> No, he said that Steve supported an idiotic position. That is not an ad
> hominem.
He said "idiotic" and then stopped and said, oh, this is nothing personal -- the classic cycle of aggression followed by an attempt to bind the victim to the aggressor (ritual identification with the discipline-wielding schoolmaster, or the psychological equivalent of a First Strike doctrine). His basic argument was that the Left is all hot to support Third World dictators, which is just not so; his dismissal of Scott Ritter was equally suggestive -- first saying, noone can know what's going on, and then that recourse to symbolic violence again: "the people of Kurdistan and Iraq would disagree with you [i.e. Philion]".
One of the truly terrifying things about the total system is its power to transform would-be critics, even the most intelligent ones, into its mirror image. Alas, Hitchens is sounding more and more like a bot.
-- Dennis