--- Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net> wrote: >
My these Trots are getting overheated lately...
And indeed they are, but I'm not one of them and I must say that I find it quite hard to distinguish between the brothers Hitchens these days, facially and politically. His column in the Evening Standard is just fucking appalling boilerplate rightwing stuff, almost as bad as Mark Steyn. I can't remember the last time I saw him write anything recognisably leftist (albeit that I don't read the Nation or anything like that).
And then we had that bullshit in an email to (forget who) someone on lbo saying that "conservatives are talking more sense than liberals on a lot of issues, particularly libertarian". Which I can't think for the life of me what these might be -- certainly not drugs, as the libboes are firm supporters of making me piss into a cup and stay out of the pub at lunchtime if my employer forbids it. All I can come up with is the right to shout nasty things at black people and expect to keep your job, which seems like a right not worth having.
Speaking of which, Hitchens could stand taking a little bit more care in excoriating the grievance mongers and writing things like "the tendency of black and Jewish Floridians to be first to complain that they were cheated has been noted, to say the least". It's bloody difficult to work out what he means, at least one interpretation is profoundly nasty and the context is less than encouraging. I only mention this one case because it was in yesterday's paper; but I've noticed the same pattern of offending before.
UK readers will understand, while US readers won't, what I mean when I say that there is more than a touch of Jeremy Clarkson to CH's laboured anti-PC humourlessness. Suffice to say that to be Jeremy Clarkson is a fearful thing indeed.
dd
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