Luke and Doug, what are you sources? I believe he's doing well already, writing for Vanity Fair and all. His current piece opposing term limits was very good. He argues term limits would put the government in the hands of lobbyists. Very post-partisan.... Gore Vidal's piece on McVeigh was fantastic.
>From a July 11th Guardian piece on the War on Drugs by Hitchens:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,519762,00.html
"A striking fact is the predominance of honest and intelligent conservatives
on the sane side of the argument. The first editor with any "profile" to
call for legalisation was William F Buckley, the old lion of the rightwing
National Review. He has been joined by George Schultz, formerly Reagan's
secretary of state, and by Gary Johnson, the Republican governor of New
Mexico, among many others. The "libertarian" journals have been ahead of the
"liberal" ones for the most part. In an eerie way, this matches the recent
shift of opinion on capital punishment, where conservatives have again been
taking the most moral and political risks. (In both cases, the common factor
may be Bill Clinton, the Nixon of the liberals, who expanded the drug war
just as he increased the scope of the death penalty.)
Three decades of this grotesque, state-sponsored racketeering have led to unbelievable levels of official corruption and to an unheard-of assault on civil and political liberties. Colombia doesn't look any more like the US as a result, but the US does look a lot more like Colombia. The actual resources expended would have more than paid for national health care: the potential revenue from legal, and therefore clean, narcotics would rebuild the cities from the ground up."
This last sentence seems like an argument a socialist would make. In my mind, the first paragraph is the sort of thing that gets him trouble with leftists who believe the right can do no right.
on Hitchens's new book: Kirkus Reviews August 1, 2001 SECTION: NONFICTION LENGTH: 320 words ISBN NUMBER: 0-465-03032-7 AUTHOR: Hitchens, Christopher TITLE: LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN: The Art of Mentoring PUBLISHER: Basic (208 pp.) $22.00 Oct. 22, 2001 REVIEW:
Pretty lame musings that capture but little of Nation columnist Hitchens's not inconsiderable wit-and even less of his iconoclasm. Having taught for some years at the New School in New York, Hitchens came upon the idea of composing a kind of ideological testament addressed to the young that would lay out his vision of the good life and offer some advice on how to achieve it. The scheme was inspired by Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet-and if you did not expect such a paternal, almost contemplative tone from Hitchens, you are not alone. This is the same man, after all, who has taken potshots at Mother Teresa (The Missionary Position, not reviewed) and Princess Di alike, a "grizzled soixante-huitard" (as he calls himself) to be sure, but one who detested Bill and Hilary Clinton (and delighted in the Lewinsky scandal) every bit as much as Rush Limbaugh did. The sober mask doesn't suit him, and most of what he lays out here as "contrarian" is strictly village-atheist stuff: the heroics of the solitary dissenter (Rosa Parks, Alexander Solzhenitsyn), the dangers of groupthink ("Beware of identity politics"), the broadening effects of travel, the importance of irony ("It's the gin in the Campari"), the innocence of Colonel Dreyfus (just in case you wondered), and the universal brotherhood of mankind ("we are one people"). There is also a good deal of name-dropping ("my dear friend Robert Conquest," "my Chilean friend Ariel Dorfman") and rather more accounts of the interesting places the author has been than most readers will require. Mercifully, however, Hitchens keeps his eye on the clock and doesn't go on much longer than most of his articles. A damp squib from someone who ought to know better. First printing of 75,000; author tour [end] Peter