I must admit, fellow Watchers to being a bit distracted from the Great Mans doings in the past few months, some of this was driven by the physical disconnect of doing millions of air miles, most by the dial-it-in quality of Hitchen's writing over the period. Moreover, Grey has been doing yeoman's service in maintaining the Watch.
Three things today conspired to shift my scrawny butt to post. They fall under the categories listed above.
- Friends:Guess where Hitchen's "poor poms everyone picks on us" piece on Iran is approvingly cross posted? Let's see, which website is rapidly diminishing to the fading dregs of knuckle dragging conservatism? Which site is a favourite of SadlyNo? Where have the Buckley spawn and other "moderate" "RINOs" run away from? Yes, clever Watchers, our Chris is playing a Queenly role at NRO, National Review. The magazine that never met an enhanced interrogation it didn't like. For the probably the first time in it's existence NRO linked to Slate. This is the online plague that usually mentions England only to point out it's dhimminitude or the fearful communist medical scheme.
- Flunkies: There is an awful Canadian blog, "Five Feet of Crap" that posts the unmitigated revolting ravings of a intellectually and height challenged woman called Kathy Shaidle. In a piece I stumbled into today she lovingly reports and embroiders on a version of "Women cant be funny". "Most women don't have the balls (and, I would add, the brains) to be very funny:
Now, it would take a moron to believe that this statement implies that ALL men are taller than ALL women. We’re just dealing with an accurate generalisation (a word that has become unfairly maligned these days by people who don’t understand ‘generalisation’ can be a mathematical term, just like when people who say ‘homosexuality is not normal’ aren’t always passing a moral judgement, but merely pointing out that being gay isn’t the statistical ‘norm’ - very different from saying ‘homosexuality is not natural’, which is an empirically false statement). (...) This is why all these ‘Blair Babes’ can’t hack it in parliament, feeling it’s too ‘confrontational’. They are the opposite of those exceptions who proved the rule, such as Barbara Castle, Shirley Williams, Ann Widdecombe and Margaret Thatcher, women who were not to be messed with because they didn’t moan about ‘ya-boo’ politics and relished a challenge, rather than timidly retreating from one."
Despite totally missing the point that most people who claim "gays are not normal" are relishing both meanings of the word for totally bigoted purposes. The article is a less erudite version of Chris' misogyny and quoted by a notorious rightwing fundie crackpot.
3. Fetishes: Finally someone who should be a fellow traveler of atheist Chris comes up with a perfect description of both Hitchens and all neocons state of mind.
"Just say no
He took offense.
It started out in college. You know, just experimenting with it. But he liked it. He liked how it made him feel.
For a while it was just recreational -- weekends and parties and rallies and that kind of thing. But soon he was hanging out with some pretty hard-core users, with the kind of people who took offense all the time. They didn't need a reason or an excuse, it was just what they did. It was who they were. Soon he found he couldn't get through the day without it.
Over the years he even learned to grow his own, to take the tiniest seeds of umbrage and nurture them into full-grown pretexts for outrage. The good stuff.
Some of his old friends tried to stage an intervention -- to convince him that he had a problem, that his whole life had become consumed by his addiction.
He didn't respond well. He just took more offense -- right there in front of them.
Addicts, he told them, are always chasing diminishing returns. They're always needing more and stronger drugs to provide an ever-smaller high. But the stuff he was taking didn't work like that. His highs just kept getting stronger and stronger no matter how flimsy or insignificant the reason.
You're not trying to help me, he screamed at them. You're just jealous. And he yelled at them some more, trying to get them to take offense too.
They wouldn't touch it, of course, and just left quietly, looking sad. He took a hit of offense at that and sat back on the couch. They think I've got a problem, he thought, but they're the ones with a problem. Ohh. He inhaled deeply. Yes, yes that's it. His eyelids fluttered. It's because I'm better than them, better than all of them ...
Four days later his landlord called the police, saying there was an offensive smell drifting into the hallway. They found him there on the couch.
The official report from the medical examiner said it was an overdose."
I'm not sure how CW will cope under the new administration. The group he tied himself to is becoming an ever shrinking theocratic rump who can't be comfortable bedfellows. Perhaps it's a version of "friends with benefits". I cant imagine any other reason to crawl in bed with the walking dead that are the American Conservatives these days unless necrophilia was always a turn on.
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