Still sticking up for his fellow schoolboy in disgrace, Christopher has fired off yet another letter to the editor attempting to clear the chain-smoking Marty and smear his accuser, the lovely Anna. This affair is rapidly taking on shades of the Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and Ahmed Chalabai imbroglios, in which the Preening Popinjay has proven ever-ready to supply character references, excuses and flak for his confederates. Also, the way he is turning on Anna, using her own reasonableness and willingness to compromise against her, is reminiscent of the tactics of the Mafia-lawyer-cum-extortionist-thugocracy who rule the roost in his adopted hometown of DC, where, to quote Vince Foster's suicide note, "ruining people is considered sport." It just goes to show what an unmagnanimous, petty-minded, vindictive and partisan wee shi-ite our bird can be when his feathers are ruffled.
Ah, so now Anna Ford withdraws most of her charges against Martin Amis (the drop-by on the way to the airport, the smoking) and it all comes back to her (Letters, 25 February): I was the one who (allegedly) had a cigarette and in other ways exhausted and upset my dying friend. Does this not rather defeat the purpose of her original clumsy letter, which was to impugn Martin? Next she'll be forgetting – or re-re-remembering – that I later came back unaccompanied, at Mark's request, and was not cautioned to be anything but myself. Or that I came to the funeral, bringing Martin's express commiserations during his absence in America? When did a widow of such long standing last exploit a poor memory in such an inexpensive way, and still come up beaming complacently? For shame.
Christopher has decided to do for Anna what he did for Mother T, Cindy Sheehan, and Hillary Clinton - attack the individual's reputation through misrepresentation, innuendo and snark, or in the case of the "fat slags" and "the black dyke", by means of a vulgar schoolyard insults. Oh, at the moment it is just at the level of "clumsy" letter writing, "forgetting", "impugning", and "expoit[ing] a poor memory". But it's early days yet. Still, enduring this sort of mud-slinging is a preferable fate to the one he tried to fit up Sydney Blumenthal and Henry Kissinger with.
Hitchens has a mind like a bacon-slicer (to quote Agatha Christie). He can chop the legalistic logic quite as finely as Jamie Oliver can a clove of garlic. But the fact remains that there is absolutely no hard evidence that Martin didn't light up, and Christopher's oh so confident memory is, if anything, more an indication that he is bullshitting than that he actually remembers the trivial details who did and didn't have a Harry Rag 22 years ago. And indeed, his weaselly use of the word "allegedly" in parentheses should be taken as evidence that Hitch does not actually remember whether he himself lit up or not. And if we can't trust him to remember that, how can we possibly trust him to remember whether Marty puffed?
On the other hand, Hitchens does implicitly accept that someone lit up. And if he can't be sure it wasn't him, and nobody has suggested it was the dying Mark Boxer, then it cannot be ruled out that it wasn't Martin Amis.
With ordinary decent God-fearing Christians, you can be reasonably certain they are telling the truth if they swear on their honour, the Bible, or if all else fails, their mother's life. But with Christopher, the only way to check is by a combination of a polygraph test and careful monitoring of the smirk on his face. It isn't that he's an inveterate, incorrigible and congential liar, although for all I know he may well be one, but that is is a consumate one; well-versed in the art and capable of lying both convincingly and without scruple when the occassion arises. And for all we know, his loyalty to Marty may outweigh his loyalty to the truth, even in what seems to outside observers as such a petty matter, while his evident desire to humiliate this woman who has attacked his friend may well have risen to a level that he is happy to lie about her for the sport in it. The problem with Christopher is that you can never put such behaviour beyond the bounds of possibility because he can be a vicious as a rottweiler when it comes to attacking people. In this, he's truly shameless, and that is what's so absolutely shameful.
“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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