Christopher Hitchens has two recent essays that are well worth a read.
In Slate he writes about recently released Nixon tapes featuring Dick and Henry talking about their views of the world. Hitchens describes one of them as:
“… that rare and foul beast, a man whose record shows sympathy for communism and fascism.”
And he has some harsh things to say about Nixon as well. The article details some of the many reasons that Kissinger’s apologists should be filled with great and lasting shame for the evil that they defended for temporary partisan advantage.
The second article in Vanity Fair strikes some of the same notes. This time Hitchens focuses on the madness, paranoia and extreme conspiracy theories that inform, drive and animate the TeaBagger movement. He calls them out, but his real target is the many “reasonable” conservative pundit apologists–like Ross Douthat–who will whitewash anything for temporary partisan advantage.
Hitchens was spot on in the way he named the two main concerns that drive TeaBaggers and the modern so-called conservative movement:
Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. This is by no means purely a “racial” matter. (In my experience, black Americans are quite concerned that “Hispanic” immigration will relegate them, too.) Having an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It’s more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim. The president (why not?—after all, every little bit helps) is the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there’s nothing racial in their attitude …
And as Sullivan reports, Douthat is outrage that Hitch called him out. Of course Kissinger has been outrage about Hitch for years. So now Henry and Ross can chat about mean old Christopher Hitchens and their hurt fee fees the next time they meet.
And we can hope that Christopher Hitchens keeps hurting the feelings of the world’s biggest pricks for as long as he can. Even when I disagree with him he is always a joy to read.
Cheers
arguingwithsignposts
Gads, if two douchebags deserve each other, it’s sully and chunky bobo.
freelancer
And here I thought your post tonight would be reflecting on what the editors of the Esquire wrote about the electorate being treated like children:
handy
Well it takes a douche bag to know, don’it? One that still gives gives pissy drunks the world over a bad name.
Douche bag.
Lev
I don’t know what’s happening. If two years you had told me that now Christopher Hitchens would be turning out insightful and powerful columns about the dark energies behind the Tea Party and Ross Douthat would be writing hackwork about why we should consider repealing the 14th Amendment and why the Teabaggers should totally be taken seriously, I don’t think I would have believed you. It’s not precisely a complete reversal, but it’s amazing that back in 2008 Hitchens’ usual output was crappy articles about why Iraq was right and Bush was right and why women weren’t funny, while Douthat was actually leveling precise critiques of the GOP.
At which point did Hitchens become good again? It seems like he has.
asiangrrlMN
I find Hitchens problematic, but he is spot-on here. I’m glad he’s gotten Douthat all hot and bothered. He’s quite possibly the worst columnist the NYT has hired, and that includes Kristol and Dowd and Friedman.
freelancer
@Lev:
When he leveled his rhetorical sights and took aim at God. And since his cancer, he’s become extremely prolific.
Jewish Steel
Hitchens writes like silk. Polemicizes with Chuck D level authority. The man has skills.
I only pray he lives long enough to take on my asshole neighbor and his perpetual leaf blowing. He won’t know what hit him.
jwb
@Lev: I never liked Douthat, but the NY Times gig destroyed any independent thought he had and turned him into a third-rate hack, who doesn’t even have the amusing virtue of his predecessor of being wrong about everything.
General Stuck
Yep, Hitch is spot on about the ever increasing and irrational fear of lost white control over this country. And the reason I am so pessimistic that this is pretty much beyond sane dialogue and resolution, is because it will occur from a natural process of an evolving democracy. I mean, how do you dialogue this, without including some stipulation that any resolution would have to include changes to one man one vote. It is primal, this fear, and I get the bad feeling a rather large, though minority still part of this country is inconsolable on this question of who runs the American ship of state. I wish I could see a way out of this continuing dilemma, but can’t right now.
jwb
@asiangrrlMN: I don’t know that he’s the worst, but he’s easily the most overmatched.
no_absolutes
Well, he’s right about a lot– but in my experience (from being one) most African Americans are doing absolutely nothing to forestall the ability of Latino/a people to come to or participate in the United States and its institutions, and we’re quite aware that numbers have never been the factor that made the difference: it’s about advantages and disadvantages. It makes me wonder what Hitch thinks black people are worried about: being displaced as the most visibly large minority group? As if, what, racists will no longer notice us? I think white conservatives are much more worried about being outnumbered than anyone else.
freelancer
@General Stuck:
Thank heavens for the argument from personal incredulity fallacy. Just ’cause you (or I FWIW) can’t see the way out doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
I like most of your work, but I have a really hard time taking seriously anyone who calls feelings “fee fees.”
Let’s retire that lameass substitution, okay?
Dennis G.
@Lev:
Hitchens was batshit crazy in his way over the top defense of the Iraq war as he let his long fight for the Kurds cloud his judgement. And yet his writing was always solid even when his arguments were not.
I respect his work and opinions–even when I think he has been full of shit sometimes. When he is on his game, he can be excellent. In these two pieces he was in the zone.
Cheers
Lev
@asiangrrlMN: Douthat took over for Kristol. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s a downgrade, but it ain’t the improvement I thought it would be.
General Stuck
@freelancer:
I never lose hope, so long as we have elections that are fair and free. I mostly think that the American people have gotten fat and lazy, especially intellectually about maintaining their democracy. With increasing pain, so will the curiosity to inform themselves increase. Just hope it’s in time.
Dennis G.
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
Fair point. I will retire that from the bag of tricks.
Cheers
wag
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
ah, does it hurt your fee fees, too?
Lev
@General Stuck: I guess the only cause for optimism is that all those people will be dead in twenty years, and the people replacing them are casually multicultural in a way that previous generations simply aren’t.
salacious crumb
yeah fuck Hitchens. sometimes he blows the liberal dick and sometimes the conservative. He is the male version of MoDo. I still cant forgive him for the role he played in trumping the Iraq war and his lack of apology. He is like Tony Blair. Detest the geriatric selfish masses but at the same blow their dick to prop up the conservative war mongering regimes of the western world
General Stuck
@Lev:
This is a very good point you make
wag
@Dennis G.:
I will retire that from the bag of tricks.
Ija
This is slightly OOT, but in his rousing defense of himself, Ross used this phrase:
So apparently even “reasonable conservatives” use the term Obamacare. How “reasonable” of him. I wonder why Medicare Part D never get tagged as Bushcare.
asiangrrlMN
@jwb: Yes. This is perhaps a better way to state it. I just have a personal antipathy toward the man that cannot be subdued no matter how hard I try.
@Lev: I know. I never thought Douthat would be an upgrade–I just find his pseudo-intellectual pretzel-twisting even more offensive that Kristol’s straight-up dumbshit asshattery.
@Ija: Gaaaaaaaaaah! That epitomizes exactly why I hate Douthat! Obamacare! Gaaaaaaah! Rusty pitchfork for him.
jwb
@freelancer: Hopefully, there are several ways clear. Hopefully, we’ll stumble down one of those pathways. Hopefully, when we stumble down such a pathway, we won’t take a wrong turn because Glenn Beck is rattling gold coins or Sarah Princess just made some absurd tweet. Hopefully, we’re willing to continue down a path even when the going is tough. (Maybe we are even on that path.) There is no reason for nihilism and despair—we are not fated—but like Stuck I am increasingly pessimistic.
Jay
Oh, so NOW Hitch is worried about creeping white racism? Unless and until he apologizes for his Slate op-ed comparing Michelle Obama to Stokely Carmichael (not gonna dignify it with a link, just use Google), he can bite it.
asiangrrlMN
@Jay: Fuck. Forgot about that. Fucker.
WarMunchkin
Why wasn’t Sullivan in the Hack 30? He’s a better candidate, than say, Ingraham.
Lev
@General Stuck: I guess there’s also the point that enthusiasms (like the Tea Party) only last for so long. Over the long run, things tend toward equilibrium. Eventually, people will start a conversation and come to an understanding. Always happens. We just have to ride it out.
freelancer
@Jay:
Jesus. What is with people tonight and their propensity to get hoisted by the “evidence” that leads to the claims they think they want to make?
Here’s the relevant exerpt from the article, which overall, bemoans tardiness with which Obama distanced himself from Jeremiah Wright.
College-Aged Michelle Obama says in her thesis that she’s influenced by Carmichael, and Hitchens describes who Carmichael was for the reader. Not exactly a derogatory comparison. Or even a COMPARISON. It’s not like he pulled the two out of thin air either. Sheesh.
And as for the assertion that the article was a hit job or a smear, it was during the period of the campaign where the nation as a whole didn’t really know Michelle Obama’s background, so stuff that went willfully unreported by national media was one side of the breach, and the crazy conspiracies hatched by wingnuts and PUMAS forged the other side of the gulf. The void inbetween, that which we didn’t know, and have thus become aware of and recognize as fact, was the realm that Hitchens was operating at the time. Wright was a kook, Farrakhan is fringe, Carmichael (partly) influences Michelle intellectually, but she would grow to marry the ultimate example of cool under pressure and sane centrism. So at the time, it was fair to ask where was she on the spectrum? I’m still waiting for the whitey tape.
Calouste
@General Stuck:
__
Delusion is the word you are looking for, not hope. With the current process for the Senate, elections are never fair. And as long as people like Hans von Spakovsky are not behind bars, elections won’t be free.
FlipYrWhig
@Ija:
For that matter, “Obamacare” reduces the deficit, making it the _opposite_ of water over the fiscal falls, if there’s a hydrological term for that.
suzanne
@Ija:
Oh pleez oh pleez oh pleez let “Bushcare” enter the common lexicon. I don’t think I’d ever stop having fun with that.
srv
If we ever wondered what Lincoln’s first term would be like if the South hadn’t seceded, we’re all about to find out.
asiangrrlMN
@freelancer: Thanks for the context. I would quibble with you about Wright being a kook, however.
freelancer
@asiangrrlMN:
I think all preachers are kooks to some extent. The mask came off for a minute. Sorry.
Brachiator
Unfortunately, the next election is much less than twenty years away. And we may see how desperate the worst of the people Hitch writes about are by what comes out of the new Congress, and perhaps by what cases are brought to the courts.
And the General has a point here. Much depends on whether people want to be passive and lazy, or whether they are willing to fight. You cannot sit back and wait for your opponents to die off if they are doing everything they can to make sure that either they get what they think is theirs or insure that the nation becomes an ungovernable, angry ruin.
burnspbesq
@freelancer:
Going after someone for what’s in their senior thesis is, by definition, a cheap shot.
burnspbesq
@Calouste:
Did you vote? If so, given your beliefs, why?
celticdragonchick
@freelancer:
Thanks for providing the context. I have to agree with you on that.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
The enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend.
Fuck Christopher Hitchens, he’s bloody neo-con Trotskyite war monger.
jwb
@Brachiator: I don’t think I know what “fight” means in the context of current politics anymore.
jwb
@Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century): Agreed, but he still writes well.
Calouste
@burnspbesq:
I do vote. In fair and free elections.
Another thing why elections in America aren’t fair and free is the extreme bias towards the two major parties in parts of the electoral system.
And just because American elections aren’t free and fair doesn’t mean your vote is completely worthless North Korea style. It’s just not worth as much as it should be.
Oh, and they’re not my believes. Any system in which the vote of someone can be worth 50 times more than someone else’s vote just depending on where they live is not a fair system.
freelancer
@burnspbesq:
Yeah lets go ahead and have him search for it. He’ll be busy for quite a while, cause it doesn’t exist. Sadly, I’m not a college graduate yet, but it’s okay you didn’t know that because if I was, I’d be sure to include my professional title at the end of my internet handle. Like a boss.
Sincerely,
Bugs “freelancer” Bunny, Esquire
PS: WRT your claim:
What you write in the world is fair fucking game. It is out there, for better or worse. Or do you think Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell should have been able to avoid questions of his puritanical, misogynistic, homophobic thesis for Regent University?
Martin
@General Stuck: Well, the fear over losing that majority position fades as soon as the majority position is lost, and the fear is greatest just before that happens.
Obama really was a large shot across that bow.
15 years ago California was facing the reality of a majority/minority state. Prop 187 was our response. We blasted through that and today there’s virtually no support for legislation of that sort and the state has lurched quite strongly left. So, we’re a bit ahead of where most of the south is – we’ve basically accepted that diversity is going to come, and it turns out it’s okay.
But to folks in the south and states like Arizona, California’s transformation has to be a bit scary. Once that fear fades for most of the population, the GOP looks really unpopular. We’re only a few seats in the legislature away from the GOP having no authority whatsoever in the nation’s largest state.
So, we’ve got to push the nation through, but I suspect we’re making real progress if everyone is so worked up.
celticdragonchick
@burnspbesq:
Uh…since when? I have zero problem going after this asshat for his college writing…
I believe in standing behind what you write in college…good or bad. You are an adult by this point and should be able to let your words speak for themselves. If an apology or explanation is due at some point, then so be it…but don’t pretend it wasn’t something you wrote that reflected your views at the time.
That goes for my side as well as the other.
celticdragonchick
@freelancer:
DougJ is certainly free do a front page on my senior work…but optical mineralogy & igneous and metamorphic petrology are not going to grab the page views, methinks.
Martin
@General Stuck: Yeah, we should take some perverse solace in the fact that most of the teabaggers have a 6% chance of dying in the next 12 months. The 2012 electoral demographics are going to look a fair bit different simply due to the inevitable effect of time on the human body.
Jay
@Freelancer-
Oh, for crissake.
The old drunk wrote a column arguing, without directly saying, that the First Lady kept the Obamas at Trinity because maybe, just maybe, she shared the views of Wright and Carmichael.
If Americans, by and large, didn’t know about the Obamas’ backgrounds, Illinoisians certainly did. The President would not have been elected senator in the first place if he, or even his wife, were the raving black separatist nutcase so many want to see.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
@Dennis G.:
Your check is in the mail!
Danceswithwords
Are we supposed to like Christopher Hitchens now that he has discovered that tea partiers are nuts?
a) I have a really hard time taking his attitude toward Nixon and Kissinger seriously, given his cheerleading for the Iraq war.
b) I have a really hard time taking his attitude toward teabaggers seriously, given his fellating of GWB when he was scared that evil brown men might bomb his plane.
In other words, way to be scared of the very thing you enabled, dude.
freelancer
@Jay:
I didn’t exactly get a charge of glee reading what Hitchens wrote almost 3 years ago. I saw the subtext, his fear of possible radicalism, a COMPARISON to Bill and Hillary Clinton in the early 90s, and mostly, a lot of agnosticism as to whether racial gauntlets should be laid down. Y’now, typical pundit wankery.
But what he didn’t write, by any means, was what you accused him of writing, namely, an apples to apples comparison of Michelle O to Stokely Carmichael. For the record it was neither an apples to orange comparison, nor a comparison in and of itself.
There is a distinction there, a huge one in terms of intellectual honesty. Personally, I acknowledge such a distinction.
Jay
@celticdragonchick: Wanted to throw this into my response to Freelancer, but my editing clock ran out on Balloon Juice. No biggie.
What I was going to say is that the comparison of Michelle Obama’s thesis issue to Bob McDonnell’s is off because she didn’t run for anything. McDonnell did. It’s really that simple.
Jay
@freelancer: “But what he didn’t write, by any means, was what you accused him of writing, namely, an apples to apples comparison of Michelle O to Stokely Carmichael.”
Sorry, not buying. What, he didn’t write that she, like Carmichael, opened for Farrakhan at the Garden? How sweet of Hitch.
He didn’t even try to engage the part of Carmichael’s thinking the First Lady picked up in her thesis, he just jumped from the fact that she wrote a thesis in which Carmichael is mentioned to a description of Carmichael at his very worst. There was no need to do that unless Hitch wanted to do guilt-by-association garbage. He should apologize. He thought she shared all of Carmichael’s views.
Martin
@celticdragonchick: It’d grab more than mine on the Mixmaster universe model, though DougJ would probably dig all the differential geometry. In spite of being the least interesting topic ever, I’m sure a flamewar about ricci curvature or whether a parallelizable manifold exists for S7 or some other shit would break out between me, maclaren, and Wyldpirate.
freelancer
@Jay:
You know what, you’re exactly right. You have me on this point. However, my position remains unchanged. What you write in this world, and submit to an institution for examination and as a record of your scholarship, that shit is forever.
Being a Millennial, I would go so far as to even extend that down to what you write and publish on the web and Facebook, including this place. Burnsy said he’d never subject his thesis to the scrutiny of Krugman and Delong, but the thing is, long before he reaches the kind of profile where what he writes is gonna cross Krugman’s desk, opposition prep people (from whoever’s office) are going to find anything and everything he’s written here at Balloon Juice. What I said was “What you write in the world is fair fucking game” and I stand by it. If you have ambitions for higher office, think twice before you click that ‘Submit’ or ‘Send’ button. (Ask Carl Paladino) Them’s the new rules, and they aren’t going to get any better as time goes on.
Yutsano
@Martin: Yeah. We’d probably have to start a PayPal collection just to get you three a room after all that. I’d demand pics however.
freelancer
@Jay:
He reported that in her college thesis, she admitted to being influenced by Carmichael, insofar as he held an idea or opinion that she also shared. THAT’S as far as Hitchens went in linking Obama and Carmichael, and that is indisputable. What am I missing?
Martin
@freelancer:
Absolutely. Nobody is forcing you to commit your words to permanence, so if you don’t want to be measured by them, don’t write them. Asking people to look the other way, based on whatever rationale you might think should matter, simply isn’t going to fly.
The Republic of Stupidity
@freelancer:
Perhaps knowing exactly how you’re going to die and having a pretty good idea of when tends to clear your head out and straighten up your thinking for you, I reckon…
Anya
@freelancer: That column should not be defended. It was a kitchen sink stuff and Hitchens knew what he was doing. Don’t let the pretty words distract you. He was playing Fox News’ game by linking Farrakhan’s racism to Mrs Obama. He did that deliberately and in a calculating manner.
freelancer
@freelancer:
I also feel the need to add to this that Michelle Obama wasn’t seeking higher office, and hasn’t as of yet, (If she does, lemme know. I’ll go door to door). Still, you don’t graduate Princeton without the slightest modicum of personal ambition. She had to know, or even hope that her thesis would be read again someday, outside the context of academia. That is part of the larger point I intended to make but feel went unwritten.
Jay
@freelancer: alright, alright, let me first cave to a long-ago request from Balloon Juice commenter Corner Stone, and be one poster here to admit that I edited my comment. Crap. Again, I was not trying to mislead. It’s just that I post here fairly infrequently and so often forget etiquette here at La Casa de Tunch. Further, it’s late here and I was writing on the fly.
Finally, belated apologies to Corner Stone, wherever he is, for bashing him when he mentioned the bit about editing.
My point about the Hitch essay stands, though. He used guilt-by-association to say FLOTUS is a Stokely Carmichael clone who kept the family at Trinity when, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out, POTUS was going there BEFORE he was married.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
@Anya: This.
It was pure guilt by association smear, twice removed, shit.
freelancer
@Anya:
Like I said, I found the column to be pundit wankery. I don’t think Hitch was playing “Fox News’ game” by discussing the Obamas and the Farrakhans in the same breath. I think his disgust with religion and its major charlatan purveyors blind him to the truth of things upon first glance. Like a culture shock, he finds his horse in the 2008 horserace linked to something he loathes, and he openly speculates as to how deep it can go. It’s not encouraging, because he ends up following the wingnut line of inquiry to satisfy his own completely different biases, and after the smoke clears, he ends up unequivocally endorsing Obama, in fact unreservedly praising him for his tact, his accomplishments, and his intellectual prowess. This latter part was not hackery, it was sincere admiration, but we all are initially skeptical to information that contradicts our bias, whether it’s Hitch, John Cole, Oprah, or myself.
Brachiator
This is quite humorous. A woman I know, a lawyer who clerked for a New York Supreme Court justice, once bragged that every word in every paper she wrote in college was calculated to get her ahead in the game. College success and eventual career. She had a clear idea of a template, and buzzwords guaranteed to please and to dazzle.
And some of her papers that I read were brilliantly, cynically empty. Anyone who would try to hold her to some standard which suggested that her words were reflective of anything would be wasting their time.
And now that I think about it, a couple of papers that my girlfriend turned in during senior year were not her words at all. They were mine. She was buried under a ton of work, and I had taken the same class the prior term and knew the subject cold.
celticdragonchick
@Jay:
Sarah Palin’s husband didn’t run for anything either, but I am pretty fucking curious about his membership in an Alaskan secessionist group. Aren’t you?
Thems the rules in higher office now, and being a Harvard educated spouse of the President (or a semi thuggish snow mobile racing husband of another candidate) means you will get scrutiny. Whatever you write is fair game, and your prior questionable affiliations are as well.
celticdragonchick
@Brachiator:
That is a fairly flagrant violation of the academic honor code at my school, fwiw. My spouse and I do not do work for each other’s classes even in our home. We take it pretty damned seriously. I know what you are getting at as far as a practical matter for an over worked loved one, but we ry to avoid even the appearance of impropriety in our academic lives.
freelancer
With regard to being blinded by your bias to the point that it affects your better judgement, see this post about Keith Olbermann siding with anti-vaxxers because the reporter debunking them worked for a Rupert Murdoch owned paper.
celticdragonchick
@Jay:
Maybe she had some interesting political ideas along those lines…and maybe not. Radicalism in the African American community is hardly new or rare. I think it more likely that Obama simply was checking off a required field in his resume by finding a church that was palatable (and necessary) for his candidacy in Illinois.
So she may(or may not) have thought Stokley Carmichael was on to something and maybe Pastor Wright gave an occasionaly good sermon. Yawn. Whatever. Even Hitchens seemed to think it was a stretch, and he was pretty much phoning it in since he dismissed any idea that Obama had any radical inclination of any sort. He let his suspicion of all religion get in the way.
The point still stands that whatever you write in college follows you forever…especially senior thesis documents or anything you defend before a board.
Jewish Steel
How about my junior recital? Does that follow me as well? (It’s on cassette tape)
Anne Laurie
@Ija: __
Because putting the words “Bush” and “care” next to each other, even ironically, is an affront against the known laws of the universe.
Yutsano
@Anne Laurie: Plus it just doesn’t have that roll-off-the-tongue feel. I mean let’s face it: the sh sound is a terminating phoneme. Nothing really should come after it. Especially if that nothing is named Jeb.
(edited to prevent hyphen bomb of doom. FYWP.)
Brachiator
The practical, and the affection and concern, were far more important than the honor code. I still feel that way now.
Funny, thinking back on these days (a fancy ass Ivy League school), I remember a kid who was a Classics major, and who deliberately recycled papers he had written in prep school.
I note the importance of honor codes, and have my own line in the sand (e.g., a student I busted for stealing a little known author’s work and passing it off as an original short story of his own), but some “violations” do not strike me as that big a deal in context. Others, where people shamelessly game the system, still piss me off.
By the by, the kid who tried to pass the short story off as his own was not punished. He had connections.
freelancer
@Brachiator:
Goddamn you, Walter Mitty!
Delia
@celticdragonchick:
To me the difference here is between a 21 year old doing a senior thesis for a BA and a 34 year old doing an MA thesis. There’s just an assumption of a whole lot more research, personal analysis and maturity in the latter.
salieri
Funny how Douhat writes
but of course, Medicare Part D created a giant fiscal hole, while ACA is projected to reduced the deficit. What gives, Ross?
bob h
like Ross Douthat—who will whitewash anything for temporary partisan advantage.
who will whitewash anything because they are paid to do so.
Nellcote
@freelancer:
He enabled Juan Williams to go on Fox and call Michelle O. “Stokley Carmichael in a dress”.
honus
@Jay: That, and her thesis isn’t as batshit crazy and outright dumb as McDonnell’s for Pat Robertson’s little un-accredited vanity “university.”
Svensker
@Jay:
And for his war mongering. Not to mention the
piece of shitignorant, lazy book he wrote about religion.Yes, he can turn a phrase. Yes, his coastal elite background inoculates him against Fox/Teabagger stupidities. But the legitimacy he gave to the war and war-mongering lent credence to Fox and the warnuts and until he repents his role in all that (and if he understood religion at all, he’d understand the need for repentance) he’s no better than the folks he’s ridiculing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Delia: The law review article I wrote as a 30 year old law student and the paper I wrote on social mobilization in the context of the Kenyan independence movement as a 20 year old undergrad are two very different things. I stand by what I wrote in the law review article; it was correct and it summed up my thinking on the interdiction at sea of refugees. I could maybe dig up the Mau-Mau paper at my parents’ house; it was 25 years ago and I have no idea whether I would agree with a word in it anymore ( I wrote it in a completely caffeinated 48-hour stretch).
matoko_chan
i finally get Sully…im so ashamed he spoofed me for a while.
he is totally faking it.
sure he hates Palin and DADT and DOMA…but on everything else he makes a headfake towards truth by linking Yglesias or Drum, and then follows through with linkage to Douthat and Manzi and McMeghan.
Sully is still just a conservative shill…he is just cloaking dead white failosophy (Oakeshott, Hume, Burke, Hayek) with a gloss of Doubt…..its all pretend. there is no value that bullshytt– its what led to the econopalypse. it must to realize your dissertation was absolute crap.
he fucking pretends Obama is “conservative”, and pretends the teabaggers are fiscally motivated. bullshytt.
Obama is a pragmatist.
Douthat and McMegan are toxic poseurs….and profoundly intellectually dishonest.
I was done with them at least when they blamed liberals for Dr. Tillers murder. i fucking hate those scumbags.
satby
@freelancer:
The dog whistles.
matoko_chan
Dead white guy failosophy.
Sully cant bear to admit his life work has been utter failsauce.
Chris
You know, it occurs to me that the United States will eventually fall from its status as the world’s preeminent power. Whether it happens in the next decade or in five hundred years, it’s inevitable; no hegemony lasts forever.
What worries me is that Americans are so wedded to their vision of themselves as the exceptional nation, and in the last sixty years, that’s become tied to their status as the world’s most powerful nation. Falling from superpower status doesn’t have to be the end of the world; Britain’s adjusted and it’s doing fine right now. But I’m worried that when America reaches that bridge, it won’t be able to go gracefully or quietly.
jomo
Hitch has been all over the map. From the Nation to the Neocons. And since his cancer he has written some of the most powerful biting stuff I have had the pleasure of reading. Why let personal animus over some of his writings deprive you of it? The guy’s his own man. You should all get over it.
Alex
Matoko, please elaborate on how Hume, Oakeshott, Burke, etc. have failed as philosophers, as that is quite an audacious assertion. Please try to use full sentences, with subjects and predicates, as well as proper syntax (if you are cognitively able to do so). Then please point me to those non-dead, non-white philosophers who, implicitly from your statement, have succeeded where these prior philosophers have failed. If I hear nothing but echoes, I won’t be surprised. There are reasons for that.
Peter A
black Americans are quite concerned that “Hispanic” immigration will relegate them, too.
They aren’t wrong. No group suffers more from illegal immigration than African-Americans.
tomvox1
Let’s see…the answer to the first allusion is Bush…and the Teabaggers would be more than happy to vote for him again (see “deficit!” for them is really code for “black guy in the White House!,” Rossy Boy). Medicare Part D, which banned the government from directly negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on the price of their drugs, with 100% of the program’s astronomical cost added to the deficit–also Bush. And “Obamacare,” which is widely seen as a harbinger of the endtimes by the teabags (and apparently weepin’ Ross, as well), will reduce reduce reduce the deficit in the long term and is no more of an entitlement as currently constructed than health insurance is now.
You just can’t escape the conclusion that the leading conservative thinkers are, in real world terms, dumb as talking birds.
Montysano
Hitchens: “the people who really curl my lip…”
Consider “curl my lip” stolen, Hitch. As noted in the post: I’ve often disagreed with him, but I always read him. He’s just that good.
matoko_chan
@Alex: Burke, Hayek, Hume, Oakeshott, etc., etc., are all first culture intellectuals.
ie antique white guys talking about talking about stuff.
read that link an’ then we can talk, but right now you have neither the substrate or the background to unnerstand what im talking about.
Heres a teaser– Hayek was wrong. The growth of the welfare state doesnt lead to socialism, it leads to secularism.
and no thnx, i dont speak cudlip.
chanese is fine for comboxes.
:)
agrippa
@General Stuck:
neither can I.
I think that it will have to work out as it will over the years.
MBunge
@jomo: And since his cancer he has written some of the most powerful biting stuff I have had the pleasure of reading. Why let personal animus over some of his writings deprive you of it?
Translation – As long as I am entertained, who cares how many Iraqis suffered and died? What are their lives compared to clever snark?
Mike
matoko_chan
ratz, moderation AGAIN.
i keep forgetting the embedded links.
>:(
matoko_chan
sans links.
@Alex: Burke, Hayek, Hume, Oakeshott, etc., etc., are all first culture intellectuals.
ie antique white guys talking about talking about stuff.
read that link an’ then we can talk, but right now you have neither the substrate or the background to unnerstand what im talking about.
Heres a teaser—Hayek was wrong. The growth of the welfare state doesnt lead to socialism, it leads to secularism.
and no thnx, i dont speak cudlip.
chanese is fine for comboxes.
:)
wallah…..i guess it is just me.
eyepaddle
@celticdragonchick:
I used to love to tell people the names of my classes–and Ig met pet never ceased to cause looks of horror in my poli sci friends’ faces !
I was fairly close to pursuing a graduate degree in igneous petrology/volcanology once, I sometimes wonder where I’d be had I done that.
matoko_chan
@Alex:
no thanx, i dont speak cudlip.
chanese is fine for comboxes. high info content, low verbal.
you should learn it.
:)
matoko_chan
@Alex: Hume, Oakeshott, Burke, Hayek are the founders and framers of “conservative” thought.
Just ax Sully.
The Econopalypse that Ate Americas Jobs is the spectacular failure of conservative thought.
Those guys are first culture intellectuals.
ie antique white guys talking about talking about stuff.
read this link an’ then we can talk, but right now you have neither the substrate or the background to unnerstand what im talking about.
Heres a teaser—Hayek was wrong. The growth of the welfare state doesnt lead to socialism, it leads to secularism.
matoko_chan
merde…i dont get the moderation filter atall.
sry Alex u have to wait for the response, it is moderated.
Binzinerator
@Brachiator:
It’s called plagiarism in any context. What you did was ‘shamelessly game the system’.
Every plagiarist and every enabler of a plagiarist I’ve known has an excuse, a story that rationalizes and justifies what they did and makes them in their own mind unlike those other, common cheats and losers who dishonestly pass off others’ work as their own. I see you got your story too.
@celticdragonchick
That’s a flagrant violation of the academic honor code at any school.
Mnemosyne
@freelancer:
Hitchens often suffers from a common problem among immigrant pundits: he thinks he understands the United States and Americans better than he actually does, so it’s not uncommon for him to go down completely the wrong road based on a false premise. This would be one example: his deciding that Stokely Carmichael was somehow evoked as a religious figure by Michelle Obama because he later converted to Islam. It’s about as logical as it would be to decide that she’s a dedicated Communist if she talks about being influenced by Bayard Rustin, but it makes sense to Hitchens because he doesn’t understand what Stokely Carmichael represents in America. (Hint to Hitch: no one thinks of him as a religious figure.) Carmichael was a Scary Black Man Who Wants To Kill Whitey to most Americans, and his later religious beliefs have no bearing on that image. Comparing him to Michelle Obama is bringing out the idea that black people want revenge on white people and has absolutely nothing to do with religion.
This is definitely one area where his hatred of religion sent him down completely the wrong path because, not being an American, he has a very shallow understanding of the place of religion and black churches in African-American culture and civil rights.
Brachiator
@Binzinerator:
Yawn.
I wrote a couple of papers for my college girlfriend. This, for you, is the same level of violation as the student who stole a story from a published author and passed it off as his own. I enabled a plagiarist. Ooooh. A tip of the hat to you, Monsieur Javert.
And now that I think about it, I have at various times decided to shamelessly game the system. I just can’t help myself. As a training and development supervisor, I worked with an older woman who could not pass a company devised job test. She could do the job, but she just kept freezing up on the test. Broke out into a sweat and hives. Ultimately, my manager and I conspired to fudge the results so that this woman could keep her job. Which she continued to do well.
Never lost a minute of sleep rationalizing or justifying.
Mike in NC
@Chris:
Dick Cheney once had some comments about how no other country could ever be allowed to challenge American hegemony, even if it meant going to war with them in their own backyard. He was referring to China and India. What a lunatic.
jomo
@MBunge: John Freaking Cole supported the Iraq War at the outset. My life would be much poorer if I blackballed the guy on that basis.
Jay
@celticdragonchick:
“Sarah Palin’s husband didn’t run for anything either, but I am pretty fucking curious about his membership in an Alaskan secessionist group. Aren’t you?”
Not really. Sarah Palin came by her bigotry (yeah, I used the word) and radicalism on her own. It was her own father who pointed out that she left college in Hawaii because of what she believed was a too-high concentration of Asian students.
I’ll say it again: Hitchens didn’t engage any of the points made in FLOTUS’s thesis, he just assumed the worst. That’s one of the things that makes the column a stinker. I mean, Hitch is supposed to be smart, but mulling over the words of a then-twentysomething black woman is apparently beneath him.
Once more, with feeling: Michelle Obama is not who Christopher Hitchens thought she was. Both Obamas were vetted by the people and press of Illinois in a statewide race, and that race would’ve had a different outcome if the Obamas were who their worst critics thought they were. This ought to settle it. I don’t know what else there is to say.
celticdragonchick
@eyepaddle:
LOL!
I am seriously considering igneous petrology/volcanology at Chapel Hill for spring 2012.
I gave up saying “ig met pet” to anybody outside of geology, but they still glaze over when you say the words completely…
celticdragonchick
@Jay:
We just are not going to agree on this one. Fair enough.
:) I’m not really worried about it.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
Spot on.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Very nicely done. You really hit the nail on the head here.
MBunge
@jomo: John Freaking Cole supported the Iraq War at the outset. My life would be much poorer if I blackballed the guy on that basis.
1. If your life would be “much poorer” if you stopped reading this or any other blog, you are a sad and pathetic human being.
2. Unlike Cole, Hitchens continues to this very day to defend both the invasion of Iraq and his propagandistic support for it. He wears the death and suffering of Iraqis as a badge of what a badass rebel he is.
3. What if Hitchens was an advocate of pedophilia? Would that be enough for you to “blackball” him?
Mike
liberal
And we can hope that Hitchens is wrong, that there really is a Hell, and he burns in it for his support of the invasion of Iraq.
ware
I agree with everything Hitch says (offer good for this article only), but I think the emphasis on white fear is only part of the equation. There are many strains of fear running high, and all of them serve to feed the wingnut paranoia.
DougW
It’s obvious that Doubthat (aka as douchebag) is a member of the KKK.
AnotherBruce
@Martin: Here is the problem I have with this argument, which is repeated quite often. It’s true that older people die off at a higher rate than younger people, but it’s also true that younger people become older. And older people tend to be more conservative. This is how Fox news is making it’s living and with some (political) seasonal variations is increasing it’s viewership.
AnotherBruce
@Chris:
I find it amazing how so many Americans have bought into the Olde England idea of “The White Man’s Burden”. Hence our wars against smaller nations with people who are not like us. It’s crazy how quickly we’ve turned ourselves from a young revolutionary nation to an old reactionary one. But wealth will do that to you.