>[what a performance... and what a transcription...]
>
>MATTHEWS: "Vanity Fair" columnist and author Christopher Hitchens
>latest book is called "Why Orwell Matters." Celebrating his departure
>from "The Nation," the "New York Observer" columnist Ron Roosevelt
>recently announced he too was disillusioned with the left, writing
>quote, good bye to a culture of blindness that tolerates this part of
>peace marches, women wearing suicide bomber belts as bikinis. Good
>bye to paralysis by moral equivalence.
Ron Roosevelt? What a shitty transcription. I saw it and have a good memory and a ton of this is wrong.
>HITCHENS: Not at all. It`s certainly not with this administration. I
>have enormous numbers of criticisms of the Bush administration of
>indeed the Ashcroft policy and of the state craft (ph) that got us
>into this in the first place going all the way back to our latest
>Nobel prize winner Jimmy Carter who was the man who encouraged Saddam
>Hussein to attack Iran.
Very rightwing. Matthews once worked for Carter. I think he was a speech writer.
>MATTHEWS: OK, let`s deconstruct this thing. A lot of people in this
>country live in the heartland mentally and culturally, feel that in
>New York and Los Angeles, Hollywood and New York, literary crowds,
>cultural elite they look down on America. They just don`t like
>America.
>
>In fact when America gets involved in a dispute they assume we`re the
>bad guys. It`s the hate American crowd. You might call it as Jean
>Kirkpatrick very ungraciously called it the San Francisco Democrats.
>I don`t buy that but you think that`s true now, don`t you?
>
>HITCHENS: No, I don`t and I remember hating her for saying that. was
>a kind of Philistine populist bid.
[clip]
>No, it doesn`t. And they say, they`re embarrassed to mention the
>Kurds, our old comrades, because the Kurds hate Saddam Hussein more
>than anything else does and they`ve already, no one notices this,
>they`ve already started fighting him. The war in northern Iraq has
>already begun.
The Kurds have already started fighting?
>MATTHEWS: Why do think in the gut the left you describe as the awful
>left. Why do think they hate America? Do they hate their parents or
>what? What`s driving this hatred?
>
>HITCHENS: I don`t think it`s psychological. I think it`s partly it`s
>honorable. The people who learned a lot from the lying of the
>government during Indochina, Iran-Contra. They know the government
>lies.
very right wing.
>HITCHENS: The idea of saying in it public and having it out for
>debate as it is being done is a new thing. As I began by saying,
>President Carter paid and encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in
>a deliberate act of aggression. The beginning of all our troubles
>actually was that at covert action, aggression remaking the region
>but not telling anyone about it, indeed, lying about it.