Well at one point you had a blurb of his on the jacket of Wall Street and now he doesn't seem to return your e-mails right away and you like to call him names. Anyways, that comrade list could be way off the mark. I'll put it back on if it'll make you feel better.
What is the point of quoting this 1985 essay? Are you saying he's done a 180? I would refer you to his picks in the collection he and Caldwell edited. One that is relevant now is by Adolph Reed Jr. in which he points out the error of the left defending the militias (Cockburn) and Mumia, or at least raising them up above other victims of the legal system.
Also on a recent morning TV appearance on CSPAN with Andrew Sullivan he wouldn't come out and say Hezabollah was a terrorist organization. He said it formed in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon and under international law had a right to repell the invasion. Sullivan went into hysterics. Perhaps Hitchens was just being cheeky.
In the Nation review of the Mencken book, the reviewer hypothesized what Mencken would be like now and it sounded an awful lot like what people accuse Hitchens of becoming. A while back, Hitchens told me he and that reviewer, Carlin Ramano "crossed swords" before and that he didn't trust him. Even so he invited Ramano to a dinner I attended - because he was in town for something and had interviewed Hitchens for the Philidalphia Inquirer that day. Also in attendance was Larry Summers (ex?) girlfriend Laura Ingrahm. She and Hitchens argued about religion.
Peter