Christopher Hitchens from left charlatan to mouthpiece for the Republican right

Peter K. peterk at enteract.com
Tue Nov 28 17:22:44 PST 2000



>--- 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).

I liked this recent article from The Hindu (great name - the piece originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement) http://www.the-hindu.com/2000/11/19/stories/1319017i.htm

two of my favorite parts:

Discussing Gore's book Earth in the Balance, Hitchens writes "Some of it is religious in a slightly fundamentalist way; Gore affirms belief in a Creator who is presumably willing to see his Week's worth of labour go to naught."

"The genius of Clinton lay in his ability to emasculate his party's Left, and to make that party a guarantor of Wall Street and NAFTA and NATO and the Federal Reserve, while managing to appeal incessantly and successfully to correctness. In other words, if Al Gore has now abandoned his former moralism and become a supporter of gay rights and abortion, it is, paradoxically, as part of his move to the Right. (The recent rather unconvincing feminisation and Rainbowing of the Republican Party illustrates the same point in a different way). The new "vital centre" is far more conservative than the old one, but it has constituencies of "inclusion" to be appeased."



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