I’m trying to lay off the intra-frontpage posts here, but I feel compelled to jump into the Hitchens versus the teabaggers stuff from Tom’s post.
I just don’t see very much difference between Christopher Hitchens and a teabagger. They want to invade Mexico, he wants to invade Iran. They enjoyed Bush’s 2004 victory because it pissed off liberals, he enjoyed Bush’s 2004 victory because it pissed off liberals. They reject the notion that you should actually count revenue and expenditures, so does he, e.g.
That the costs of putting an end to this nightmare (Iraq) were underestimated by one side in the argument seems to me to be obviously, if trivially, true. (The opposing side has never, to my knowledge, come up with a “costing” for the continued life of the bankrupt Baathist system, and the Bilmes/Stiglitz analysis doesn’t even touch the point.) Does this mean that we can only do one form of accounting? I would argue that this is not necessarily so.
[….]Think how many candy-canes and vacations I could have if it were not for the space program, or the cost of carrier-groups or special forces or — I don’t know — Black Hawk helicopters. (If you think I am being unkind or frivolous, see if you can detect the thread of reasoning that connects Iraq expenditures with the crisis in the mortgage system.) There are days when I think that the money raised by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama might have been better spent on the alleviation of poverty, but I can still tell an apple from an orange and am not hopelessly stuck on the zero-sum fixation.
The total amount Hillary and Obama spent on their campaign was about $1 billion, the Iraq war is estimated to cost around $3 trillion. What Hitchens is saying here is that he doesn’t believe you can actually measure things using money. The teabaggers, for all their supposed love of capitalism are the same way: yes to $4 trillion in tax cuts, no to a few extra tens of billions for unemployment extensions. Tax cuts are good because they are morally right — the rich deserve money — while unemployment benefits are bad because the jobless are moochers and looters who should be punished. Doesn’t matter how much money is involved in either or what effect either might have on the economy. Hitchens doesn’t care how much the Iraq war cost or how many people died in it because it was all a “war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate”.
Once you decide that you’re more interested in pissing off your opponents than in supporting sane leaders, that you care more about the beauty of grand airy schemes than how you’ll pay for any of them (or even carry them out), once you decide that people’s religious beliefs or lack thereof are more important than whether or not their positions are reasonable, you may as well be a teabagger, no matter how much Auden you quote.
Baud
Isn’t the real difference between the two the ability to spell?
Hawes
Funny, I just wrote about the same phenomenon of pissing people off just because, but on the Left, and the difference between Liberals and the Left.
I did that instead of the big stack of work sitting under the dog on the couch next to me because…America, dammit!
Anyway…
http://zombieland-nowbrainfree.blogspot.com/2010/12/left-history-of-last-60-years.html
DougJ
@Hawes:
I like the post but I find it very hard to read with that background.
eemom
teabaggers are stoopid, sheep-like tools of people who fuck them over.
Hitchens is not.
Hitchens is a good writer.
teabaggers are not.
That’s all I got. There may be more.
DougJ
@eemom:
I am sure there is some full-fledged teabagger who can write reasonably well. Is Tom Wolfe a full-fledged teabagger? He seems like he might be.
Amanda in the South Bay
@eemom:
I think to be generous to Hitchens (and to be fair he has had his good moments) he’s an immensely complex individual. I can very much sympathize with, well, changing one’s views on any number of issues, having held stridently held beliefs in the past that a lot of people consider misguided nowadays, etc.
I guess, well, sometimes he’s very much full of shit, other times, on the side of the angels. Sorta a sui generis guy.
Redshift
@DougJ: I’m sure the Sith Lords of the teabaggers like Dick Armey can write reasonably well.
Amanda in the South Bay
@DougJ:
Tom Wolfe is like the Law and Order of writers. His stories are full of cliches ripped from the motherfucking headlines.
DougJ
@Redshift:
People tell me that Pajamas Media Roger Simon’s books are pretty good.
DougJ
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I think he writes pretty well, though. His novels are terrible, I agree, but his best nonfiction stacks up the best of Hitchens’ oeuvre.
John - A Motley Moose
I’ve never understood why some on the left embrace Hitchens. He has no side. He’s an arrogant, belligerent drunk that happens to be a good debater and writer. That’s great when he’s on your side of an issue, not so great when he’s on the other. Which side he attacks seems to depend on where his bleary-eyed, bloodshot gaze falls on that day.
Hawes
@DougJ:
Hmm, F-ing blogger. I need to hire one of my students to redesign the damn thing…
Just Some Fuckhead
The difference between Hitchens and Teabaggers is Hitchens can spell his protest signs correctly.
Redshift
I’ve never thought much of Hitchens, I’m afraid. My direct experience of him is being in the audience for Bill Maher, where he showed up obviously drunk, all his arguments were little more than “I’m right and everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot,” and he flipped off the audience to get them to boo him for show. (The flip-off was held low enough that it seemed pretty clear he was assuming that since it was TV, it would be kept out of frame, but since it was HBO, they just showed it.)
I understand that he has and occasionally still does write brilliantly, even though he’s spent much of his time since I’ve been following politics advocating for things that are abhorrent. He’s a weapon that is useful when it happens to be pointed at the right people, but I’m not convinced that makes it great to have something that dangerous around.
eemom
there’s a difference between being a merely competent writer — and yes, surely the teabaggers have some of those — and being a talented writer. I’m not an expert on Hitchens, but from what I have read, he definitely falls in the latter category.
As for Tom Wolfe, I know almost nothing about his politics but have always enjoyed his novels. They’re not great literature, but they’re entertaining.
Svensker
Fuck Mr. Hitchens, very much. God, that pisses me off.
eemom
The piece Hitchens wrote about his cancer diagnosis was outstanding by any standard.
FlipYrWhig
Don’t underestimate Hitchens’s admiration of George Orwell and his conscious attempt to model himself after his left-critique-of-the-mushy-headed-left positions.
IIRC Hitchens supported the Iraq war because of Saddam’s brutality; Hitchens supported the “war on terror” because he really does think Islam is abhorrent. (He also thinks Christianity is abhorrent.) Hitchens subscribes to, in essence, Enlightenment, and if you don’t support Enlightenment ideas, woe unto you. Moreover, he likes to do the “If you don’t see it my way, it’s because you’re only lying to yourself” kind of cocksure reasoning that gets Greenwald criticized so often in comments here. To me that seems obnoxious… but not very much like any style of argumentation drawn from the Tea Party.
Bill E Pilgrim
@DougJ: I agree. Terrible novelist, truly awful, but he wrote excellent journalism once upon a time, and was actually an innovator. I’d take his journalism writing over Hitchens’ any time. I find Hitchens flowery and old-fashioned often, which oddly seems to impress Americans.
As for content, Hitchens once actually claimed in an article that Novak didn’t out Valerie Wilson because he looked up her name in Who’s Who in America. The fact that he could buy, and then peddle, what has to be one of the most imbecilic right wing talking points ever made me realize just how thick he really was behind all of the fussy writing.
Bill E Pilgrim
@DougJ: I agree. Terrible novelist, truly awful, but he wrote excellent journalism once upon a time, and was actually an innovator. I’d take his journalism writing over Hitchens’ any time. I find Hitchens flowery and old-fashioned often, which oddly seems to impress Americans.
As for content, Hitchens once actually claimed in an article that Novak didn’t out Valerie Wilson because he looked up her name in Who’s Who in America. The fact that he could buy, and then peddle, what has to be one of the most imbecilic right wing talking points ever made me realize just how thick he really was behind all of the fussy writing.
mark
I’ve been very confused to see some of the Hitchens hagiography on this site over the past few days. The man is every bit as morally vacant, and economically illiterate, as the tea baggers against which he so humorously rages. I mean he’s basically functioned as a remora on the conservative movement since 9/11 and it’s only now that he realizes they’re religious nutjobs?
He just sounds intelligent because he speaks with an Oxbridge accent and Americans are genetically programmed to treat anyone with such an accent as their cultural better. His prominence as a “man of letters” says far more about the deep dysfunction and intellectual bankruptcy of the English and American establishments than it does anything else.
Redshift
@eemom:
Good point. I doubt there’s anyone amongst the teabaggers or the hacks who stir them up and aim them who would be considered a talented writer.
Culture of Truth
you may as well be a teabagger, no matter how much Auden you quote.
Oooh. But did you know he’s got one of those impressive smart movie accents?
DougJ
@FlipYrWhig:
He claims to embrace the Enlightenment but his arguments are always based entirely on emotional appeals (which he does well), never on reason or empiricism. He’s an atheist teabagger. And not the only one, by the way.
DougJ
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Hitchens once actually claimed in an article that Novak didn’t out Valerie Wilson because he looked up her name in Who’s Who in America.
Thanks for reminding me of that! If that isn’t exactly the kind of thing Sharron Angle would say too, I don’t know what it is.
eemom
the other point in the plus column I have for Hitchens is his critique of Mother Theresa. Like most people I always bought mindlessly into the “saint” folklore before I read that……but goddamn if he didn’t lay out a quite compelling case against her.
So, yes, he’s an equal opportunity religion-as-instrument-of-evil hater. That should be factored in to his views on Iran, imo.
JGabriel
@DougJ:
No teabagger writes reasonably, Doug. No teabagger is reasonable. Reason is the teabagger’s bete noire.
.
agrippa
Hitchens is all over the map. Sometimes, he makes sense. Sometimes, he writes like he is off his rocker.
He acts like he is the prisoner of his passions.
Redshift
@DougJ:
Angle would say she heard it somewhere, and when pressed, would say it was someone on the Internet. That’s what makes Hitch an intellectual, I guess.
cleek
depends on the subject. Hitchens on religion is pretty awesome (if you’re an atheist). Hitchens on US politics, i could do without.
he’s not the only person with whom i agree on some things but not others.
people are not points on a Correctness Line.
Hunter Gathers
The main thing that binds the Teabaggers and Hitchens isn’t ideology, or even ‘what ever pisses off the other side.’
They are assholes. Plain and simple. Every asshole I know is a Teabagger. And every Teabagger is an asshole. Hitchens has always been an asshole. A well educated, literate asshole. He’s always right, never wrong. Call him out on the shit he is wrong about, and you get a 57 page screed which can be boiled down to a Sadly No! shorter which reads : ‘Fuck you, you commie! ‘Cause I said so.’ Which is pretty much what every Teabagger wants to scream whenever you call them out on their bull shit, only they want to say ‘Fuck you, you nigger loving commie butt-fucking jew. Catch AIDS and die.’
The only difference between Hitchens and your garden variety Teabagger is the color of the skin of the people that they hate. Teabaggers want every black person in the country lynched on the National Mall. Hitchens wants every Muslim in the world to burned to a crisp with Napalm.
Mark S.
Test
The Republic of Stupidity
I am astonished at how many times I’ve heard that – ‘Because it pisses off a lib’rul – as a reason and a justification for some move or choice or position on the right…
Simply astonished…
Really?
‘Because it pisses off a lib’rul…’?
That’s it?
Is the entire right side of the equation basically an enormous collection of younger, and dumber, little brothers, and sisters, who’ve been nursing a grudge for DECADES, and now that they’re too big to silence w/ a noogie or a wedgie, are going to act out endlessly, no matter what the downside?
Bill E Pilgrim
@DougJ:
There were several satirical responses to this particular talking point, which was astonishingly widespread despite the utter and obvious imbecility of the claim. One of my favorites was Tom Tomorrow who had a right wing character saying “Novak just said “Wilson’s Wife”! That could mean anybody!”
I also liked this post in response to the same claims, which I remembered ever since and rather surprisingly I actually just found.
Jane2
Hitchens has arguments and complete sentences and can spell. Teabaggers rant and have slogans and often can’t spell. Hitchens is an independent thinker, whether or not you agree with his thoughts. Teabaggers are the product of cynical manipulation.
Do you have to agree with what people write to consider them worthy? That’s pretty facile.
DougJ
@cleek:
I don’t think teabaggers are all wrong about everything all the time, either. I think that their approach to arguing and reaching conclusions is very similar to Hitchens’.
eemom
@cleek:
yes, there is that.
eemom
@DougJ:
Part of the confusion here is who you mean by “teabaggers” — the leaders or the followers.
FlipYrWhig
@Hunter Gathers: Why would Hitchens be dismissing someone by calling him a “commie,” though?
IMHO Hitchens is to “reason” as Greenwald is to “civil liberties”: if you don’t consistently uphold it, you’re on the shit list. Saddam Hussein is a thug, so the US should take him out with military force to reduce human suffering; you shouldn’t do it the loopy crusading Bush way, but you should still do it. “Islamofascism,” to Hitchens, is a real thing; if you can be read as defending it, you’re a patsy, and he’ll scourge you. On the Iraq war, I think his view has been, radical Islam is a horrible thing, Saddam Hussein is a brutal tyrant, and a strong country has to act against both of those.
[Like a lot of the Iraq war boosters, of course, what he really supports is “Hitchens’s War” (the same was true of Ken Pollack). But Hitchens’s War isn’t gonna happen; you’ll only get “Bush’s War” and “Obama’s War.” That’s a blind spot.]
He’s also rather creepy on gender issues. And he’s _extremely_ defensive and argumentative.
I think his shtick is basically to wrap himself in the mantle of the True Left, universalist, justice-seeking, rational, and manly, and disparage both the right _and_ what he thinks is the cultural-relativist left, including feminists and isolationists. It’s an odd constellation of views, but I don’t think it’s very similar to teabaggery at all.
JGabriel
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Yes.
SA2SQ.
.
Mark S.
Shit, I think I’ve read all of Wolfe’s fiction novels. Bonfire and A Man in Full are pretty good, but my god Charlotte Summers was utter dogshit.
As for Hitch, I honestly am past caring about anything he has to say. I’m not trying to flip, but whatever merits he once possessed have been completely overweighed by his sanctimonious warmongering.
JGabriel
DougJ:
Where is DougJ and what have you done with him?
.
DougJ
@JGabriel:
There must be something I agree with them about, right? Maybe our shared dislike of so-called moderate Republicans.
DougJ
@eemom:
I mean the leaders who believe some of it, so not the Koch brother, but Sarah Palin and the like.
JohnR
@Hunter Gathers:
I’m inclined to agree with that. Assholes can be entertaining, even enlightening, but in the end, they’re simply assholes. Screw them all.
One thing that annoys the crap out of me (speaking of assholes) is this habit many of us have, of justifying things or people we think are ‘more worthy’, while giving the back of our hand to the same damned thing (or person) who is ‘less worthy’. You can define ‘worthy’ in all sorts of ways – by wealth, facility with arguments, extra-ordinary polysyllabilizationability, good looks, right sort of religion, etc., etc., but why not cut to the core and call an asshole an asshole and be done with it? One is pretty much like another when you come right down to it.
Hob
@mark:
Confused, or maybe reading a different site. A few people said he had a few good qualities, or used to. That’s not what hagiography means.
Svensker
@cleek:
Well, yuh, but he’s bumfuck ignorant on religion. So what he has to say on the topic is primarily informed by his emotional response to religion, and is, as a result (unless you’re Hitchens), very uninteresting.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Jane2: Well no, but worthy of what exactly?
I think Hitchens writes very differently from how Tea Baggers do when writing their signs, yes.
I don’t find his thinking very interesting, though, nor his writing anything unusual. In fact I find that his writing reeks of the 19th century in a way that often annoys the hell out of me.
I think that’s one of the reasons that I find the silly sniping at people like Matt Taibbi here so ridiculous. I often get the feeling that people writing “he just writes fuck a lot” and similar “critiques” really want to hear the little filigrees and curlicues like “it has come to my attention” and all the other antique mannerisms that Hitchens swaddles his writing in before they’ll take anyone seriously.
Anyone who doubts the pure writing skill and talent of Taibbi should check out his takedowns of Tom Friedman, another journalist often praised for his “excellent writing”, which is like The Keystone Kops being praised for gracefulness and excellent police work.
Back to Hitchens, I’d summarize it this way: Yes perhaps he’s not as utterly clueless and illiterate as your average tea bagger — but often I think that he might as well be.
Bella Q
Hitchens is a sanctimonious prick, but he’s terribly intelligent (however misguided and irrational at times), educated and quite a talented writer. And a speaker who can organize coherent thoughts, extemporaneously, even when such thoughts are abhorrent – as his can be. Those things should distinguish him from the teabagggers.
Janet Strange
@Hawes: I agree with DougJ. Really enjoyed the post. I’m a life long liberal and I can’t change, even though I tried to be Left in my youth. I just couldn’t do it.
Total redesign isn’t really necessary, imo. a) I find it hard to read white letters on a dark background. b) The aqua is a horrible color. It just is. and c) Aqua and red clash to the point of making my eyes vibrate. So just change the text to black, the text background to something light and neutral. You can keep the red highlights if you really want to as long as the aqua is gone.
Svensker
@Bella Q:
.
That makes him more interesting and more dangerous. Just as abhorrent, tho.
Hunter Gathers
@FlipYrWhig:
It was meant as a general insult that the likes of Hitchens throws out to throw his detractors back on their feet, to put the argument back on his terms. Perhaps commie isn’t something that he would use per se, but he does disparage anyone who disagrees with him as idiots or morons, which is how he ‘wins’ most of his arguments. At least the ones that I have seen anyway, although I do have a small sample size, as I find him to be nothing more than a perpetually drunk pompous ass, as I change the channel whenever I see him on the boob tube, and I don’t read him either.
General Stuck
Hitchens is a scamp, and irreverent asshole, but is capable of piercing through the bullshit at certain points in time, and did on this one, though I don’t think it was a revolutionary expose on anything we didn’t already know about the teabaggers.
He didn’t cause the Iraq war, that was Bush, and I expect the devil will take that into consideration, likely soon. I will take clear direct unceremonious prose of the diseased politics of the current right wing wherever it comes from people of higher profile.
Hob
@FlipYrWhig: I think that’s a good description of Hitchens. But you left out the biggest reason he doesn’t resemble a teabagger: he doesn’t give any lip service to populism. He hates hippies and Democrats for various reasons, but he doesn’t praise the oppressed Real Americans who heroically oppose them… he doesn’t even really claim to like Americans. He’s just glad that his own brilliant insights happen to coincide with the goals of a large powerful political faction, but he’s sure as shit not going to descend to joining them and becoming just another face in a crowd of fools; his self-image requires him to be a solitary prophetic voice with no friends, even when he’s taking the side of the powerful. And I’m glad, because if he did play well with others, he could be even more damaging.
Bella Q
@Janet Strange: I had no issues with the white on spruce background. The red on it, though – painful. But I know I’m weird.
timb
@Amanda in the South Bay: I always wondered who the nice lady/ies he met in Kurdistan some years ago. He is as pro-Kurd as Peter King is pro-IRA and I never could out how many Arab eggs he was willing to break to establish the Kurdish state.
Between how many times he got laid back in the 70’s and his rampant hatred of any government based on superstitions, you just can’t be an Arab and catch a break from Hitchens.
He is indeed very complicated
Downpuppy
I will take clear direct unceremonious prose
Say what?
One thing I know for damn sure: Hitchens is no accountant.
His notion of opportunity cost is such utter bullshit that bulls all over the world stand mute.
Tom Levenson
Just got back on the toobz after kid and dinner and all that, and I just want to say that (a) I agree w. DougJ about Hitch (mostly) and (b) mah point in the post below was not that Hitch has been anything but grotesquely wrong (and self-stupidified) on Iraq and much else — but that Douthat fell back on rhetorical bad faith to defend himself against a charge that I think Hitchens did, this time, get right.
Which is to say that I do think Hitch is right when he says that Teabaggers are not as Douthat suggests, just colorful exponents of increasingly mainstream views. Their core belief that the country is theirs to take back is dispositive here. And even if Hitch were a perfect doppelgänger to the teabag profile, that wouldn’t change the fact that he diagnoses correctly the pathology here.
timb
@John – A Motley Moose: Do you have to be on the right side. The fact that he digests prodigious amounts of both liquor and literature and can reasonably opine on either pretty much fascinates me, whether I think he is wrong (Iraq), utterly wrong (the Plame affair), or largely correct (Kissenger).
Not to go all Stewart on you, but why does he have to be on my side for me to read him and find some of his points interesting? If I demand pure agreement on all issues, am I not some douchebag like Mark Levin?
FlipYrWhig
@Bill E Pilgrim: IMHO Taibbi is tiresome because he goes into “look at me, I’m freakin’ out the squares!” mode in a very formulaic way. The criticism of Taibbi isn’t “He says ‘fuck,’ and my delicate constitution can’t take much more of that,” it’s “His attitude is a performance, and he’s playing to his crowd.”
Hitchens is tiresome because, like Greenwald, he has a set of principles he considers inviolate, and if you step on them, you’re an enemy forever.
But they’re all a world better than anything the Tea Party has yet produced.
FlipYrWhig
@Hob: True, I agree, Hitchens doesn’t much care for people.
General Stuck
@Downpuppy:
I was talking about his teabagger piece
DougJ
@timb:
I agree with his positions on a lot of things, but even when I do, I find his reasoning awful and I’m sorry that I agree with the conclusion.
timb
@mark: Apparently, you never suscribed to the Atlantic when he wrote their book reviews. I think a lot of the commentariat here, especially since it is currently sans firebaggers, but I would wager that Hitchens has read more books in the last year than this group of commentators combined. That is not to say we are stupid and he is a god (oh, the irony), just that he is as well-read and his book reviews were very interesting combinations of multiple subjects and genre.
Oh, and anyone should feel free to take the me to task for the metaphor. I was just using it loosely to illustrate a point
honus
“(The opposing side has never, to my knowledge, come up with a “costing” for the continued life of the bankrupt Baathist system, and the Bilmes/Stiglitz analysis doesn’t even touch the point.)”
What sophistry to insiuate that “The opposite side” has some obligation to do an analysis of the cost of continuing the Baathist regime, before criticizing a destructive and useless trillion dollar invasion. But it’s not a lot of trouble. The cost was at least a trillion less than what was wasted on Hitchens’ useless war. Saddam was no threat to the US. In fact, as we know now, he didn’t even have any gas, germs or other WMDs, and certainly no nuclear program. He was still a balance to Iran. So, Hitch, the cost was a whole lot less. We pissed away billions and thousands of American lives for nothing. Now fuck off back to England and quit spending my money and killing my people with your stupidity.
Matt Taibbi (not really)
Basically, I do a piss-poor job of ripping off Hunter S. Thompson.
DougJ
@timb:
I think that’s the thing about Hitchens that makes him a good example of an unpleasant phenomenon: people can read a lot of books and still be ignorant, irrational assholes. Bobo is another example of this. We all want to think (at least I want to think) that education and reading inevitably lead to something good. But they don’t.
timb
@DougJ: This response is comedy gold. Nice work, Doug!
timb
@Svensker: His evisceration of Mormonism is pretty entertaining
DougJ
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I sometimes think the same thing. I think some of Hitchens’ writing is actually good but some of it gets by on exactly what you describe.
timb
@DougJ: This is a good point. You shouldn’t infer that I think he is an amazing thinker, just that his reviews in the Atlantic, before I couldn’t stomach the damn magazine any longer, were wide-ranging and I was always impressed with the amount of reading he had done.
Doesn’t mean that for the last few years I haven’t wanted to throw the computer through a plate glass window when I saw his byline on Slate (and some of those were desktop computers!).
And, to your point, the latest teabagger point is how dare Congress try to pass a budget bill! And, that is such a dishonest and naked partisan point, I guess it does remind me of his ludicrous arguments about Iraq….
Damn, stop making me consider you points!
Mike in NC
Wow. Wasn’t that a bargain at twice the price? And don’t forget to buy Dubya’s fucking book for Christmas!
Bill E Pilgrim
@FlipYrWhig: Well, it’s part of what he’s doing, not that he nor I would use the word squares of course, but I know what you’re getting at by using it.
If you’ve ever read Hunter Thompson, you know that there’s a long tradition in doing just that. But honestly, have you read Taibbi, his new book for example?
I was showing a part of Griftopia to a friend last night over dinner, namely this part, in which Taibbi is hanging out with a Tea Partier, really trying to like the guy and get to know him, and the guy starts explaining that the Depts of Energy and Labor should be abolished because they’re not in the Constitution:
I’m sorry, that’s terrific writing. The whole book is excellent. I think you’re getting hung up on some minor style point that comprises about .01 percent, IMO anyway.
jwb
@Bill E Pilgrim: Who ever accused Tom Friedman of writing well?
Corner Stone
@Bill E Pilgrim: Man, I’ve lived my entire life around people who “go to eleven”. At the drop of a hat. As we Texans sometimes say.
Sometimes people are just fucking crazy.
Bill E Pilgrim
@jwb: Oh I’ve seen that claim all over the Internets. For years. I’m tempted to say including right here, but I won’t be that cruel and also I can’t swear that it’s true. Here I mean.
I tried to read the flat earth book years ago and I couldn’t finish more than a few pages. I honestly didn’t know what the hell was wrong at first, then it slowly dawned on me– this guy can’t write to save his life. It was horrible. It was so horrible that most of it didn’t even make any sense.
handy
Good to see some pushback on this “Ohh Hitch burned Douche Hat and the Teabaggers! How cool!” popping up these last few threads.
The guy is a posh, priggish drunk who has been an unapologetic advocate of imperialistic pursuits that has cost the lives of several hundreds of thousands of people.
Oh but he skewers the godbotherers! So it’s all good.
forked tongue
I’ll stay out of the Hitchens debate, but since Tom Wolfe has been mentioned, I’ll just point out that he gave a raving blurb to Jonah Pantloads, and consequently I have no idea why anyone would regard him positively at all, for anything.
honus
@timb: Fish in a barrel.
Jamie
Thanks for reminding me why I never read Hitchens anymore. The man is a belligerent twit.
Bill E Pilgrim
@forked tongue: Wolfe is a right winger who writes bad novels, IMO, the only thing positive anyone was saying was that he used to be a skilled journalist. And he was. He was always pretty much conservative, but far less so than he seems now. I don’t know if he just hid it, or has changed that much.
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was excellent, and so was the astronaut book IMO. He then decided not only to start writing novels, but to launch a “manifesto” at the same time centered on the idea that no one wrote like Charles Dickens anymore. Just to be clear, he meant that people should.
I always found it one of the weirder paths anyone ever took. His novels are pretty much what you’d expect from someone who thinks that being cutting edge means writing like people did more than a hundred years earlier. Wolfe’s journalism on the other hand was the epitome of “New Journalism” at the time, and was precisely the opposite. He really did break new ground.
Malron
And neither do I.
honus
@Bill E Pilgrim: What do you expect from a guy who went to Washington & Lee, wears white suits, and lives in NYC?
DW
Hitchens is a misogynistic asshole who gets by on style. He had nothing to say about the Tea Party crowd that Taibbi hadn’t said earlier and better. More to the point, Taibbi noted how many Tea Party types were old folks drawing pretty hard on the government, something Hitch overlooked. Hitch brings up his opposition to Clinton back in the 1990s. Does he reconsider in light of the evidence that maybe Clinton wasn’t public enemy number 1? Maybe he shouldn’t have given aid and comfort to right wing crazies? Hell no! He just wants to let you know he’s not like those Christian Right, white trash conspiracy minded freaks. He just happens to be their ally.
As a practical matter, the Christian Right is the electoral backbone of the modern Republican party. In addition, those white southerner bible thumpers make up a high percentage of military recruits, If you really want a glorious Western crusade against Islamic fundamentalism, you will have to work hand in glove with the Christian Right. There is no other practical alternative. There are no secular legions waiting to charge against the wicked Arabs, no matter much Hitch wants that to be so. A truly wise and honest man would face this truth and either accept alliance with the Tea Party crowd or abandon thoughts of crusade. Hitch lacks the guts for such honest analysis. And if you look at who’s been more successful at achieving their goals, you have to wonder if Hitch isn’t just a useful idiot for the Tea Party/Christian Right.
For further critique of Hitch, I recommend John Dolan (probably NSFW) – http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7919&IBLOCK_ID=35.
honus
@Bill E Pilgrim: The Right Stuff was good, but Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was kind of joke to the people who were there. Hunter Thompson wrote a good piece on Wolfe and that book if you can find it.
Cliff
It’s a rare day when I agree fully with DougJ on something, but here we are.
The man’s an Iraq War apologist and as such I ain’t got much fucking use for him.
handy
@DW:
Now that’s a righteous takedown. Well put.
KDP
@Hawes: NIce work, but hard to read. After about 4 screens worth, my eyes went buggy over the white on green.
I like your post on Obama’s working to fulfill his campaign commitments in the way he could under the condition within which he must work.
Thanks for some interesting reading.
HE Pennypacker, Wealthy Industrialist
Well thank FSM, DougJ, your post is so timely. I can admire Hitchens’s eloquence, too, but the fact that he employed it in the service of the Iraq invasion is just unforgivable. The fact that he can’t admit his error demonstrates that his arrogance is pathological.
Triassic Sands
Saying there’s no difference between Hitchens and Teabaggers is silly.
Saying they both suck (in different ways) is not.
RSA
__
I used to argue with proto-teabaggers, in the early 2000s, who would make the same argument about the invasion of Iraq. I’d sometimes suggest that if it were all about good versus evil, why don’t we invade North Korea as well? I stopped doing this after hearing further arguments that that would be a good idea, too.
NonyNony
@cleek:
Um, not to all of us. I’m an atheist and I find Hitchens religious tirades to be fairly terrible. It’s the same as the rest of his writing – he gets up on his high horse and starts out with some slightly more literate version of “I’m right and the rest of you are morons” and then blathers on with diarrhea of the mouth for pages and pages and pages basically on the same theme. It’s boring – and frankly the only reason I’ve gotten from other atheists about why they like it is because of tribal identity (i.e. someone is saying the things that they believe themselves and they can shake their fists and say “fuck yeah!” along with them).
Richard Dawkins on religion is awesome. Sam Harris on religion is awesome. Bart Ehrman on religion is awesome (if you want to find a book that pretty much lays bare exactly what’s wrong with Christianity at its most fundamental core – even the liberal denominations – “God’s Problem” is it.) Hitchens is polemic – and really not very good polemic at that.
Hitchens on anything I can do without. We’re talking about a man who refused to believe that waterboarding was torture until he himself was waterboarded. At which point he suddenly realized “oh, that’s torture”. I mean – how can anyone say the man is intelligent when he can’t even extrapolate something basic like that and has to be tortured before he can admit that something is torture?
timb
@Cliff: So was al Franken at one point. One decision does not usually ruin an entire public life
matoko_chan
@NonyNony:
no they are not, and i say that as a Dawkins otaku on genetics and evo bio.
Dawkins and Harris, like Hitch, are evangelists of atheism. Religion is not evil, evangelism and proselyting are evil. Religion evolved in the EEA to spread fitness benefit among a wider memetic tribe, instead of the oldstyle consanguinous tribe. Religion is good for humans.
it is evangelism and proselytizing that is bad for humanity.
Scott Atran on religion is awesome.
Pascal Boyer on religion is awesome.
Dawkins, Hitch and Harris are evangelical atheists.
on religion they all sukk.
MBunge
@timb: Not to go all Stewart on you, but why does he have to be on my side for me to read him and find some of his points interesting? If I demand pure agreement on all issues, am I not some douchebag like Mark Levin?
Hitchens is an unrepentent Iraq War supporter. Oh, he might give you some blather about how it should have been done differently, but he still defends the invasion and occupation and I’ve never seen or heard him ever regret or reconsider his cheerleading for it. This isn’t the case of somebody making a mistake or an error in judgment. This is somebody who was awesomely wrong about something that got thousands of Americans and tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, and he defiantly persists in his wrongness despite all evidence.
Hitchens is also a creature of the Left. His audience has never really been conservatives, even when he joined in with all the post-9/11 bullshit. He’s also never been that popular with moderates or whatever you want to call the “mainstream”. Hitchens’ career has always been on the liberal elite side of the Opinion-Industrial Complex. If anti-war liberals or liberals who became anti-war can’t hold Hitchens accountable for his warmongering, who will ever be held responsible for anything?
Mike
Howlin Wolfe
@JGabriel: of course “reasonably” standing alone or modifying “well” doesn’t mean the same as “well-reasoned” or “with valid reasoning”, i.e., logically sound.
Jamey
This gets to the root of why I think Hitch is a militant athiest: He can handle being factually wrong, because making glib, facile, straw-man counter-arguments are his strong suit. However, I suspect that he privately fears the wages of being morally wrong, so he doubles down on Iraq and other wayward causes that are his articles of [non-] faith.
Equating the likely illusory cost of not removing Saddam as a rhetorical counter to the real, dollars-and-cents costs of our stupid wars?! Fuck me, Hitch. Were I as much a douche as you, I’d ask you to tell Lee Atwater that I said hello when you see him…
HyperIon
@Jane2: Do you have to agree with what people write to consider them worthy? That’s pretty facile.
wow. you obviously “get” DougJ.