I like Hitch's Slate column this week. It's full of exclamation points, genuine outrage and even some good comedy (he dusts off his old "no spitting" recollection, you know, about how stupid the signs were in his boyhood). Commenting on the incident in the sky over Michigan where a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up the airplane he was on, Hitch is baffled:
But somehow the watch list, the tipoff, the many worried reports from colleagues and relatives, the placing of the name on a "central repository of information" don't prevent the suspect from boarding a plane, changing planes, or bringing whatever he cares to bring onto a plane.
Somehow. As for the rest of us, "the collective innocent," it just means longer lines, more pointless searching and idiotic rules.
For many years after the explosion of the TWA plane over Long Island...you could not board an aircraft without being asked whether you had packed your own bags and had them under your control at all times. These two questions are the very ones to which a would-be hijacker or bomber would honestly and logically have to answer "yes." But answering "yes" to both was a condition of being allowed on the plane! Eventually, that heroic piece of stupidity was dropped as well. But now fresh idiocies are in store. Nothing in your lap during final approach. Do you feel safer? If you were a suicide-killer, would you feel thwarted or deterred?
Good stuff. Back to the "somehow." Do any of these recent events make much sense? No. Even if he doesn't realize it, Hitch is flirting with the suggestion of a conspiracy when he writes:
Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can't—or won't. The answer to the second question is: Because we can.
Maybe "we" need guys like Abdulmutallab around to continue rationalizing WOT? Just a thought.
Unfortunately, Hitch's piece comes apart in the last paragraph. The pointed questions, criticisms and derision disappear, replaced by some really dark and scary, dramatic and powerful propaganda about, well, see for yourself:
We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains...The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it.
The "battle," if that's what you insist on calling all this nonsense, does not have to go on for the rest of our lives. The US government could put an end to it, not by bombing Muslim countries, but by not bombing Muslim countries. Read Glenn Greenwald's latest analysis "Cause and Effect of the Terror War" of America's war on 5 Muslim countries.
Seems like every time, I drag my lazy butt into a comfy chair with a wine of my choice some moron decides his sticky little fingers should stray from his trousers to the trigger of a badly made explosive. This time it's yet another spoilt gulf brat with delusions of entitlement who tried to take a plane load of people to meet his unpleasant maker.
Our Chris puts it all down to religion, his brother puts it down to a lack of parental discipline. Whichever weakness, it causes me grief, personally and professionally.
Planes have an iconic position in our society, a higher body count would be met by hitting a train, a social security or post office, a sporting fixture or rock concert. All these venues have been targeted at times but it's planes that seize our imagination. This latest sad spoilt boy decided that an aluminium tube comprising 200 odd fellow travellers was the ideal venue for his theatre of the absurd and the obscene.
These men who are driven by a combination of stone age texts and post millennium disillusion have won in a sense. Every time grandma loses her knitting needles, airports put an extra $ security fee on your bill and a university cancels it's American conference - we have all lost.
This is why Chris's "War On Terror" is unworkable. The more we fight it, the more we lose our freedoms.
Perhaps the reason that planes are such an attractive target is that they are the clearest symbol of our new freedoms. Freedom to party, freedom to move and ultimately freedom to leave any binding social or religious constraints for a new beginning.
While "religion might poison everything" it's restraint on our freedom of movement that will ultimately minimise our lives.
The second part of Hitchens' recent appearance on BloggingHeads TV, where he has a friendly little chat about religion with Rev. Wright of the Church of Bloviating Heads. The chickens really come home to roost in this second part where Rev. Wright delivers a scathing sermon, at one point screaming at the top of his lungs "GOD DAMN Hitchens!"
I was hoping for an enlightened discussion between two highly esteemed intellectuals here, but unfortunately Wright plays dirty and is mean to Chris, "hurting" his "feelings." In one bizarre sequence, amongst many in this diavlog, Chris breaks down into tears, and nearly picks up his ball and goes home. It's so odd, that a confused Wright, hard to blame him, misunderstands the temper-tantrum as Hitchens being offended because atheist crimes are being pointed out. No, it was because Wright was calling Hitler a secularist, and by implication an atheist, and repeating this old, hackneyed line that Hitler was only being pious and working with the religious and the Catholic Right because of his will to power. We all know that Hitler was very cynical about power--explicitly so in Mein Kampf--and the means to achieve it, so maybe he wasn't actually religious. But alas, Hitch has got nothin', and then breaks into tears, perhaps because even though he hears this line every day, he still doesn't have a good answer for it, as evinced by him being unable to say anything whatsoever that demonstrates that Hitler was actually personally religious. What an embarrassment for Hitchens, the most common and trite religious claims, and he still can't come up with a decisive response to them. No wonder he was so wounded. "No doubt you've got a great response to this" Wright naively assumes. Wrong Wright, there is much to doubt (and really, how hard is it to mention, for instance, that in Hitler's Table Talk, the book that theists use to "prove" that Hitler was an atheist, Hitler's personal religious beliefs, the ones he shares with his inner circle in private, are openly and explicitly theist--Providence has willed Hitler's rise--and, while highly critical of mainstream Christianity, he praises Jesus and is a proponent of a more hardline, anti-Semitic version of Christianism?).
And it's a real disaster for Hitchens throughout the rest of the trip, where he repeatedly flies off the rails into one train wreck after another: Hitchens likes to give blood therefore there's a metaphysical basis for morality in a godless, materialist universe; Dr. Martin Luther King was so not really a Christian (reminiscent of Hitch's other very intellectually-honest argument that Stalin was never an atheist); The Golden Rule? Well... I DON"T WANT TO TREAT MYSELF LIKE WE TREAT CHARLES MANSON!!!11!! LOL (and it's "casuistry" if anyone points out that that's a completely ridiculous strawman, because, though the Golden Rule is flawed, the principle of it is obviously that if Hitchens were to become a serial killer he should be imprisoned as he wants Manson to be right now, not his crude caricature); the crackpot, torture-loving, fascist-sympathizer "Dr." Sam Harris is right that Islamic Radicalism can't have anything at all to do with such minor peccadilloes as imperialism, poverty, oppression, etc.. because there are many victims of these things in the world and they don't all become jihadists (though by this pathetic logic, 9/11-style terrorism can't be caused by Islam because more than 99% of Muslims don't commit terrorist acts); the rise of religion in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has nothing to do with material causes like poverty and oppression (even though in god Is Not Great, Hitchens concedes that the creation of Hezbollah was largely caused by the imperialist US-Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982: "Israeli's irruption into Lebanon of that year also gave an impetus to the birth of Hezbollah"); etc.. etc..
However, we should not be soft on The Creationist Wright. If you think the New Atheists are bad, wait to you get a load of these "New Deists." It's all spelled out in my upcoming article "Why The New Deists Are Right Wing On Foreign Policy," where I outline how New Deists like Wright mostly support Obama's perfidious foreign policy, a warmongering and jingoist one that is to the Right of George Bush in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This on top of them being shrill, angry and having a remarkable lack of respect for the feelings of New Atheists.
It is rather striking that even though Wright is supposedly an atheist, nearly every point and argument he accosts Hitchens with could have been made by the usual religious fundamentalist that Chris debates. Quite revealing. In fact, I have a challenge for our readers. You have to name me an act, or statement made, by Wright in this diavlog that couldn't have been made by a theist.
Hitchens is quite right to describe Wright as "now emerging as the leading liberal apologist for the faith-based." Indeed. And the irony here is that this demonstrates how Wright and Hitchens, far from being diametrical opposites like they think they are, are actually very similar. Hitchens is also an apologist for the faith-based with his support for religious extremists and Christianists like Bush, Palin (when it counted before the crash), Giuliani in the GOP primaries (who is connected to Catholic pedophiles like Monsignor Alan Placa), and now Obama (yes, representing the moderate wing of the Christianists, but whom has continued, and expanded, Bush's religious attacks on the constitution, like the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives), his canoodling with the Dinesh D'Souzas of the world, and his support of polices in the Middle East that have demonstrably empowered the Parties of God, like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So these two are actually quite fundamentally similar. Apologists for religion. Don't forget that.
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A Christmas Carol from the land where the Predators are still droning on
Below is a little piece of holiday uncheer that's currently doing the rounds in cyberspace, and it's oh so very seasonal.
Now that Bushie and Obomba have managed to achieve Hitch's aim of bombing much of Afghanistan out of the Stone Age and into the Tent Age — literally leaving no stone unturned in their house-to-house searches for Bin Laden's beard — and restored national opium production and the resulting income stream to even higher than pre-Taliban levels, the feeders sucking on that particular ample tit have good reason to celebrate.
And as long as NATO remains in place, even with the Talibanis in control of 80% of the country, there'll be no oil or gas pipelines from Central Asia or Iran to China, which seems to be the main strategic aim of the Western presence these days.
Meanwhile, all Christopher wants for Christmas is for "our friends the Indians" to join in the WOT, as if they hadn't suffered more than enough from two centuries of the British Raj to fall for that one. But that's another column.
A Visit from St. Obama By Dave Lindorff (apologies to Clement Clark Moore)
Twas the night before Christmas and all through the land Not a creature was stirring in Afghanistan. The bedrooms were bunkered with piles of hard stones To protect from attacks by the Predator drones. The children were huddled, afraid, in their beds While visions of night raiders danced in their heads.
Mama doffed her hijab and I doffed my hat And we both settled down for a rest and a chat When out in the yard their arose such a clatter, I sprang to the door to see what was the matter. Away to the entrance I ran 'cross the floor, Pulled on the handle and opened the door.
The moon hadn't risen but up in the air A chopper was shining a light. Such a glare! And what to my wondering eyes did appear But a whole gang of men, armed and dressed in black gear. With a tall skinny guy who was wearing a pistol, I knew in a flash: it was General McChrystal.
More rapid than eagles his raiders they rushed And they grabbed me and trussed me and kicked, hit and pushed. "Frisk him! Blindfold him! Remove him! Get going! And tear up his household! See what he's not showing!" They frightened my wife and my kids just for kicks, And slaughtered my goats and a half dozen chicks.
Then away they transported me up in the air To a far-off location and I still know not where. They duct-taped my eyes and my arms and my feet, And left me alone in a room with no heat.
That was a Christmas some four years ago, And I've been in this hellhole so long I don't know What my hometown still looks like. I hear it's all rubble, From air-raids and car bombs and other such trouble.
But yesterday morning I was told by a guard That I'm going home soon and should not take it hard. It was all a mistake, they just had the wrong chap, and Since my name is Achmed, well, "These things can happen." Now I hear that the head of the American nation, Obama, has ordered an Afghan escalation. He's sending another 34,000 men To ramp up the effort to "help us"...again.
In the spirit of the season, he said, by the way, That the first of these new troops will arrive Christmas Day! This Nobel Peace Prize winner thinks it's just great To unleash these new killers on that special date.
He and McChrystal both claim this invasion Is to make us all safer and to build us a nation. But how can that be when they're raiding our houses, and bombing our weddings and scaring our spouses?
You attack us with drones that kill innocents daily Send out death squads to hunt us, and lock us to jail Leaving families to worry if we're even living, While you torture us, starve us and then want forgiving
When it turns out, as with me, you got the wrong guy. And meanwhile our families were left there to die Because no one's around to earn money for bread. And you wonder why people want Talibs instead?
You say you have brought us democracy? Right! If a corrupt drug cartel counts, then maybe you might Have a point. But I think that Karzai and his kin Are much closer to gangsters than they are to Abe Lincoln.
Merry Christmas America! Happy New Year! Enjoy your days off. We're in hell over here. But I think you will find, as this old year is ending, That your President's "good" war is only beginning.
And now, because it's Christmas, a lovely Xmas 'carol' that even Hitchens might like. Sing along with all your friends, and have a good one. See you on the aptly named Boxing Day for more spite and bile but for now it's all mulled wine and good cheer....enjoy it while it lasts......
I saw this seasonal offering over at NaturalNews.com, abode of the Health Ranger, Mike Adams, who never met a fruit, nut or raw vegetable that didn't agree with him.
On the subject of "Merry Christmas", Mike is very much a traditionalist, as his latest anti-PC rant reveals:
Here's a Merry Christmas to all the NaturalNews readers from the Health Ranger. And yes, I do specifically mean Merry Christmas. I don't mean just "Happy Holidays" or "happy winter break" or even "happy end-of-year time off." What I mean is Merry Christmas. That's the holiday name I grew up with and I'm sticking to it. :-)
On this merry Christmas, I feel compelled to comment about the ongoing effort to sterilize the English language by removing any words that might dare to impart meaning. I've read reports that certain people feel "offended" by the term Christmas, and I've watched as public schools have morphed their own descriptions of the Christmas break, removing the word "Christmas" and replacing it with "Holiday" as in "Holiday break" or "winter break."
The politically-correct language police have, once again, gone too far. This effort to sterilize the language of Christmas only serves to dumb down the children and remove any real meaning from words so that nobody might choose to feel offended by them. Words that say nothing, it seems, are more acceptable in our modern world where political correctness trumps authentic communication.
The problem with this approach is that when you sterilize the language, you also remove most of the meaning from the words, leaving an empty shell of strung-together syllables that are designed to say absolutely nothing....
This sort of rant makes such a refreshing contrast to Christopher's spoilsport take on "Merry Christmas", although as some of you may recall, the old boy has finally come around to mouthing, tongue in cheek, the offending greeting. I've linked to the holier-than-thou RDSTC (Richad Dawkins Supreme Truth Cult) site — "A CLEAR-THINKING OASIS" — because its always a lot of fun to read the swoons of the loons, the slights of the brights and the fantasies of the fanboy followers who fill the pews of their Church of Sanitology.
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Wishing a safe and secure Christmas to all our readers
Not that wishes, let alone Christmas, count for much in the Hitchiverse, where all such "magical" thinking is strictly forbidden and perpetual bile for perpetual hate figures is the force that gives life meaning. There'll be no turkey, no pudding, no tree, no Bing Crosby, and no crackers at the Hitchens residence again this 25th of December. Like the White Witch of Narnia, he'll continue to hold his kingdom under a spell that ensures it's always winter but never Christmas.
In conformance with UK Home Office guidance, we're posting this Christmas greeting a little early in order to warn you all Decent law-abiding citizens that if you spot a bearded-man in a red and white coat riding an animal-propelled delivery vehicle, handing out presents to strangers, patting other people's children on the head, or attempting to squeeze down a chimney, take no chances — it could be an Islamofascist terrorist in drag!! These people hate our freedoms, our religion (or lack of it) and our taste in clothes, food, jewelry, music. you name it! And they also despise Christmas almost as much as the Hitch does. So be safe and secure by keeping an eye out this Christmas!
The Big Bad Hitch on MSNBC. And when Hitchens is on Scarborough's show, we all know that makes that day's cup of Morning Joe Irish:
Like a good little Neocon, Hitchens takes exception with Obama's so-called withdrawal date, calling it "ridiculous" and a "psychological weapon" that the Taliban can use to intimidate Afghans by telling them that the Americans aren't going "to be there" for the long haul. But this, of course, is poppycock, and hypocritical poppycock at that. I don't recall Republicans and hard-Right reactionaries going ape in 2008 when the Bush Administration agreed, nominally at least, to a complete withdrawal of all US military troops in Iraq by the hard deadline of December 31st, 2011. Hitchens and asses of his ilk didn't bray over the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement for some strange reason. And Obama is not leaving Afghanistan, quite the opposite, he's rapidly escalating the war and maintaining a permanent military and political occupation of the country, while cleverly framing it in the rubric of a "withdrawal" that creates political space for the occupation to continue with the consent, or at least acquiescence, of the US population, the critical factor, as the US is militarily indefatigable, but politically vulnerable at home. Now all the Obama Administration needs to do is remove a brigade or two by 2012 and he can drag this redeployment out for years, as long as is necessary for either the insurgency to cool down or for the Afghan forces to "stand up." Removing a few brigades would still leave Obama with more than double or triple the 20-30000 troops that Bush had in Afghanistan for most of his Presidency. This on top of Obama's massive increase of private military contractors (that are not included in the "withdrawal"), the expansion of the Bagram Air Base, the construction throughout the country of seemingly permanent Forward Operating Bases, and the gigantic fortress in Kabul disguised as an "embassy" being erected (modeled on America's Tower Of Babel in Baghdad that is approximately the same size as Vatican City). Contra to Mr. Hitchens, the US is likely going to "be there" for quite some time.
Hitchens has also been demanding for Washington to move even closer to New Delhi of late, which he does again here on MSNBC. Admittedly this does make sense from the vantage point of playing armchair imperialist, as India might prove to be the United States' most important ally in the 21st century, but for the rest of us, what Hitchens is calling for here is insane. If there is going to be a devastating nuclear war somewhere in the world, the most likely scenario is between India and Pakistan, and the US, already having played an indispensable role in arming Pakistan, is now supporting India's brazen and ominous development of thermonuclear weapons. And Hitchens wants to increase tensions between these two countries even further by turning on Islamabad, and encouraging India to intervene on Pakistan's borders? A very dangerous and foolish prescription.
The Popinjay then ends by squawking and getting his feathers in a ruffle over one Ms. Sarah Louise Palin. And it's out of fashion and trite. Hysterical hatred of Sarah Palin is so 2008. All the cool kids now know that the hip thing to do this season is to defend Sarah from all the women-hating, sexist pigs out there, like Chris Hitchens. We should all be cheering for Sarah, as she would simply be a fabulous Presidential Candidate for the Republicans in 2012. Let's face it: she's probably more qualified and capable to be President than that vacuous automaton Ronald Reagan was, and she's about as qualified as Hillary Clinton to hold that most revered office, plus undoubtedly more worthy of being a feminist icon than her. Unlike the nepotistic Clinton, Palin's political rise wasn't due to her being married to the most powerful man in the world, she had to win on her own merits, with none of the advantages Hillary enjoyed, on top of having a very modest, small-town upbringing and background. Just compare the two of them as politicians when they both came to the national stage, Palin fares pretty well. Sure, Sarah never went to Yale Law School like Hillary, but that's more of reflection of privilege than anything else. Dubya of course famously went to Yale as well, proving nothing whatsoever.
So our Hitchens for some queer reason is aghast and outraged that Sarah has flip-flopped on a few things for political reasons. A politician being cynical? Impossible! But he does raise a good point, namely that Sarah shouldn't be blamed for the misstatements and untruths that she has uttered on occasion as she's only reading the lines written for her in the teleprompter. Indeed, her most scandalous comments during the 2008 campaign, the ones she was beat up for (i.e. "palling around with terrorists," Russia being next to Alaska counting as foreign policy experience, etc.. etc..), were obviously not written by her, but by the hacks in the McCain campaign like Steve Schmidt who completely bungled and mismanaged the campaign, simultaneously both under-preparing and over-preparing Palin for the national spotlight, destroying the credibility of the GOP ticket.
But Palin proves to be smarter than Hitchens here, as she lures him right into her trap, to be shot like so many wild beasts she has hunted from helicopters. Sarah's only chance to win the Republican nomination is to ride a wave of Tea Partiers, Birthers, and the alienated conservative base of the GOP to the convention, and by saying statements that in themselves are almost innocuous, i.e. that the Birthers do have a right to be lunatics, she reaches out to these groups. Even though she obviously doesn't believe Obama is Kenyan, the media, and pundits like Hitchens, go berserk and make a huge deal out of it, exactly what her handlers want, as this publicizes this orchestration and delivers the Birthers right into Mother Palin's loving arms, without her actually having done anything for them at all, while feeding her most shrill critics and stirring up even more hysterical, and often misogynist, paroxysms, that win her the sympathy of countless women disgusted by the rank sexism and personal attacks against the victimized Sarah, mother of 4, er 5, children.
If Sarah actually wants to win the nomination, what other choice does she have here but to do these kinds of things? Though if she was really serious about winning, she would come out against the bank bailout, mostly on how it was done, that would outflank Huckabee's economic populist message that is resonating with many Republicans, and undercut other contenders like Romney who were for the TARP. It would help her with moderates and even some liberals.
But undoubtedly, there's no better gift that Chris could have given Sarah this Christmas season than for a sneering, elitist immigrant like himself to go out on national television and deliver a mean-spirited harangue against her, in part for her table manners of all bloody things.
Our Hitch's whiskey-tasting buddy Tony Blair is now widely viewed as prosecutable as a war criminal, and not just on the loony fringe. Britain's fomer Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald has said that both Blair and Bush engaged in "an alarming subterfuge" to drag their nations into war, and even more shockingly he wrote of the former PM's behavior as "sychophancy towards power". Meanwhile, mainstream proper journalist Neil Clark is at it in the The First Post, writing that "the war crime case against Tony Blair now rock-solid" and that "A trial would be warmly welcomed by millions – so what happens next?".
Here's a sampling from his piece.
Tony Blair's extraordinary admission on Sunday to the BBC's Fern Britton - that he would have gone to war to topple Saddam Hussein regardless of the issue of Iraq's alleged WMDs - is sure to give fresh impetus to moves to prosecute our former prime minister for war crimes.
The case against Blair, strong enough before this latest comment, now appears rock solid. Going to war to change another country's regime is prohibited by international law, while the Nuremburg judgment of 1946 laid down that "to initiate a war of aggression", as Blair and Bush clearly did against Iraq, "is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole".
Blair's admission, that he "would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam]" regardless of the WMD issue, is also an acknowledgement that he lied to the House of Commons on February 25, 2003, when he told MPs: "I detest his [Saddam's] regime. But even now he [Saddam] can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully. I do not want war... But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam's active co-operation."
The view that Blair is a war criminal is now mainstream: when comedian Sandi Toksvig, host of Radio Four's News Quiz, called him one on air, the BBC, according to the Mail on Sunday, did not receive a single complaint.
But while it is easy to label Blair a war criminal, what are the chances of him actually standing trial - and how could it be achieved? Various initiatives have already been launched.
What's even more fun for us Indecents is that Neil's opinion has attracted negative attention in the comments section from one Oliver Kamm, which is pretty gross, as there can be few hot-blooded erect males — journalists or otherwise — who would appreciate Ollie coming down on their column.
Writes Ollie: Where do you start? 1. There is no such place as "Nuremburg". 2. Dr David Halpin is a 9/11 "Truth" campaigner. 3. Neil Clark's attitude to war crimes is distinctly flexible. In 2004 he was retailing the bogus claims of the Bosnian Serb government on Srebrenica, denying the documented figure of 8,000 victims of that genocidal massacre.
Quips back Neil McGowan: It ill behoves monolingual warmongers like Oliver Kamm to make a one-letter typo the basis for the refutation of the case for a war-crimes trial of Tinpot Tony, their gutless neocon hero. Kamm's reputation lies in ribbons - no surprise that he's been dropped as an author by even the Beaconsfield Bugle.
Nice to see that Decency and Indecency are alive and well and still kicking in Blighty.
If I was claiming to be a morally upright homo sapien, let alone a humanist, a deomcrat or an upholder of justice, but had sipped montepulciano with Mussolini, port with Pol Pot or schnapps with Stalin, wouldn't you call me on it? Of course you would. So by the same token, there's all the reason in the world to call Christopher on his dreadful choice of drinking buddy.
As a short note, the irredemably nasty Oral Roberts has finally met his maker at age 91.
A particularly greedy version of Evanglicus Telivisionious, he once claimed God would call him home if he didn't get $8million US out of the suckers watching him.
His decent started in the 80's even with the spawn of his loins claiming " that he had seen his father raise a child from the dead. That year, the Bloom County comic strip recast its character Bill the Cat as a satirized televangelist, "Fundamentally Oral Bill". In 1987 Time stated that he was "re-emphasizing faith healing and [is] reaching for his old-time constituency."However, his income continued to decrease (from $88 million in 1980 to $55 million in 1986, according to the Tulsa Tribune) and his largely vacant City of Faith Medical Center continued to lose money.
For all that I love a classy con man, this B*stard failed to entice and didn't even have the Tammy Faye Baker makeup to add to his image.
As you sit around your festive feasts raise a glass and hope this leach is truly burning in his imaginary hell.
Vanity Fair shows our Chris back in a somewhat muted but far more respectable raging form. Instead of wilted fights with D'Souza, Chris is taking on the corrupted military that previously have done no wrong. Where are we at? The well known conflation of religion and war.
As many sources including Mother Jones, the New Humanist and Ed Brayton have made a point of highlighting, the US army is riddled with proselytizing dingbats of the worst evangelical style. In Iraq they gave out Christian coins, in Afghanistan it's more bloody bibles.
As the New Humanist said a year ago "If you heard it said that America’s military was being taken over by agents of apocalyptic Christianity, you might think it the fiction of some leftwing alarmist. But what if it came from a man who said, “I never thought, coming from a conservative military Republican family filled with [US Air Force] Academy graduates and people that have been in so much combat, that at this point in my life, after being a White House lawyer, a lawyer for a Texas billionaire, a businessman, that I’d suddenly become this political activist”?
These monsters are not afraid to add to the damage American torturers have done; it's all the way with Jeebus and bugger your own beliefs.
Unfortunately some of the main movers of this movement seem quite happy to add abuse of non-believing Americans to their abuse of the constitution.
For once Chris is happy to report that things are not rosy at the front. He describes.. "A screening of Mel Gibson’s incendiary, Jew-baiting homoerotic extravaganza, The Passion of the Christ, had flyers in its favor placed on every seat in the Air Force Academy dining hall. A Pentecostal chaplain warned cadets that they should accept Christ or “burn in hell.” About the latter incident, the air-force investigative panel decided to be lenient, on the perfectly good grounds that such language is “not uncommon” in this denomination. And that, I suspect, is part of the problem to begin with: unexamined extremist Christian conservatism is the cultural norm in many military circles. One Lutheran chaplain at the academy, Captain Melinda Morton, resigned from the service after being transferred for protesting that the evangelical pressure was “systematic.” And, despite the tolerance for Pentecostal hellfire rants, by no means all forms of expression could be indulged; a nonbelieving cadet was forbidden to organize a club for “freethinkers.”
Unfortunately I cant agree with Christopher's happy conclusion about the role of the military.
"Throughout modern American history, the armed forces have been a great engine for assimilation and integration. Segregation of blacks was abolished in the services long before it was done away with in the wider society. Hispanic soldiers who are not yet full citizens have won many awards for bravery in the field. Women—not always approved of by religious fanatics—have risen to occupy serious command posts at all levels. (Discrimination against homosexuals, another religion-based prejudice, remains official, but that is a political decision, not a military one, and even the British services now recruit gay men and women, so change is probably not far off.)"
This is not the experience of many in the military, the military has always been about conformity first and for that reason (among many) proselytizing is very dangerous but even an atheist legion is not an army of light.
Merry Christmas. Now, about that public display ...
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, Washington Post December 11, 2009
A reported scheme for a "nonreligious" celebration of Christmas in the Obama White House was over before it began, long before it could become part of that old seasonal favorite, "the war on Christmas." I never believed the original reports anyway: The president has no need to incite those who already think that he is a closet Communist or stealth Muslim. But that doesn't mean that there is nothing to argue about. The White House is, as some recent interlopers have again proved, public property. And its East Room is one of the parts of it that are not reserved for the First Family's private life. So the constitutional question -- should taxpayer-funded space be used for the affirmation of any faith? -- is as real there, if not indeed more so, as it is anywhere else.
I know the fans are screaming "We want Hitch!" But when we give him to you you just shrug your shoulders and say "boring! Boring!" So let's look at something a bit more edifying instead.
Remarkably in these enlightened times, Prof. Sallie Baliunas of of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is considered by some to be a bit of a witch. In fact, she has been persecuted by the self-appointed witchfinder Michael "Piltdown" Mann and his fellow AGW troglodytes for having the audacity to question the credibility of his famous "hockey stick" graph and for finding "strong evidence" that the Medieval Warm Period really was... well... warm. Apparently, the hockey stick catastrophists' most damning piece of evidence against Sally's credibility was that she was been funded by oil money, although more oil money goes on scientists attempting to prove AGW than to disprove it. And over the past 20 years governments have spent up to 80 billion greenbacks on settling the science. Anyway, Sallie was treated visciously by Mann — It was mean! It was mean! — and his goon squad, but although her methodology may have been a bit iffy, now her reputation has been at least partially restored by the exposure of some of her tormentors as far, far dodgier scientists than they ever implied she was in the wake of this Chaucerian fraud called Climategate.
But enough about all that. The above video is from an interesting talk Sallie gave about how people were accused, convicted and executed in respect of crimes such as cooking the weather back in the Little Ice Age. And it's well worth listening too not only out of historical curiosity but also because the world may be heading into another Little Ice Age within the next few decades.
By the way, like many other natural open-minded skeptics, I rejected AGW on the day it was proclaimed in an Algorean Chant that the science was settled and no more debate was needed. In science NOTHING is beyond debate — ever.
Our valiant Neocon-errant draws his lance into battle against the perfidious Robert Wright, the renowned Creationist, in this Blogging Heads joust.
These two have been going at it back and forth recently, with Our Hero lashing out at the Creationist Wright in the pages of Slate, berserk with jealously over the New York Times Op-Ed page marrying Wright and not Hitchens, leaving our Chris jilted and bitter. And Wright himself has not minced words with the preening Popinjay. In a diavlog a couple weeks ago, Wright briefly stopped flirting with Mickey Kaus for a moment to slanderously accuse Hitchens' Slate piece of being "pathetic! pathetic!", "nothing but name-calling," and wondered if "that guy does any thinking?"
Young Robert has much to learn about our Hitchens.
Though the Creationist Wright should be commended here for doing an able job confronting the Popinjay, but getting Hitchens to admit something obvious, like Maj. Hassan's postal rampage being related to the Iraq and Afghan wars, is a bit like trying to nail jello to a wall.
The writer, political commentator and author of god is not Great sits down with host Jian Ghomeshi to kick around the idea of adding three new commandments to the ten commandments.
Karl Stig-Erland Larsson, better known as Stieg Larsson, was a Swedish political journalist, crime novelist, Trotskyist, agitator, vocal feminist, graphic designer, science fiction aficionado, chain smoker, coffee addict, lecturer and all-round thorn in the side of Sweden's extreme right. Moreover, since his death at the age of 50 in 2004, he's achieved considerable worldwide fame and literary acclaim as the posthumous author of The Millennium Trilogy, a series of by all accounts unputdownable whodunnits that have also been made into movies. Being a perverse sort of chap myself, I tend to ignore the sort of hype that builds up surrounding posthumous literary careers, but in Larsson's case it has now reached such a crescendo that that he's been hailed by our very own Christopher Hitchens in this month's Vanity Fair following a similar accolade from fellow WOT cheerleader Nick Cohen in the Guardian this past September.
The three novels are The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, which leaves me in a quandary over whether it would have been better to entitle this post as The Swede Who Kicked the Bucket. But the Hitch has beaten me to it by calling his piece The Author Who Played With Fire.
Old Nick's title, Read Stieg Larsson, the bestselling socialist militant, is lame by comparison, and reminds me of one of the main reason I gave up reading the Guardian many years ago — the self-righteous preachiness that pervades its pages, right down to the sports section — but perhaps the fault lies with the paper's editorial staff rather than the journalist.
I enjoyed reading both Hitch's and Nick's takes on Stieg and overall I found Nick's by far the more informative, insightful and entertaining read, although Hitch goes into greater detail about the content of the novels. But more than this I was struck by some similarities in their approach that suggest either that Hitch was using Nick's piece as reference or that both were working from the same set of publishing company talking points. For instance, both give prominence to Larsson's gold-plated credentials as an anti-fascist/anti-Nazi/feminist and both highlight the stories that his life was at risk, he was unable to marry because this would have meant making his address publicly available, and that consequently his partner of decades Eva Gabrielsson was not entitled to inherit his estate as a legal wife would have done under the provisions of Swedish law. Both also drop heavy hints that despite remaining officially neutral, Sweden leaned distinctly towards being pro-Nazi during World War Two. And of course, neither Hitch nor Nick murmur a word about the benefits to Freedom, Democracy, etc., that have accrued from such leanings. For one thing, it gives the Zionists — no strangers to cooperation with the Nazis themselves — a useful stick with which to beat the Swedes anytime one of their leaders or media organs works up the courage to criticize the spilling of Arab blood or the thieving of Arab property that is taking place with depressing frequency in what used to be called the land of Canaan. And then again, whatever happens we'll always have Ingrid.
Where Hitch goes well beyond Nick is in his embrace of conspiracy theory. It's sad to see it break out like an attack of shingles or malaria racking and rattling the body of a respected if slightly crinkly and dessicated public figure or a fungal disease stripping the bark and branches from a similarly great and sombre oak or elm tree.
To be exact, Stieg Larsson died on November 9, 2004, which I can’t help noticing was the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Is it plausible that Sweden’s most public anti-Nazi just chanced to expire from natural causes on such a date? Larsson’s magazine, Expo, which has a fairly clear fictional cousinhood with “Millennium,” was an unceasing annoyance to the extreme right. He himself was the public figure most identified with the unmasking of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations, many of them with a hard-earned reputation for homicidal violence. The Swedes are not the pacific herbivores that many people imagine: in the footnotes to his second novel Larsson reminds us that Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in the street in 1986 and that the foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death (in a Stockholm department store) in 2003. The first crime is still unsolved, and the verdict in the second case has by no means satisfied everybody. A report in the mainstream newspaper Aftonbladet describes the findings of another anti-Nazi researcher, named Bosse Schön, who unraveled a plot to murder Stieg Larsson that included a Swedish SS veteran. Another scheme misfired because on the night in question, 20 years ago, he saw skinheads with bats waiting outside his office and left by the rear exit. Web sites are devoted to further speculation: one blog is preoccupied with the theory that Prime Minister Palme’s uncaught assassin was behind the death of Larsson too. Larsson’s name and other details were found when the Swedish police searched the apartment of a Fascist arrested for a political murder. Larsson’s address, telephone number, and photograph, along with threats to people identified as “enemies of the white race,” were published in a neo-Nazi magazine: the authorities took it seriously enough to prosecute the editor.
Hitch realizes that the probability that Swedish Nazis actually eliminated Stieg is vanishingly small. But that doesn't stop him running with his little ball of carefully selective speculation as far as he can trot.
But Larsson died of an apparent coronary thrombosis, not from any mayhem. So he would have had to be poisoned, say, or somehow medically murdered. Such a hypothesis would point to some involvement "high up," and anyone who has read the novels will know that in Larsson’s world the forces of law and order in Sweden are fetidly complicit with organized crime. So did he wind up, in effect, a character in one of his own tales? The people who might have the most interest in keeping the speculation alive—his publishers and publicists—choose not to believe it. "Sixty cigarettes a day, plus tremendous amounts of junk food and coffee and an enormous workload," said Christopher MacLehose, Larsson's literary discoverer in English and by a nice coincidence a publisher of Flashman, "would be the culprit. I gather he’d even had a warning heart murmur. Still, I have attended demonstrations by these Swedish right-wing thugs, and they are truly frightening. I also know someone with excellent contacts in the Swedish police and security world who assures me that everything described in the 'Millennium' novels actually took place. And, apparently, Larsson planned to write as many as 10 in all. So you can see how people could think that he might not have died but been 'stopped.'"
I would tend to side with the publishers on this one. Larsson's entire lifestyle was, from a medical standpoint, a form of slow suicide. And to the ciggies, the junk food and heavy workload we can add his practice of working well into the small hours and living a sedentary urban existence in Sweden, land of depressingly little sunshine leading — for those who don't make a positive effort to avoid it — to health-threateningly low levels of vitamin D for half the year. The Scandinavian climate is enough to dampen even a soccer hooligan's ardour. And despite what Hitch or Nick may say, you can't produce decent Nazis under such poor growing conditions. But Sweden does have its compensations...
Intriguingly, the far right in Sweden now has far bigger fish to fry than knocking off the odd aging Trot. Just like Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Nick Griffin, Pat Condell, Bill Kristol, the staff of the American Enterprise Institute, Barack Obama, Gordon Brownshirt, Old Uncle Tom Freidman and all, their all-consuming obsession is currently stemming the tide of Islam, as this story relates:
According to Åkesson [Leader of the far right Sweden Democrats], “today’s multicultural Swedish power-elite are totally blind to the dangers of Islam.” He goes on to claim that more than ten Muslim terrorist organizations have established themselves in Sweden, that Sweden has the most rapes in Europe, and that Muslim men are highly overrepresented among the perpetrators. “As a Sweden Democrat, I see this as our greatest external threat since World War II and I promise to use all my power to change the trend during next year's election,” writes Åkesson. Åkesson’s claims prompted academics and legal experts to draw parallels between the Sweden Democrats and the Nazis. “This is the same sort of propaganda as the Nazis' anti-Semitism,” said Jan Hjärpe, an emeritus professor of Islamic Studies at Lund University, to Aftonbladet. “This also has racist undertones, because the rhetoric assumes that religious affiliation determines how a person acts.”
That being the case, surely it's only a matter of time before we see Chirstopher and Nick joining their goosestepping friends at rallies and town hall meetings across Europe to defend the continent's Christian, sorry, Enlightenment values from the evils of the veil, livid volcanoes of rage sporting paintbrush beards, and stunted lives lived without lobsters, champagne or anal sex under a dreary rutualized regime centered on Sharia law and Halal food.
Without necessarily advocating every single sentiment expressed in it, this video — from the Coolies down at Minnesotans for Global Warming — is a good laugh for people whose sense of humor, like that of John Lennon's, extends to appreciating the mocking of organized religion.
On the other hand, in the interest of balance, here's a message from the Warmies, narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, a chap whose carbon footprint is well-worth emulating.
As for Christopher, his views on global warming echo my grandfather's on faith in God. Grandad said that if you find you can no longer believe, just go on living and acting as if you do, and if you find you can no longer pray, just keep saying the words. Mother Teresa would have agreed with that, and so do I. On global warming, Hitch says: "The argument over global warming seems to me not whether there is any warming but whether or not human activity or to what extent human activity is responsible for it. My line on that is that we should act as if it is. For this reason — which I borrowed from Johnathan Schell's book on the nuclear question — "The Fate of the Earth": We don't have another planet on which to run the experiment. We can't find out, but one way. And just as we don't have the right to run an experiment in nuclear exchange on this planet — it doesn't belong to us to that extent — we've no right to run an experiment in warming on it either. So if it turned out to be that there was no serious global warming threat or that it wasn't man made, then what we would have done would be make a mistake in analysis — which we can correct for. But if it turns out that there was and we'd done nothing about it, then it would be too late to do anything."
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Hitch's official position on Global Warming closely parallels the common traditional Catholic theological position on God. If it turns out that old Porkie has made a mistake in his analysis about the chances of hellfire waiting for him on the other side of the grave, it will be too late for him to do anything about it and he'll have to rely on the prayers of Brother Peter, Anthony McCarthy and Dinesh DeSuza and the pleadings of Mother Teresa for salvation — a frightening prospect indeed! Fortunately though, the case for doing anything to avert catastrophic climate change has totally collapsed now that Al Gore stands revealed as a Chaucerian fraud peddling indulgences in the form of carbon credits, the Copenhagen Summit has turned into a Brechtian farce (as even the grandfather of global warming James Hansen claims) complete with free hookers!, and the Climategate scandal has revealed that the data underpinning the IPCC's prophecies of Armageddon are every bit as bogus as Hitch reckons the divine revelations made to the prophets Moses, Mohammad and Joseph Smith were.
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Hitch and others manage to make Sarah Palin seem likable
When Sarah Palin was in danger of being elected Vice President, I immediately disliked her for all the same reasons most of us hated her: because she’s a rightwing moron. And let’s face it - she was an embarrassment as a national candidate. But now that that’s all over with, I've been warming up to the woman. First, she pissed off career hacks like Steve Schmidt by ridiculing him in her book. I’m sure Going Rogue is as Thomas Frank describes: “as literature, it’s trash,” but it was a breath of fresh air just to read about how she dished on some of the shoddy political handlers with whom she had to cope. As a result, many in the GOP establishment were quick to denounce such backstabbing. Preening dipshits like David Brooks and other members of the "high-minded" element of the Republican Party want to kick her out. Suddenly, Sarah became likable.
Hitch has been piling on, of course, shooting fish in a barrel in his latest Slate "effort." Hitch argues that Palin isn't a real populist, as if anyone actually believes she is. Hitch complains that Palin tries to have it both ways (i.e. she ain't a Birther, but she ain't against the right to be a Birther) as if that makes her unique among politicians. Actually, the fact that she's been able to infuriate the professionals and exceed expectations on the book trail, makes her even more likable. The two-party system is already completely corrupt; I can't see how Palin could make it any worse. She certainly makes it more interesting.
Moreover, while interviewing Palin fans who were waiting for her to sign their books, many reporters discovered that the fans didn't know what the hell they were talking about on the issues (big surprise there). But as Glenn Greenwald points out in a recent blog post, as clueless as Sarah Palin and her supporters may be, President Obama’s remaining apologists appear just as clueless on the issues. More precisely: like Palin’s fans, Obama’s fans don’t really care about the issues. They just trust their heroes from the strength of personality. Greenwald:
The similarity between that mentality and the one driving the Obama defenses posted by [Andrew] Sullivan is too self-evident to require any elaboration. Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar in kind to those whose reaction to Obama is dominated by their view of him as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual. These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies. But for those looking for some emotional attachment to a leader, rather than policies they believe are right, personality attachments are far more important. They're also far more potent.
Hitchens Watch's resident art and cultural critic, Stabler, finds some disturbing undertones in Jim Sheridan's latest movie offering.
As Obama escalates the war in Afghanistan, it is evident the real threat to the American Character is not religion (Hitch's only real problem is with Muslims anyway) but a dull, passive nationalism that manifests itself in a in a trite sentimentality over all things military. Compelling anecdotal evidence is abundant in Jim Sheridan's terrible high-profile Hollywood film Brothers.
Brothers is a Cain and Able story rewritten for a dumbed-down New Testament. A good guy soldier (Toby Maguire) leaves his wife (Natalie Portman), his wayward, minor felon brother (Jake Gylienaal), and two oppressively adorable toddler daughters for another tour in Afghanistan. Word comes back that he has been killed. The wife and brother bond, and in a scene almost certainly purified by a cleansing studio rewrite, they kiss in a weak moment but never go to bed.
The brothers' grizzled Vietnam vet father (Sam Shepard) begins to forgive the bad seed. The good brother, however, comes back much the worse for his imprisonment. Although he is troubled to the point of madness by being forced to kill a fellow soldier by his captors; he rails against his wife's imagined infidelities. When She lays it on the line (talk about your problems or lose Natalie Portman) he has a breakthrough, admitting his non-guilt. More tears, but a happy ending.
David Beniff's lousy script pares everything down to primal schmaltz. These characters are far too pure to ever have a fleeting doubt about the motives of those who send them on these hellish missions. They are almost too pure to go to the bathroom. Gyllenhaal is a bad boy without any bad; Maguire (who had a personal macrobiotic chef on the set, just to help him get into the working class motif) is truly terrible. When he waves the gun around and holds it to his head there is no real danger he will hurt himself, just a distant, vain, and fleeting hope he will put an end to this performance. Portman's earnestness seems to be utterly blocking her attempts to become a real actress; which is another way of saying this is the worst possible project for her. It is unintentionally funny when other actors start commenting on how good looking She is. Yeah, we know, it's Natilie Portman.
Sheridan, like many insecure directors, goes back to the well of what has worked before: the cute kids from his nice but overrated In America are redone to the point of shamelessness. So, it's another bad movie; so what?
What's disturbing about Brothers with its demonized Afghans and "no comment" politics is slightly below the surface and is all the more troubling for that. This is a movie made by liberal Hollywood. It was clearly not their intention to write a commercial for Obama's War, yet that is obviously what they've done. In all channels of American Discourse, the warmongers and profiteers are given cover by a mawkish sentimentality over just the sort of families they rip off and destroy, as they fill they're pockets and weaken the Country. How could this be? In a world which takes Hitchens as a truth-telling gadfly, it pretty much just makes sense.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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