> 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....
Disgusting. <flush> But as for the rest...
Sidney Blumenthal said of Hitchens:
> As a political writer, Christopher was a literary critic.
As was Orwell. I found that a merit, not failing.
> 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.
"Fairness" is not something I count among the strengths of political writers. Quite the opposite. As Joan Didion wrote in an essay on Bob Woodward ("Political Pornography"), the operative meaning of "fairness" is often "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."
Of course, dishonesty in representing the opposition's case is shameful, and a current Hitch tactic. But no polemicist should be required to make the opposition's case for them.
-- Shane
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