Cockburn gutlessly explains Hitchens' deed with reference to somebody else's impression that H. is a reality-challenged alcoholic!
That's okay by you Hitchens-haters, is it?
That's morally or politically preferable than making public one's suspicions that Lewinsky may not actually be a mad stalker and that half the crap we've heard about Willey may be either untrue or irrelevant, is it? Preferable to defending rapacious bosses against hopelessly out-gunned employees? A stronger political contribution than to remind us about Rector just when everybody else had forgotten about one of the big guy's rungs to the top? More useful than laying bare before us the gravity of allowing hypocricy, intrigue and spin-meistering to decontextualise this 'minor lapse' - like our allegedly hopeless alcoholic did here:
'Now we have the bulbous Baptist Clinton who preaches sexual abstinence for teens, an inquisition for homosexuals in uniform, cutoffs for welfare mothers with insufficient moral fiber and a V-chip to impose childish standards on an already infantile mass medium. And his apologists want everyone to be strictly non-judgmental. We also have the Clinton who cut great chunks out of habeas corpus and the appeals process with his "tough" new laws on terrorism and capital punishment. And his apologists squeal that Kenneth Starr is acting like Lavrenti Beria. This is pathetic, and those who are engaged in it should be ashamed. But if they were susceptible to shame, they couldn't decently work for Clinton in the first place.'
Have any teens, homosexuals, welfare mums and TV watchers out there in LBO-Land who might share their opinions with us - not to mention the sorts of activists who might one day find themselves on the wrong side of a paranoid government armed with semi-martial legal powers?
Loathing Clinton is not something one may do only at the expense of loving Starr.
Hate 'em both, forgawdsakes! And care not a fig who prevails in a brawl between these privileged predators.
Two thirds of the electorate already seems fixed in their impressions of Starr, his agenda, and the people upon whom he seems happy to tread to get there. What they need to be reminded of is that Clinton's no better - that Washington is the distillate of a rotten political structure. That there must be an alternative to the freedom to choose their tormentor. Mebbe Hitchens is too sanguine a believer in Al Gore - we need not agree with him about everything - but at least he's making himself useful. Unlike, for instance, Todd bloody Gitlin. And he's doing it a mite more scrupulously than Cockburn is doing him, imho.
That's my last gasp on this - I realise I'm rather arrogantly sticking a foreign beak into all this.
I'm better now.
Cheers, Rob.