>>>Rakesh
You're being too literal and boring. According to Hitchens nemesis Cockburn: http://www.counterpunch.org/
"Now we can see that Hitchens was maybe trying to hit a vein of Swiftian irony in his remarks on that Fox show, trying to say that by the standards of what US forces were doing in Vietnam at that time, Kerrey's unit was as well mannered as a dinner party designed by Martha Stewart. He only killed the women, he didn't rape them first. But Hitchens should know that irony doesn't work on tv, and there's no palatable Martha Stewart-like comportment when you're cutting throats and shooting babies at a range of ten feet.
[Hitchens doesn't condescend to his viewing audience, unlike you or Cockburn. Maybe this is partly why he's popular. More people have seen _Full Metal Jacket_ and understood it than you realize, I bet.]
Why did Hitchens have to insist he likes Kerrey "very much" Well, Hitchens has a taste for creeps, but usually they're a little more off-beat than the president of the New School. Maybe Hitchens wants tenure at the New School. So instead of urging the New School students and faculty to demonstrate outside Kerrey's office and demand he be sent to the International Court at the Hague to stand trial, and his salary be sent to Thanh Phong as reparations, he's kissing Kerrey's ass. People will do anything for tenure.
What happened to Scheer and Hitchens? "Is your hate pure," our old friend the late James Goode used to ask of us. What happened to the cold steel of their hate? Actually, Scheer never had the cold steel of pure hate. He wanted comfort too much and now he's got it. Long since, he's gone soft in Santa Monica, going to parties with Oliver Stone and Barbra Streisand. Hitchens is a hater, but too obsessively. Just because Clinton put his hand up the skirt of some woman Hitchens cared for (though he's never named her), he confused him with Pol Pot. Perhaps he can only get mad about one person at a time: Mother Teresa, Ronald Reagan, Paul Johnson, Bill Clinton, Kissinger. [end clip]
Another unstubstantiated accusation by Cockburn. Please feel free to use it to bash Hitchens. Hitchens's friend Martin Amis said that Clinton's cynical political execution of the mentally retarded black man Rickey Ray Rector is what set him off.
Rakesh Bhockburn: (two can play at that game!)
>But I understand Vidal defending McVeigh with the guilloitine
>hanging over his head. And more importantly someone as smart as Vidal
>probably understands that insofar as "McVeigh" has come to himself be
>the reason why civil liberties have to be violated, McVeigh has to be
>defended. But what's Hitchen's excuse for defending his boss?
It's not completely accurate to say that "McVeigh" has "come to himself to be the reason why civil liberties have to be violated." The death penalty and the violation of civil liberties, as you know, are weapons against black, latinos, the poor. McVeigh is just a high profile aberation of a case where it's a white man who's being put down. It's being used to justify the death penalty which will then be put back to use against black, latinos, the poor after McVeigh is killed.
>not Hitchen's. And of course I agree with Cockburn's take on Kerrey's
>war time activities, not Hitchens' (insofar as it can be made out).
If I were a conspiracy monger, I'd say Kisssinger and his cronies were behind the outing (or highlighting) of Kerrey's war crimes. Hitchens's Trial of Henry Kissinger is now on the Washington Post's bestseller list. I wonder if all those conservatives in their conservative cities are buying it up.
Back to McVeigh. It's interesting that people were horrified about McVeigh's cold claim that the children were "collateral damage" in his so-called just war. This points to the fact that the public finds the notion of collateral damage offensive. Still, politicians and the ruling class use the notion. During the presidential campaign, pro-death penalty candidate Gore admitted that it was inevitable that innocents would be killed in our system of capital punishment. Then there's Albright and the Iraqi children.
>From Hitchens's -The Trial of Henry Kissinger_ (p. 41):
One reason that the United States command in Southeast Asia finally ceased
employing the crude and horrific tally of "body count" [the name of black
rapper Ice-T's back up band, by the way] was that, as in the relatively
small but specific case of Speedy Express cited above, the figures began to
look ominous when they were counted up. Sometimes, totals of "enemy" dead
would turn out, when computed, to be suspiciously larger than the number of
claimed "enemy" in the field. Yet the war would somehow drag on, with new
quantitative goals being set and enforced. Thus, according to the Pentagon,
the following are the casualty figures between the first Lyndon Johnson
bombing halt in March 1968 and the same date in 1972:
Americans 31,205 South Vietnamese regulars 86,101 "Enemy" 475,609
The US Senate Subcommittee on Refugees estimated that in the same four-year period rather more than three million civilians were killed, injured or rendered homeless. In the same four-year period, the United States dropped almost 4,500,000 tons of high explosives on Indochina. (The Pentagon's estimated total for the tonnage dropped in the entire Second World War is 2,044,000.) This total does not include massive sprayings of chemical defoliants and pesticides, the effects of which are still being registered by the region's ecology. Nor does it include the land-mines which detonate to this day.
It is unclear how we count the murder or abduction of 35,708 Vietnamese civilians by the CIA's counter-guerrilla "Phoenix program" during the first two and half years of the Nixon-Kissinger administration. There may be some "overlap." There is also some overlap with the actions of previous administrations in all cases. But the truly exorbitant death tolls all occurred on Henry Kissinger's watch, were known and understood by him, were concealed from Congress, the press and the public by him - at any rate to the best of his ability - and were, when questioned, the subject of political and bureaucratic vendettas ordered by him. They were also partly the outcome of a secretive and illegal process in Washington, unknown even to most cabinet members, of which Henry Kissinger stood to be, and became, a prime beneficiary. [end clip]
Rakesh: I was just underlining that McVeigh's victims were as innocent as those in whose name he killed. But this is rather obvious. And the real reasons for Vidal's brave defense of McVeigh are rather obvious as well, but I am still confused as to why this compares--as Peter seems to think- to Hitchen's grovelling at the feet of his boss. ------- You're playing dirty pool. I never compared the two. I was just pointing out that the "brave" Vidal has a very high opinion of Hitchens and would take him over you - who he probably hasn't even heard of - any day of the week.
yr pal, Peter