> >> >Of course Hitchens likes Kerry--the guy runs the university which
>>>>probably pays this non Ph.D. very handsomely. So why would Hitchens
>>>>mention that according one of the other SEALS and two Vietnamese,
>>>>Kerry is lying about their being shot at by the Viet Cong? Why would
>>>>Hitchens intervene in this dispute given his obvious conflict of
>>>>interest if he were not trying to raise the market value of his "Your
>>>>Honor Ken Starr" celebrity?
>
>>>>Rakesh
>
>
>You're being too literal and boring.
It may well indeed be boring to note that Kerrey may well be lying as his account has been called into question on both sides of the Pacific, but it's the simple boring fact--along with the fact that Hitchens ignored it--that you too simply don't recognize in this lengthy, albeit amusing, reply.
>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.
Yet by allowing Kerrey's version of events that they had first been fired on, Hitchens' ironic mode then allows his to get off the hook even for this evil. Kerrey comes across as a modern day Kurtz, not a Seal on a special operation.
>
>[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.
So Cockburn proves that his sense of humour is even more wicked.
>
>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.
Yes we on the left have our National Enquirer need to know such compelling news.
>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),
but then we should probably insist that such serious accusations have something more behind them than unnamed victims.
>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]
so Hitchens and Cockburn take jibes at each other, people sub to the Nation to read the on-going cat fight, and then the Nation doesn't actually have to pay for investigative journalism to get subscribers.
>
>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.
If that were true, Hitchens would have prioritized the defeat of Bush.
>
>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.
If memory serves, it was McVeigh who served as the main reason for the domestic anti ter bill.
>
>>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.
No only if you saw the world through the eyes of Hitchens would you think this is the reason Kerrey has come forward. Obviously by trying to see the world this way, you are suffering from Hitchens' famed blurred vision.
> 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.
Was there any collateral damage in the bombing of Serbia--which Hitchens supported in the name of stopping genocide, no?
>
>>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]
wow hitchens doesn't miss a thing. he does have his finger on the pulse of america.
>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.
And the soldiers who carried out his orders by firing indiscriminately upon viet cong, no matter the collateral damage, were rewarded with handsome political careers and august academic positions.
>
>-------
>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.
Getting a little pissy, aren't you, pal?
Rakesh