tom, i was prepared for an anti-hitchens diatribe since i tread lightly. you must be getting soft.
- dave 12-19-2011 6:08 pm

For my anti-Snitchens words I went to Alexander Cockburn, who takes exactly the right tone:

I guess the lowest of a number of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go on, back in the Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away about “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient Punch cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’ books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?
- tom moody 12-19-2011 6:27 pm

i dont think i knew hitchens prior to his monica lewinsky bloviations. for a libertine his whisky soaked rants seemed disingenuous and self-serving. it was impossible to take him seriously.
- dave 12-19-2011 6:37 pm

I used to read him in the Nation in the '80s and early '90s and liked his writing pretty well. He lost me with the Clinton hatred--it just seemed unhinged. It wasn't such a big step to his Iraq war support but that surprised me. How could a professed arch-skeptic not see how flimsy the case was for war?
- tom moody 12-19-2011 7:54 pm

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