Doug said:
>Yeah, I gotta say that while I don't approve of Hitchens' going to the
>impeachment managers, and his approving comments about the guy he oddly
>calls "Judge Starr," he mainly hates Clinton for the right reasons and not
>the wrong ones. Bob Fitch, who knew Horowitz well back when they were both
>at Ramparts, is full of stories of what a scumbag Horowitz was even when he
>was a "leftist.
So no one believes Hitchens when he says the managers came to him?
some bits and pieces from Hitchens circa '87 on the Second Thoughts conference, pg. 111 in For the Sake of Argument: [snip] David Horowitz and Peter Collier, former editors of Ramparts, have come all the way from pink Pampers through Black Panthers to one-dimensional Reaganism. With a bit of effort, they could succeed in their current modest ambition, which is to become quite nasty. They make a good fit with the diagnosis offered by Isaac Deutscher in his 1950 book The God That Failed. Speaking of a certain kind of former Communist, Deutscher wrote: "He is haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society; like Koestler, he may even have an ambivalent notion that he has betrayed both. He then tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of *extraordinary certitude and frantic aggressiveness.* He insists that the world should recognise his uneasy conscience as the clearest conscience of all."[Emphasis added-by CH not PK]. [snip] So who needs yet another set of breast-beating recusants, this time accusing themselves of a past mired in terrorism, crime and family maladjustment? In order to make their point and stake their claim, Horowitz and Collier had to exaggerate the zeal of the convert, intensify the hunt for the heresy. I can offer a trivial and amusing example, to take away the taste of the LeoGrand episode. In private conversation the duo had suggested a debate between themselves and your correspondent. They even proposed that I contribute an article to the magazine which, with money from yet another right-wing foundation, they propose to launch. But at the above-mentioned dinner the toadying emcee, Marty (Hot Lips) Peretz, tried a flailing attack on the 'loathsome' *foreigner* Hitchens. (Peretz is one of those tiresome, unctuous types who thinks he's a wit and is half right.) At next day's session, Horowitz took up this cry and made it more extreme. It was obviously emotionally important for him not to be outdone by anybody. [Emphasis added by PK] [snip] But the absurdity of the Horowitz-Collier-Radosh faction doesn't necessarily define it as innocuous. There will be further spasms of lunacy down the road, and fresh occasions for the paranoid style to express itself. As Deutscher put it so aptly in speaking of the penitent: "His former illusion at least implied a positive ideal. His disillusionment is utterly negative. His role is therefore intellectually and politically barren.... He advances bravely in the front rank of every witch-hunt. His blind hatred of his former ideal is leaven to contemporary conservatism." ----------------- After the heavily-medicated Zaftig One chatted with Barbara Wa Wa on TV last night, I spoke with conservatives who felt that the Republicans were way off going after Clinton for sex. I tend to believe that if Clinton had been removed from office for his perjury and obstruction of justice in regards to the blowjob/cigar fest, we would have seen a Democratic Congress and Gore as Prez. Pace the anti-sexual McCarthyites- not a Puritan hell-hole. A liberal made a good point to me last night. Even though the U.S. is more puritanical than Europe, they get all their porno from us. We export tons. What would Zizek call this? I saw Thomas Geoghegan speak tonight -he has a new book out- and he made a good point that American exceptionalism could be attributed partly to the fact that the Senate exists. He said if the Senate didn't exist the U.S. would be more like a Western European social democracy.