Crooks and Liars provides this video excerpt of Christopher Hitchens on Scarborough Country last night, where Hitch states:
SCARBOROUGH: Mr. Hitchens, is Senator Clinton correct?
HITCHENS: I have no idea. My presumption would be that she’s just fooling with the numbers. But that’s just because I don’t like her and can’t stand the sight of her…
Notwithstanding his subsequent argument about whether or not DHS needs more money, you have to appreciate Hitch’s candor.
gratefulcub
That is why I love Hitch, and that is why I hate Hitch
j
Was he drunk?
Rick
Actually, that’s pretty much the line of many of the Balloonistas here, only substituting GWB for HRC.
So, thanks for your candor. But it gets tiresome by the 572nd iteration, so please come up with some original remarks.
HTH.
Cordially…
Marcus Wellby
The honesty is refreshing. Sometimes it is possible just to dislike someone for a reason thats hard to put your finger on. Its just instinct. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t get pissed off just by the look of someone!
What cracks me up are many hardcore lefties that adored Hitch when he was exposing Kissinger, but suddenly loathe him when he points his rhetorical guns at the icons of the left. He leans to the pompous at times, but is an entertaining read.
On a side note, it boggles my mind that those on the right hate Hillary and those on the left adore her. Her voting record in the senate would make more sense if she was a moderate Republican rather than the “zany lefty” she is cast as in the news-o-tainment shows.
JoshA
Crooks and liars has the video (www.crooksandliars.com). I don’t think he’s drunk, but I’m pretty sure he’s hung over (or he got about 4 hours of sleep in the past week).
Hitchens has always disliked some people too much and liked other people too much. He refuses to see Iraq as anything but a shining success, and urges us to give Holocaust deniers a fair hearing. But Hillary’s awful.
Kimmitt
What people fail to understand is that Hitchens is that guy in school who would say absolutely anything to get noticed. Once you stop looking for consistency — or real thought, for that matter — and just revel in the bile, he’s fun to read. Just don’t expect to learn anything.
Al Maviva
Kimmit, I won’t argue with your point, because, as you nicely noted about Jonah Goldberg above…
But Hitchens’ real sin is that he’s an apostate from the left. The left reserves special venom and vengeance for those who were once true believers, who stray from the party orthodoxy.
Stalin for Trotsky; the Stalinists for Orwell in Spain and later; the mid-century American left for Chambers; the 68’ers for Horowitz and Radosh, Podhoretz and Kristol; and today’s left for Hitchens.
And before your inevitable off-topic comment in response Kimmit, David Corn at the hands of that economics magazine for sociology majors, The Nation.
Y’all may hate my conservative guts – but it’s nothing like the vitriol you reserve for apostates. It’s kind of amusing for me in a way, except for the fact that those who leave the left are usually in the midst of a painful awakening regarding the full and disastrous implications of leftist philosophy, and I tend to feel sorry for the hatred they must perceive, at the very personal level it’s doled out at by ex-friends.
HH
More
Sojourner
Thank you, Al, for the belly laugh you gave me! This is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time. The last few years have demosntrated the full and distrous implications of conservative philosophy, yet you’re still belly aching over the lefties.
Too funny!
Al Maviva
Gee sojourner. Here I was thinking conservatism involved minimal government, avoiding foreign entanglements, and focusing on local communities. Guess I misread Burke, Coleridge, the Southern Agrarians, Kirk, Oakeshott, Chambers, Buckley and Kristol.
And for your part…
Lenin.
Trotsky.
Stalin.
Beria.
Molotov.
Mao.
Ho.
Fidel.
Honnecker.
Pol Pot.
Kim Il Sung.
Keep telling me how leftist philosophy needs just one more chance, and this time, we’ll get it right.
I’m with Orwell on this question. I’m conservative, in that a conservative is against utopianism and favors slow, evolutionary change in society whenever possible. I hate utopianism in all its forms, and especially despise leftist utopianism and its “smelly little orthodoxies.” Conservatism is the art of preserving a tolerable hypocrisy, in preference to utopian social plans – all of which have failed to date. To be conservative is to be aware of history and to believe we live in it and are captive to it. Leftism, on the other hand, is the insistence that we need to try leveling society, and this time, somehow, we’ll avoid the millions of dead bodies. Leftism is the conscious ignorance of history, coupled with an insistence that if history did indeed exist, that we can break from it and remake ourselves any way we wish.
BTW, I do like the leftist response to London. “Pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq, get the Israelis out of Palestine, and we won’t have to worry about Islamacism.” Now that gives me a belly laugh.
Kimmitt
Dude, do you still wear leisure suits or something? Red-baiting has gone so far out of style you can show up to parties and do it to appear hipster.
John Thullen
Al Maviva:
You forgot Wavy Gravy on your list of my formative influences. Just after Beria and a little ahead of Molotov.
Rick
Al,
You really can’t engage folks even more brain-damaged than their sacrificial Terri Schiavo.
To such one-more-time/never-been-fairly-tried true-believers, contemplating and citing the misdeeds and disasters of left wing experiments–which have, to quote one drunk (I guess) here, “demosntrated the full and distrous implications,,,”– is to “red-bait.”
The term itself invites the leisure suit scorn.
Cordially…
metalgrid
Her voting record in the senate would make more sense if she was a moderate Republican rather than the “zany lefty” she is cast as in the news-o-tainment shows.
Posted by Marcus Wellby at July 8, 2005 05:22 PM
It is interesting that you mention this. Hillary somehow gives me flashbacks to Margaret Thatcher in the sense that she comes off as someone who’s driven and is willing to throw anyone under the bus to get what she wants.
About as attractive too, and I have no idea about the ankles.
Sam Hutcheson
Hillary somehow gives me flashbacks to Margaret Thatcher
I’m glad someone else finally said this. I was starting to think it was only me.
Sojourner
Do you find it equally unattractive in men? For example, Karl Rove and Tom Delay?
metalgrid
Do you find it equally unattractive in men? For example, Karl Rove and Tom Delay?
Looking like Thatcher doesn’t make for very attractive men either.
Or did you mean the “driven and is willing to throw anyone under the bus to get what she wants” part? I actually admire that. I’d expect Hillary to be ruthless enough to get better results in a mid-east war than I would expect from Bush, Rove or Delay.
Rick
Too funny–I might be the most Republican guest here, and I must say I have no expectation that Karl Rove has any input in the fight against Caliphatemongers.
It’s you lefties who inflate his powers.
Cordially…