><http://wfan.com/imusinstantreplay/local_audioclip_132095035.html>
>
>Checking the box scores I saw that Hitchens is now
>doing sports-themed talk radio. Imus actually says at
>the start that Hitchens had been there many times
>before.
>
>Some highlights:
>
>Calls himself a friend of Ahmad Chalabi; enthuses over
>the "trucks of mass destruction;" says that Saddam
>"could have bought a plutonium weapon off the shelf
>from North Korea" if we hadn't attacked Iraq; follows
>the National Review line that the CIA is "sabotaging
>Iraqi civil society" by questioning Chalabi's fitness....
He's found his level.
I like what Sidney Blumenthal had to say about him <http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/05/09/blumenthal5/print.html>:
>Though he paid scant attention to actual American politics, he
>caught the drift of things and applied his sensibility with the
>intent to shock, bedazzle, and entertain. He did not concern himself
>with domestic policy issues, not health care, education, or the
>economy. That would have been too prosaic for him, requiring precise
>knowledge about institutions with which he couldn't be bothered.
>While freed from commitment to practical political outcomes, he
>could purport to be more committed than any American precisely
>because of his roots in a European radical tradition. London was a
>good place to be from.
>
>As a political writer, Christopher was a literary critic. As a
>literary critic, his specialty was not irony so much as mockery --
>that very English form of implicit superiority and disdain,
>difficult for Americans to master. As a political reporter, he was,
>in a word, unreliable. "Why would you ever be fair?" Hitchens once
>said about his own method of debating. I never took him seriously as
>a reporter of fact, and I didn't know anyone in Washington who did.