In this discussion of Christopher Hitchens on Marc Cooper's blog, I was directed to this execrable column by Hitchens. I've fumed and stewed for a couple of days, but I think that the best response to these baseless comments of his was by Charles Pierce on Eric Alterman's Altercations. As Eric has no permalinks to his post, I'll reprint Pierce's entire comment:
Hey Doc:From the pen of our man Hitch, Tuesday:
"But I also know the difference when I see it, and I have known some of the liberal world quite well and for a long time, and there are quite obviously people close to the leadership of today's Democratic Party who do not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq."
One name, Christopher.
No "Democratic activists." No "prominent foreign-policy Democrats." Nothing you thought you over heard over the clinking of the silverware and the pouring of the sherry. Nothing that "Doctor" Chalabi whispered in your ear. Nothing that depends on a reader's faith in your experience in "the liberal world," because that's starting to sound like the stories told by people who claim to have been abducted by the Little Gray Ones with the big old eyes and the rectal probes. Nothing out of that profitable puppet show that you've made out of your middle years.
One name.
One person close to the leadership of the Democratic party who does not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq.
One person who wants American soldiers to die so that John Kerry can win the election.
(And not, of course, one person who, say, would play hide-and-seek with U.S. Marines in and around Fallujah because a high casualty count might knock down the old numbers in Iowa and Minnesota -- The Marine general already told us who that is.)
I don't give a damn that he's starting to turn into Whitaker Chambers in tweed. I couldn't care less about the fact that Bill Clinton drove him as batty as he ever drove anyone, so much so that he finked on a friend to a special prosecutor steeped in the kind of "monotheistic flotsam" he once jeered at on "Crossfire." (And, by the way, if you spent eight years endorsing the work of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who got conned out of his socks and longjohns by every poolroom liar in Arkansas, you might exercise a little discretion in ridiculing people who believe in "conspiracy theories.") Hell, that's all his business and if he can make a buck at it, well, he's welcome to waltz with his new rightist fan club until the stars dance in their eyes.
But I care about my craft and this is as dishonest a sentence as anyone ever has constructed. It is a reckless, vaporous smear possessed of even less substance than decency. As a friend of mine from Belfast once told a mugger near North Station in Boston:
Sir, where I come from, if you have a gun, you produce it.
One name.
Is that so hard? Joe McCarthy started out with 205 "card-carrying communists in the State Department", then whittled it down to 57 before finally naming four - never mind the fact that he was never able to prove his case against those four. Mr. Hitchens, are you possessed of even less shame than TailGunner Joe?
Nota bene for Glenn Reynolds: When you decide to attack people for schadenfreude real - or in this case probably imagined - perhaps you should reflect on your shameless and unrepentant gloating over the deaths by heat prostration of elderly French citizens and your odious remarks about the terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of Sérgio Vieira de Mello and Arthur Helton, two men whose lives tragically cut short did a world of good in this world. You know the old saying about glass houses and stones, I'm sure.
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