by the hijacked planes. This is a refreshing change from the Gore Vidal view that the Bush administration knowingly grounded all military aircraft in order to give the al-Qaida teams a clear shot. But perhaps both those theories are congruent: One wouldn't want to exclude any options if one were a Republican seeking to incinerate the downtown business HQ of capitalist globalization."

More (Warning :puke: inducing): http://www.slate.com/id/2121212/

I have heard the right wing argue that even the "liberal" Christopher Hitchens was on their side one too many times. We need to start making it more clear that Hitchens is not one of us. I don't care if he may have wrote some things that sounded liberal in the past, today he represents us no better than Bill O'Reilly does. Hitchens is nothing more than a whore to the Bush Administration and we need to make that very clear.

And that his liver rejected the rest of his body years ago? Not a damn thing. :P

I would hope that Gore Vidal would've bitch slapped him by now.

...To quote George Galloway's description of him.

and an asshole in American parlance.

and he has never admitted that he was wrong about anything. He believes ion conquering people and forcing them into democracy.

He is very smart though and I would never dismiss anything he says completly out of hand. He isn't an ideologue, just incorrect about the war and obnoxiously so.

Cheney and Karl Rove are also very smart. He, like them, is an ideologue though. What makes it worse is that he is a right-wing ideologue who the corporate media tries to paint as being a liberal, so they put him on to "debate" some right-wing nut-case and he ends up agreeing with them on just about everything. We need to make it very clear that he is not one of us, and we should start placing him in the same category we place Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly, and the rest of the right-wing gas bags.

you can't point to anything in his career that supports your view other than his views on the war. He is a socialist. His view on Terry Schiavo was that her husband should have been allowed to inject her with a lethal dose of Morphine. He is on the right side of Gay marriage. He just happens to be very wrong about the war because he had personal relationships with a lot of the exiles that hoodwinked other journalists. To admit that would be admitting that he wasn't smart at all and that is something that he will never do.

BTW, Cheney is not at all smart, just mean.

He may support certain liberal positions, but in the end he is a die-hard apologist for war and there is nothing that could ever get him to admit he is wrong. No matter the evidence you show him he will always defend it. You can see that with his dismissal of the Downing Street Memos, they are hard evidence yet he portrays them as mythological.

That fits the definition of an ideologue perfectly. It doesn't matter that he supports gay marriage for example, because he is still following an ideology. Maybe it is his own ideology and doesn't fit perfectly in the left or right on all issues, but it is still ideological.

I also can't agree that Hitchens is a RW ideologue or a Bushwhore. He is dead wrong on the war, and has a blind spot when it comes to what he calls "Islamic fascism". But he is in no terms a knee jerk supporter of the shrub regime. In Vanity Fair he has written one of the few mainstream exposes of election fraud in Ohio and elsewhere in 2004 and came to the public conclusion that the 2004 election was stolen.

I think the best characterization of Hitchens is that he is the last "cold war liberal", which was a common political position between the end of WWII and the 1980s -- liberal on most issues, but fiercely anti-communist, even to the point of military recklessness, because of the idea that communist totalitarianism was the antithesis of liberalism, and once a totalitarian took over in a country, elections and democracy would end, precluding other political choices.

JFK was a cold war liberal, as was Danial Mohnihan, Scoop Jackson and many others.

I would grant this connection to the neocons: many neo-cons started out as, or working for, cold war liberals. But neo-cons added a conservative domestic agenda to their international anti-communism, and cold war liberals generally remained domestically liberal. Also, cold war liberals tended to be big believers in exporting liberalism to developing countries through US AID, Alliance for Progress, land reform, etc, while neo-cons are simply neo-imperialists who don't give a rat's ass about conditions in other countries and just want to "smash and grab" their resources.

He is also a bit of an underachiever and so he feels very comfortable with Bush.

In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, he wrote a brilliant article about the state of the young people in Iran today. Absolutely brilliant.

Plus, he authored one of my favorite non-fiction works of all time, unmasking that little Beulah Witch-lookalike who always creeped me out and was, I always suspected, the biggest grifter in the world: "Missionary Position."

http://tinyurl.com/86bbg

His view of the war is incorrect and based on faulty assumptions but is not based in long standing ideology. Here is a debate from the Right Wing rag, the NAtion, where he speaks for himself and is eloquently bested in the debate.


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021216&s=exchange

My dear Kathaa

"Examine your own prose and see how querulous and conservative it has become since. Acting as the interpreter for those who, according to you, have attended demonstrations the message of which they don't really understand, you ventriloquize their fears as follows: There might be many casualties on both sides; there might be an Israeli blow and a Baathist counterblow; there might be fuel to the Islamist flame; the whole region might become a "bloodbath." You spare us nothing, though I am glad to see that you don't bang on about "our" past support for Hussein, as if this would make a renewed neutralism or complicity suddenly OK. In other words, you voice the same misgivings if not dreads that are present in the minds of those who hope for "regime change." The difficulties don't need to be argued. They plainly argue for themselves. Where I live, in Washington, they are also the same objections, in so many words, that are proposed by three factions of the hard right: the Scowcroft-Eagleburger reactionaries, the majority of the CIA and the Pat Buchananite isolationists. These are the voices to which the President might actually lend an ear. Do you wish that he would? Then the Saudi oligarchy and the Turkish elite and their American proxies would have canceled "regime change." Fine revolutionary you turn out to be.

"

Dear Christopher,

...

You set the equation up so that there is no way to oppose invading Iraq except to be a coward or a covert admirer of dictatorship and theocracy. Well, I don't think it's cowardly to be extremely wary of war, especially "pre-emptive" war. And I don't think you have to love Saddam Hussein to be skeptical about the rosy scenarios being put forward on behalf of "regime change." Even Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi dissident who strongly favors invasion, admitted in a recent interview in the Boston Globe that there is only a "5 percent chance" that the aftermath will be what you'd like to see: a democratic, peaceful Iraq that respects human rights, as opposed to a US military dictatorship, an Iraqi military junta, civil war or other very bad outcome. Makiya acknowledges, too, that in order for his scenario to have a chance of success, America would have to keep troops in Iraq for years and spend untold billions. How likely is it that our government will, or even can, make that kind of commitment?


------------

History has proven her correct. Is it hard to believe Hitchens would be slow to publicly admit as much?

:)



One entry found for sycophant.


Main Entry: sy·co·phant
Pronunciation: -f&nt also -"fant
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin sycophanta slanderer, swindler, from Greek sykophantEs slanderer, from sykon fig + phainein to show -- more at FANCY
: a servile self-seeking flatterer
synonym see PARASITE
- sycophant adjective

cuz Ray would b'slap him across the Atlantic and back again

It's a very peculiar type of clown. I can't fathom why anyone would take him seriously.

He is a fool.

methinks i'll not be wasting my time reading this tripe.

(nt)

people regarding any scandal that touches this administration, ignore and attempt a bit of levity to ensure no one takes anything serious.

A production of "Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf" starring Hitchens as George and Ann Coulter as Martha.

Anyone care to cast the secondary characters?

I haven't quite figured out why, but Hitchens is about as neoconservative as they come when it comes to Islam and the Middle East. He's got a hard-on for the "Islamofascists" and he's completely bought into the "democracy by invasion" idea. He's been behind the Iraq war from the start, so it's no surprise that he's still rabidly defending it. Since the DS memos are both straightforward and devastating in their implications, Hitchens has no choice but to try and minimize their significance by lumping them in with the loony LIHOP/MIHOP theories.

They must've told him it was whiskey-flavored (I'm sorry, flavoured)and he couldn't resist.

and was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire - middle ranking award, but not bad for the age of 36 - he'll get a knighthood next, in the normal course of events) for his work at Downing Street. He studied Maths and Philosophy at Oxford, and would be perfectly aware of the illicit meaning of 'fixed' - and what the 'but' at the start of the sentence signifies.

n/t

of former leftists who have sped to the right, as most sensible people are heading in the opposite direction.

Money? Vainglory? Idiocy? That seductive sniff of power?

A mixture I expect.

n/t But how did you find DU?

of course!

I visit a work related forum with many Americans. We discuss politics and sometimes DU gets a link.

I'm further to the left than most here, I would guess, but I feel at home.

and see you bye!!!

You call DU "subversive"? I'm in awe.

"Sometimes DU gets a link?"

@#$%$#@ Please forgive me!!!

I was being sarcastic.

This was originally in the Onion last year :evilgrin:

Christopher Hitchens Forcibly Removed From Trailer Park After Drunken Confrontation With Common-Law Wife


http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/66772/index.php

Noted author, social critic, and political gadfly Christopher Hitchens was once again the focus of controversy Monday, when he was forcibly removed from Happy Trails trailer park following a drunken confrontation with Noreen Bodell, 39, his common-law wife of 14 years.

Responding to a domestic-disturbance call, police arrived at the couple's double-wide trailer at approximately 2:15 p.m. to find Hitchens and Bodell throwing dishes at each other. When the officers attempted to remove Hitchens from the premises, the leftist intellectual became physically and verbally abusive toward the officers, calling them "shitkickers," "bitches," and "effete liberal apologists for the atrocities of late-stage capitalism."

Having consumed what sources described as "a substantial amount of single-malt scotch," Hitchens then burst into tears, yelling, "That woman never understood me for who I am. I want to talk to Lapham. Lapham's the only one who understands me."

Charged with disturbing the peace, Hitchens was taken to the Sparta police station at 3 p.m. and released four hours later.

Little is known about Bodell, a heavy-set blonde who has been known to use several different surnames. According to sources familiar with the couple, the incident marks the third time in as many weeks that police have been forced to intervene in their volatile relationship.

"We're down at the old Hitchens place probably twice a month at least," said Sgt. Wilson Vernon, the first of three officers to arrive at the scene. "Once his blood's up, old Hitch can get meaner than a three-legged coon hound. From what the neighbors told us about this latest incident, Noreen was all worked up, accusing him of drinking and womanizing. He was angry with her refusal to acknowledge that there is ample evidence to make a case for prosecuting Henry Kissinger as a war criminal. She just kept shouting, 'No, there ain't!'"

Police were initially summoned when neighbors reported hearing shouting and a loud crash, followed by a rambling polemic on Kissinger's alleged covert approval of Indonesia's illegal invasion of East Timor in 1975.

Though the belligerent Hitchens required three officers to subdue him, police do not consider the incident serious, calling it "business as usual" and describing Hitchens as a "hot-tempered but essentially harmless provocateur for the Far Left."

"Hitch is an all-right guy once he sobers up," Vernon said. "He just gets a little wound-up sometimes, like when his woman stays out all night down at Smokey Joe's Tavern, or he has a deadline looming for his Vanity Fair column."

Hitchens' run-ins with the law have not been restricted to Sparta city limits. In May 2002, he was arrested for drunkenly singing 1930s union songs while driving a stolen riding lawnmower through the streets of Boston, where he was attending an international women's-rights conference. Hitchens accused police of "atavistic, morally reprehensible Stalinist scare tactics" before being bailed out by conference organizers the following morning.

Sgt. Ed Poole of Boston's 11th Precinct said there was no love lost between Hitchens and his arresting officers.

"Word got around the station that this guy wrote a whole book claiming that Mother Teresa was a stooge of right-wing dictators," Poole recalled. "Supposedly, he said her hypocritical approach to charity for the poor of Calcutta, as well as her steadfast advocacy of the Catholic Church's doctrine prohibiting birth control, made her an essentially immoral individual undeserving of the mantle of sainthood. Well, a lot of the boys here are Irish-Catholic born and raised, and they don't take too kindly to people speaking ill of nuns."

Town officials in Sparta, where Hitchens has maintained an on-again, off-again residence for two decades, admit that he may be "a handful" at times, but they insist he is not a danger to himself or others.

"If I know Hitch, by the end of the week, he and Noreen'll be back together, cuddlin' and kissin', just as happy as two crawdads in a pond," Sparta Police Chief Buck Perkins said. "We don't get a lot of ultra-progressive agitators 'round these parts, but Hitch is okay. Plus, he earned a lot of points with the townsfolk for his vocal criticism of the anti-war movement. Even though he was attacking the war opponents from the left, folks around here don't necessarily understand the implications of that, so he's an all-right Joe in their book."

Added Perkins: "So long as Hitch can learn to keep his mouth shut about Christianity being symptomatic of the 'savage and ignorant prehistory of our species' and whatnot, I'm sure he'll cause no trouble that a few cups of black coffee and a night in the drunk tank can't solve."

If he writes about Mother Theresa or religion in general, he's a hero. If he writes about Iraq, he's a villain.

Personally, I don't pay a bit of attention to ANYTHING the drunken sot says.

Then he gets booked on the corporate news shows again.