Who amongst us could forget Christophers stirring defence of the man he knew only slightly, Paul Wolfowitz.
"The World Bank president did nothing wrong." thundered our hero, going on to slam, blast and indeed slate the American press for an "eagerness for prurience, the readiness for slander, and the utter want of fact-checking" he wondered "if any of the ravenous pseudo-moralists will feel even the slightest blush" at their unjust allegations."
Well as we all know time has a tendency to embarrass Mr Hitchens, and indeed the passage of just a week has regrettably undermined Mr Hitchens' argument that Wolfie was a man of principle being persecuted by the ravenous and unprincipled hacks of the gutter press.
It appears that Mr Wolfowitz has indeed offered to resign, as long as his employers conceed that nothing was his fault, oh and they come up with a piffling $400,000 payoff. If not he will make sure that he "tears the world bank apart"
Hitchens opens his attack on the "sniveling" Tenet with this.
"It's difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm. There is already a perfectly good pro-Tenet book written by a man who knows how to employ the overworked term storm. Bob Woodward's 2002 effort, Bush at War, was, in many of its aspects, almost dictated by George Tenet."
Now funnily enough Mr Hitchens has discussed Bob Woodward's book before here, he even reprises the line that describing George Tenet as the ""hefty, outgoing son of Greek immigrants" proves that Woodward is in Tenet's pocket. However what is most interesting about the Atlantic article is who the source is for his rubbishing of Woodward's account.
"Here I can only state how I tried to satisfy my own extreme curiosity. Last November I crossed the Potomac (no harder for me to do than it would have been for Woodward, since we both live in Washington) and talked briefly to Paul Wolfowitz, in a government building that was still recovering from rather a major hit. It took me a while to persuade him to let me quote him, and I don't have permission to report all of our conversation. Still, some basic reporting can be done"
So Woodward talks to Tenet means the book was "almost dictated by George Tenet"
Hitchens talks to Wolfowitz, well that just shows what a great journalist he is.
Its also Odd that Mr Hitchens appears to be reluctant to mention Mr Wolfowitz as his fount of information, why in 2003 he was almost giddy with delight when revealing his intimate relationship with the great man, yet now he has gone strangly quiet on the subject.
Perhaps recent events involving the World Bank president make it politic not to reveal him as your primary source?
We can pretty much leave the rest of the article behind, Tenet was at fault for 9-11, Tenet was to blame for false ideas about Iraq's WMDs (which anyway were true) and a hollow laugh is always appropriate when Hitchens dares to call someone else "the man who got everything wrong"
However the best line is this.
"the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war."
No argument that Tenet is vain and useless, However to make a statement like that without blushing, when the administration also contained Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeldt and Paul Bremner, does show a certain inabilty to notice irony.
Iraqi blogger Riverbend and her family have finally decided they have to leave Iraq
Before she leaves she makes an excellent point about the Peace wall being created in Baghdad
"The wall, of course, will protect no one. I sometimes wonder if this is how the concentration camps began in Europe. The Nazi government probably said, "Oh look- we're just going to protect the Jews with this little wall here- it will be difficult for people to get into their special area to hurt them!" And yet, it will also be difficult to get out. The Wall is the latest effort to further break Iraqi society apart. Promoting and supporting civil war isn't enough, apparently- Iraqis have generally proven to be more tenacious and tolerant than their mullahs, ayatollahs, and Vichy leaders. It's time for America to physically divide and conquer- like Berlin before the wall came down or Palestine today. This way, they can continue chasing Sunnis out of "Shia areas" and Shia out of "Sunni areas"."
Finally she shares her fears about leaving.
"It's difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain."
Good luck Riverbend, may you reach somewhere safe soon.
After some softball questions ("what is your favourite bible story? etc) we get the first substantive question;
NY Mag "Has anyone in the Bush administration confided in you about being an atheist?"
Come off it interviewer, Mr Hitchens in an independendent journalist, not some agony aunt taking confessions from administration officials..
CH "Well, I don’t talk that much to them—maybe people think I do"
See.
Oh hold on he goes on
"I know something which is known to few but is not a secret"
Sorry, known to only a few but not a secret?
" Karl Rove is not a believer...he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”
So there you have it folks, Karl Rove is not a believer, no big deal you might think, but reading that sparked off a vague memory....
Joe Wilson, Nov 2005.
"Now, I'm prepared to think the worst of Karl Rove ever since he told Chris Matthews that my wife was fair game. And that's tough for me because Karl and I go to the same church. We go to different services, we go to the same church.
"Joe Wilson and I attend the same church but Joe goes to the wacky mass."
So there we have to folks, is Karl Rove is a hypocrite who attends services when he does not believe in god, only confiding this to Mr Hitchens? or did he whisper in Christopher's shell-like "You are just so right about God Christopher, oh and any chance of attacking Joe Wilson for us?"
More miserable news on Iraq from Tina Susman at the Los Angeles Times:
Academics are being assassinated, prisoners are being tortured, women are being murdered by their own families in so-called "honor killings," and civilians continue to be cut down by rampant violence, the United Nations said today in a report painting a grim picture of life in Iraq.
Among the U.N. report's findings: more than 200 academics have been killed since the start of the war, for sectarian reasons or because of their largely secular views and teachings; detainees in Iraqi-run prisons are frequently tortured or forced to confess to alleged crimes; at least 40 women in the northern semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan have died this year in suspected "honor killings."
Such deaths, many of them from burning, followed family members' accusations of immoral conduct involving the victims, the report said.
Given the way events are proceeding in Iraq, it's no wonder that even Hitch, who has condemned the sermonizing over the senseless deaths at Virginia Tech, is forced to resort to such concepts as "inevitability" and even "jinx" when he turns his gaze eastward. His avowed athiesm is the only thing stopping him from putting the situation down to an Act of God.
Is it me or is Mr Hitchens getting all fatalistic on us.
First there was this weeks article on Iraq which proposed the interesting thesis that Iraq was always doomed.
"Ali Allawi's new memoir shows Iraq's collapse was inevitable...Iraq was headed straight for implosion and failure, both as a state and a society, well before 2003...Hell was coming to Iraq no matter what."
So no-one's fault, no lessons to be drawn by future neo-con warmongers. Just one of those things. Lets shrug our shoulders and move on.
"Virginia Tech—alas for poor humanity—was a calamity with no implications beyond itself."
So there you have it gentle reader, no point worrying about the issues of violence in the USA, gun control, mental health services etc. No need to spend a minute pondering what could drive a human being to such an act. Again, it is just one of those things, shrug those shoulders and get over it people.
It is odd, the type of argument you expect to hear from a religious figure, for example a Catholic who believes that this life is merely a "Vale of Tears" or an fortune teller who thinks our fate is already settled, we being just robots fufilling our pre-assigned destiny.
Shakespear once famously wrote, "It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves"
There must be something more than pollen in the spring DC air, because Hitch has two new Slate columns out again this week.
The first finds him agreeing with Maureen Dowd about what a good book Ali Allawi’s memoir The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace is. I don’t want to spoil everyone’s fun, so I will just say that there is much to agree with in Hitch’s review, and a good deal of rehashing of his own previously stated positions on Iraq and America's commitment to the place too, but who can blame him for that?
The secondSlate piece, entitled Suck It Up, is not, thank goodness! yet another paeon to fellatio, but an examination of the public and media reaction to what he calls “the grisly events at Virginia Tech.” Be sure to give 'em both a read in your coffee break.
Unsourced gossip (and when has that ever bothered us?) reaches us from writer Jack Perdavis about our hero's karaoke faves.
"I learned from Christopher Hitchens himself (okay, I'm fairly certain he was not addressing me personally) that he enjoys karaoke. The two numbers for which he is celebrated (I hope I'm not giving anything away) are "Like A Rolling Stone" and "Proud Mary." (Via)
A couple of weeks ago our hero was kind enough to turn his towering intellect to the question of the French Presidential elections
Right from the headline is was clear what his view was "Le Pen rises again" he confidently proclaimed.
"M. Le Pen smirks broadly and says that everyone is moving his way in one form or another. And he isn't completely bluffing. There is a reason why the French Communist Party, which used to dominate the working class, the unions, and much of the lumpen intelligentsia, is now a spent force that represents perhaps 3 percent of the electorate. And that reason, uncomfortable as it may be, is that most of the Communist electorate defected straight to the National Front. Moreover, as Louis Dreyfus adds rather gloomily, none of Le Pen's last-time voters (who put him in the second round against Chirac and knocked the Socialist candidate out of the race) have any reason not to vote the same way this time."
Worrying stuff
" Add to this the rather peculiar fact that a huge tranche of voters—most recently as large as 40 percent—simply refuse to tell the opinion polls (who last time got everything calamitously wrong) how they intend to cast their ballots. Again, the best intuitive explanation of this reticence is that many people are embarrassed to declare a Le Pen allegiance in advance."
Well the results are now in, with Monsieur Le Pen gaining a frightening, er, 11% of the vote, his worst result since 1974.
Must be so hard being Mr Hitchens, having to bear the burden of being so right all of the time.
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At long last, Hitchens talks a bit of sense about Iran
"For years we in the West have been looking for a new Evil Empire to fill the gap left when Russia - a genuine threat - retired from the job and deprived us of an enemy. What were all those spies to do? How could we justify those missiles and bombs? What should we be scared of now?
At one stage we were reduced to pretending that Panama's General Noriega was a menace to our way of life. Then it was Slobodan Milosevic. Finally, we inflated the piffling Saddam Hussein into a looming Hitler.
Now the same experts think they have found something to be afraid of in Iran. It is tempting to believe them. This is the land of the glowering ayatollahs, the book-burning mobs, the fatwas of death and the black chador. And Iran has just become even more frightening because in its secret vaults Islamic scientists are fumbling with atoms and testing long-range rockets."
Hang on a minute, this isn't our Hitch!
It's his saner brother Peter writing in the Daily Mail. And it's a very informative read.
In his recent Slate piece entitled The French Reaction, Hitch referred to Segolene Royal as “the superficially glamorous Socialist,” which struck me as an odd turn of phrase.
Forget the Socialist bit. Glamorous Socialists may be rather thin on the ground these days, but there’s nothing particularly unnerving about the concept.
No, it was “superficially glamorous” that got my attention. Because to my mind, glamour is a superficial attribute, period. Double exclamation mark!! No ifs, no buts, no qualifications whatsoever. It applies to what we can see on the surface, regardless of what’s underneath. Flay the skin off the most glamorous person you know (make that a thought experiment), and the result will quite unglamorous to say the least.
True, glamour in the contemporary idiom is a fuzzy concept that need not only be applied to sophisticated, sexy and good-looking people dressed in haute couture. There is also the earlier association of glamorous with magical or the power to cast a spell, which one would suppose runs more than skin deep. But since all this year’s candidates for the French presidency are well armed with some combination of oratory, charisma and/or credibility, it’s a fair guess Hitch is referring to Royal’s photogenic qualities rather than her overall ability to impress or charm people.
Glamour seems to be an attribute of people and also of the things they do, including their situations, lifestyles, habits, etc. But on close inspection, it is found to be an attribute of how people and things look. And when paired up with superficial, it indicates some sort of contrast between the appearance and the reality. The trouble is, Hitch never actually says what this contrast is in Royal's case. Does she have an oral hygeine problem, an IQ up there with Paris Hilton's, an expensive cocaine habit, or a police record for serial shoplifting? Hitch doesn't say. He just leaves the slur standing there like the supreme smear artist he is.
Appetite whetted by Hitch’s use of this pairing, I gave it a Googling and came up with 1,370 hits, making “superficially glamorous” a well established but far from hackneyed phrase. The recent Slate article was in the number-two slot, beaten into first place by an intriguing article from the Vatican website entitled ETHICS IN ADVERTISING.
This is serendipitous indeed as this article touches on a subject over which swords were crossed on this blog recently. So I’ll take the liberty of quoting a couple of paragraphs here.
“If an instance of advertising seeks to move people to choose and act rationally in morally good ways that are of true benefit to themselves and others, persons involved in it do what is morally good; if it seeks to move people to do evil deeds that are self-destructive and destructive of authentic community, they do evil.
This applies also to the means and the techniques of advertising: it is morally wrong to use manipulative, exploitative, corrupt and corrupting methods of persuasion and motivation. In this regard, we note special problems associated with so-called indirect advertising that attempts to move people to act in certain ways — for example, purchase particular products — without their being fully aware that they are being swayed. The techniques involved here include showing certain products or forms of behavior in superficially glamorous settings associated with superficially glamorous people; in extreme cases, it may even involve the use of subliminal messages.”
Since browsing and pondering that, I’ve been wondering whether Hitch and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications are in agreement on what “superficially glamorous” means.
But getting back to the main point, in his characterization of Royal, was Hitch suggesting that there was something undeniably glamorous about her in contrast to her fellow candidates (to whom he have gave no glamour ratings whatsoever), but that beneath this veneer there was a decidedly unglamorous interior? If so, I am avid to learn more about what he’s alluding to. Here's the entire sentence.
"The superficially glamorous Socialist, Segolene Royal, who got the nomination only by forcefully repudiating her party's Old Left, has pitched herself as the spokeswoman for the holy trinity of the tricolor, the Marseillaise, and Joan of Arc."
Was he making an insinuation about her based on what he presumes is a common perspective shared by the bulk of the Slate readership? Or was he making a subtle sexist slur in using “superficially glamorous Socialist” as a euphemism for “tarted-up leftwing bitch”? I wouldn't put that past him. And since he has this annoying habit of not spelling out what he means—a sort of subliminal obscurantism with as small "o"—I wonder, could anyone who claims to understand him better than I do help me with his meta-message here?
One big upside of the war in Iraq for Mr Hitchens was the wonderful training opportunities it is giving to US military personnel. Indeed he has been known to wax lyrically thus.
"a positive accounting could be offered without braggartry, and would include: The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat." (The Weekly Standard, Sept 07, Via)
Hardening, an interesting choice of word, but what could it possibly mean?
"On another recent night raid near Muqdadiyah -- based on a tip from the Iraqi police -- U.S. soldiers rolled out in six Humvees expecting to find a half-dozen al-Qaeda in Iraq members in a meeting.
Instead they found a crying mother and her terrified 13-year-old boy.
"Tell him, since he's the oldest one in the house, he's the man of the house, he needs to man-up and stop hiding behind his mother," 1st Lt. Christopher Nogle, 23, of Orlando, instructed his interpreter...The boy covered his face and sobbed. It was 3 in the morning. He said he didn't know where his father had gone.
"Does he love his father?" Nogle asked. "Does he want to see him again?"
The small barefoot boy shook with fear and said nothing.
"Ask him where his father hides his weapons," Nogle demanded.
"I swear to God I don't know," the boy said.
"He is not a man, he is scared," said his mother, who was also wailing.
"He needs to quit crying. He's responsible for everybody in here right now since his father left; his father abandoned everybody else," Nogle told the boy through his interpreter. "Tell him when his father comes back later tonight or tomorrow that he needs to have a talk with his father, that his father is doing very bad things and it's getting the whole family in trouble."
Before the soldiers left, an Iraqi police officer brandished two large buck knives in front of the boy's face. Nobody was arrested."
I bet before this war a 13 year old child would not have expected to be threatened with death if he did not turn over his father to the tender mercies of the US army. Yet another great example of how the "hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women" is not only helping to win the war, it is creating a whole new generation of "hardened" Americans who will bring all of these novel experiences back into civilian life with them.
A member of staff from the world bank has taken the time to write a thoughtful and comprehensive response to Christopher's recent article about About the World bank scandal
We would reccomend sitting down and taking the time to read the Whole thing
Some of you will doubtless remember Spanish prosecutor Judge Baltasar Garzón as an old ally of Hitch’s in the fight to nail the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for mass murder (see here, here, and here). And on top of this, Garzón has also attempted to have Henry Kissinger detained by Interpol for questioning and he has indicted Osama bin Laden in absentia on terrorism charges. So in progressive circles he’s widely regarded as being a sharp legal mind, a scourge of the criminal elite, and an all-round jolly good egg.
Hitch appears to share this view. Or at least that is general impression emanating from his past writing, as this chunk from December 17, 2001 issue of The Nation (second link above) illustrates.
“Apparently unimpressed by those who maintained that the Al Qaeda death squads were trying to utter a cry for help about the woes of the world's poor. … Judge Baltasar Garzón has put the Spanish wing of this gangster network into custody. We know this judge is not soft on crime, because he helped open the new era of universal jurisdiction by issuing a warrant for the arrest of General Pinochet. He has now gone one better, by telling Attorney General Ashcroft that arrest and detention work only when they are used to enforce the rule of law. No country that respects these norms will deliver prisoners to a country that does not respect them. Military tribunals that take evidence in secret and that have the power to impose the death penalty are, by definition, not up to recognized international standards.”
Recently, however, the dreaded Judge has turned his attention to what he regards as another horrific international crime on a scale that dwarfs anything General Pinochet was accused of and is up there with some of Dr. Kissinger’s biggest capers, such as the carpet bombing of Cambodia and the invitation to annex East Timor.
Yes, you’ve guessed it—He has characterized the US-led invasion of Iraq as a criminal act.
Writing in the Spanish newspaper of record El Pais, Garzón had some extremely strong words to say about the architects of this huge and unmitigated tragedy. (If navigating El Pais is too challenging, the text of the article appears here.)
“We should look more deeply into the possible criminal responsibility of the people who are, or were, responsible for this war and see whether there is sufficient evidence to make them answer for it.”
In Garzón’s opinion, George W. Bush and his allies should eventually face war crimes charges for their actions in Iraq, and he specifically names former Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar among the defendants.
“Those who joined the US president in the war against Iraq have as much or more responsibility than him because, despite having doubts and biased information, they put themselves in the hands of the aggressor to carry out an ignoble act of death and destruction that continues to this day.”
The original article is in Spanish, but it has been covered in English (with translations of the judge's comments) by Vicky Short.
Many of the planners, proponents and supporters of the war have been running for cover of late, and some are already producing laundry lists of plausible reasons as to why they reluctantly gave the venture their backing. Mistakes were made, things could have been done differently, we didn’t have the facts, we were lied to…. Indeed, as far as I can ascertain, only one perpetrator has come clean in admitting he started the whole thing with sufficent relish to make a possible case of malice aforethought stick, and he has never retracted that confession.
Which brings us on to the juicy little snippet reported by Counterpunch in June of last year:
“As Hitchens retreated, someone remarked to him, "So your glorious war has turned out to be a total disaster, hasn't it?"
"It is glorious," the sodden scrivener blared, "and it IS my war because it needed Paul Wolfowitz and myself to go and convince the President to go to war."
As mourners digested this megalomanic outburst, Hitchens continued, "And we are going to kill every Al Qaida terrorist and Baathist in the country and that's a good thing. They need to be killed and we will kill them."
Hitch later commented to our own Sonic that:
"The report of my remarks is self-evidently absurd to anyone who knows me, even if I was trying to be heavily sarcastic" Whether this would stand up in court as a denial is debatable. if I were on among the judges I would be sympathetic to a plea of babbling nonsense in public while under the combined effects of grief, alcohol and social ostracism. But if he were to get a vindictive panel, who knows what they would make of the documentary record.
While he slouches around the States behind those same stout battlements of contempt for world opinion that shield Henry Kissinger from the long arm on international law, Hitch may feel safe from the clutches of aspiring war crimes prosecutors. But he would do well not to mistake rank impunity for true imunity, because when the buck's being passed and everyone's looking for somebody else to blame for the war on, the above outburst may come back to haunt Hitch with avengence. For a man who has campaigned so doggedly for international law to be used to prosecute Pinochet and Kissinger, to be picked up by Interpol on on some future trip abroad and dragged off to the Hague, or even to Madrid, would be poetic justice indeed.
But remember, boys and girls, NOBODY expects the Spanish Inqusition!
A personal correspondent of mine, the noted Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe calls out our boy (and Elton John!)
A forthcoming book by Christopher Hitchens, a noted journalist, is titled "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." ... No doubt Hitchens and Sir Elton would find this unfathomable. If religion transforms decent people into "hateful lemmings," why turn for help to the local clergy? If religion "poisons everything," who in his right mind would trust men for whom religious witness is a way of life?
Fortunately, the Good Guys are still with us.
"I see that moral impulse at work every day," Christian leader Charles Colson has written, "when 50,000 volunteers in Prison Fellowship . . . go into horrid holes, loving the most unlovable people in the world. You don't do that out of any kind of human instinct -- it is contrary to selfish human nature."
Sorry that Hitch upset you, Jeff, but I can assure you that his principles are as firm as his handshake.
Paul Wolfowitz's troubles at the World Bank have sent Hitch into overdrive, producing his second Fighting Words column of the week, in a valiant attempt to defend the honour and reputation both of his friend and political ally, and of the lady involved in the affair, Shaha Riza.
Of course, Shaha and Paul's romance has little in common with Monica and Bill's, but it is hard not to make comparisons, not so much about the parties and their particulars, but about the fickleness of Hitch's moralizing, how it changes direction like a weathercock depending on which way the wind happens to blowing.
So where Clinton's goings on with Lewinsky were, in Hitch's learned opinion, the public's business because they took place in a public building, the relationship between Wolfowitz and Riza "is none of my damn business (or yours)." Also, when Hitch tries to soften any possible public scorn by explaining that Wolifie and Shaha's relationship "has always been very discreet," I can't help thinking back to how Bill and Monica had the discretion to shut the door of the Oval Office before the cigar was brought out, but to no avail.
Where Monica was "the president's comfort-woman-du-jour," Shaha escapes any hint of innuendo as to her sexual status in Wolfie's eyes. She's a victim, not of her own or Wolfie's sunny nature, but of the need to avoid any hint of impropriety at the Bank. "What could be easier to understand?" Hitch asks. "A highly qualified individual, compelled to leave her job for reasons entirely unconnected to her performance—and forced also to undergo bureaucratic scrutiny of her private life —is at least to be recognized with pay and promotion."
And where Hitch concluded that Bill's efforts use lawyer Vernon Jordan to obtain alternative employment for Monica amounted to obstruction of justice, Wolfie's helping hand for Shaha is defended uncritically by a lengthy reference to what the general counsel to the bank, Robert Danino, wrote to Wolfowitz's lawyers. Still, that's what friends are for.
But moralizing apart, if there is a moral in any of this, it can be summed up in one short sentence that should be hung in big letters over the entrances to the White House and the World Bank Headquarters: Screw the President at Your Own Risk!
When Paul Wolfowitz was appointed head of the World bank, Tariq Ali remarked
"he needs a PR officer who can write his speeches, justify the unjustifiable. And I would suggest strongly that he employs his close friend and comrade Christopher Hitchens to act as his public face. I think Christopher would be very good at that."May 2nd 2005, Seven Oaks
Well if Mr Wolfowitz ever needed a pr officer it is now, as allegations swirl around him and Our hero, true to his mandate rushes in to defend his comrade.
It takes only to the second paragraph of the piece that we get to the trademark Hitchens BFL (Big Fat Lie)
"I ought probably to say at once that I know both Wolfowitz and Riza slightly"
Slightly? that's an interesting word to use. Now I'm no Washington insider, with access to the Rich and powerful, but I do have access to google, so lets see what this definition of "Slightly" adds up to
". Wolfowitz respected Hitchens’s record as a writer on human rights. He called Hitchens in the fall of 2002, at the prompting of Kevin Kellems, then his special adviser, and now an adviser at the World Bank.”...Hitchens accepted an “invitation to lunch at the Pentagon,” one might say to make a pact with the devil. Kellems reminds us."
The balance of Parker’s sad tale on the mating of Hitchens and Wolfowitz is that the latter felt those of a like mind should be on “closer terms.” Hitchens responds that he had been trying to signal Wolfowitz in his writing and Wolfowitz said, “I Wondered"
Ahh isn't that sweet.
"Kellems describes the duo of Hitchens and Wolfowitz as “two giant minds unleashed in the room. They were finishing each other’s sentences."
I have this strange vision of the two of them on the phone "You hang up first", "No you hang up"
The next stage in bonding is of course a road trip;
"“In July 2003,” he [Hitchens] and a few other reporters flew to Baghdad with Wolfowitz.”
However my favourite "Hitch hearts Wolfie" story is this one. At a memorial service for long-term New York Review co-editor Barbara Epstein, an unamed person remarked to our Christopher, "So your glorious war has turned out to be a total disaster, hasn't it?"
His response
""It is glorious,and it is my war because it needed Paul Wolfowitz and myself to go and convince the President to go to war." (Hitchenswatch via Counterpunch, July 2006.)
There is a lot more to cover about this subject, and we will be doing so over the next few days. However lets nail lie one right now, there is no "slightly' about the relationship between Wolfowitz and Hitchens.
Previews of Mr Hitchens' latest work "God is not Great" are starting to appear. Your humble blogger was particularly struck by this line.
"Hitchens, refers to Saint Augustine as "a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus"
Now I'm no expert on writing blistering attacks on religious figures, but it is a bit odd to call someone "earth centred" who died in 430 AD, well before the invention of the telescope. Attacking Mr Augustine for not having a full understanding of modern cosmology seems a little harsh.
Augustine is also well known for contending that you should use your own powers of reasoning rather than relying on scripture when it comes to scientific facts, especially in relation to astronomy.
"It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are."
Augustine seems to be saying that you should not let your preconceptions about what must be true blind you to the actual facts, otherwise people will laugh at you.
Back in 2003 our hero gave his reasons for applying for US citizenship.
"I realized that when I was reading arguments after 9/11 that said there was the American view and there was the European view—that sort of tripe—that as far as I could tell the American view is the one that I took. I felt a much stronger identification than I had before," Mr. Hitchens tells WORLD. "Before I was ready to curse alone. I was an outsider in both countries. But it felt like, feels like, is a gesture of solidarity...."If one wants to defend the deployment of forces of fellow citizens, one probably ought to be a fellow citizen."
Back when he was writing under the Minority Report label, Hitch could get away with saying almost anything without being accused of going "off-message." After all, he is a minority of one and he can, within broad limits, report on virtually anything that takes his fancy. But since moving from The Nation to Slate, Hitch's regular column has styled itself FIGHTING WORDS: A WARTIME LEXICON, which, one would suppose, considerably narrows the range of subjects he can legitimately take on. At the same time, at Slate he is having to produce his 1,000 words on a weekly rather than a fortnightly basis, so keeping up the quality requires an extra measure of effort.
The strain of fighting the good fight has been showing of late, as Hitch's recent furloughs into tabloid crime and literary tourism illustrate. But with his latest effort, The You Decade, he appears to have given up on his war altogether in favor of trivial pursuits, i.e., complaining about the lamentable state of advertising and merchandising down at the local mall and on the box these days. At a time when the guys and gals in uniform are being ordered to accept ever-longer tours of duty, could it be that one of the chief ideologues behind the war has gone AWOL?
Were this the case, it might be a good sign if it were to herald a shift away from crusading for US hegemony in the Middle East and towards support for the guerrilla war of ideas being raged against corporate totalitarianism by the likes of David Korten and Naomi Klein. But all the signs are that Hitch has no higher motive behind this particular keyboarding exercise, and that he is, rather, morphing prematurely into a contemporary version of Mike Royko or Andy Rooney in their respective dotages.
The You Decade would make a perfectly respectable personal blog entry or even a passable piece for syndication to the weekend sections of regional dailies—just above Anne Landers and sandwitched in between Dave Barry and the crossword. But as a FIGHTING WORDS column it seems badly out of place. It strikes me as the work of a tired old curmudgeon who has lots of irritants to complain about but very little real fight left in him. Perhaps it's time for change of column heading.
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Hitchens in league with sinister quasi-Stalinist sect!!!?
No, it's not a headline from the National Enquirer but an amusing aside from A Tiny Revolution in 2005 about some of the people Hitch joined on a protest about Henry Kissinger turning out to be the same group he had previously (in 2002) described as s a "sinister sect" and "quasi-Stalinist."
"In the United States, the main organizer of anti-war propaganda is Ramsey Clark, who perhaps understandably can't forgive himself for having been Lyndon Johnson's attorney general. However, he fails to live down this early disgrace by acting as a front man for a sinister sect -- the International Action Center, cover name for the Workers World Party -- which refuses to make any criticism of the Saddam regime. It is this quasi-Stalinist group, co-organized by a man with the wondrous name of Clark Kissinger, which has recruited such figures as Ed Asner and Marisa Tomei to sign the "Not In Our Name" petition. Funny as this may be in some ways (I don't think the administration is going to war in the name of Ed Asner or Marisa Tomei, let alone Gore Vidal), it is based on a surreptitious political agenda. In Britain, the chief spokesman of the "anti-war" faction is a Labour MP named George Galloway, who is never happier than when writing moist profiles of Saddam and who says that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst moment of his life."
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," - Kurt Vonnegut
One of America's wisest wisecrackers has just died—I won't say passed away, because as a secular humanist, Kurt Vonnegut never voiced any fear of death nor any anticipation or desire for an afterlife. He was also a prime example of someone who was never even tempted to drift to the right with age, nor to advocate bombing people either into or out of the Stone Age. Now I'm going to have to scratch my head so I can adopt someone else as my favorite living American author. In the meantime, let's toast him! (The following piece was taken from Fates Worse than Death (published in 1991) was selected because it contains a general forecast about the way the world is going ,and typed using both index fingers by yours truly, who is responsible for all the spelling and punctuation errors.)
I tried to deal some with the Neo-Cons' wrong centuryism and wrong-countryism in a novel I finished four months ago, Hocus Pocus. The Franklin Library is preparing a deluxe edition of Hocus Pocus (with an illustration by my daughter Edith, the former Mrs. Geraldo Rivera, now married to a really great guy) for which I have provided a special preface.
It says that I, ever since studying anthropology, “have regarded history and cultures and societies as characters vivid as any in fiction, as Madame Bovary or Long John Silver or Leopold Bloom, or who you will. A critic for The Village Voice announced in triumph sometime back his discovery that I was the only well-known writer who had never created a character, and that the next step should be to unfrock me on that account. He was incorrect, since Eliot Roesewater and Billy Pilgrim and some others of my invention are surely stereophonic and three-dimensional, and as idiosyncratic as you please. But he was onto something nonetheless: In many of my books, including this one, individual human beings are not the main characters.
“The biggest character in Hocus Pocus (excluding myself, of course) is imperialism, the capture of other societies’ lands and people and treasure by means of state-of-the-art wounding and killing machines, which is to say armies and navies. It can’t be said too often that when Christopher Columbus discovered this hemisphere there were already millions upon millions of human beings here, and heavily armed Europeans took it away from them. When executed on a smaller scale, such an enterprise is the felony we call armed robbery. As might be expected, violence of this sort is not without its consequences, one of which turns out to be the unwillingness of the richest heirs of the conquerors to take responsibility for what has become an awful lot of complicated property in need of skilled management and exceedingly boring and appallingly expensive maintenance, not to mention an increasingly unhappy and
