Everybody defending or semi-defending Churchill does so on the basis of an extremely kind leftist reading of his call for more crime. But, crap, people, this wasn't a note from some political seminar amongst ourselves. It was an essay produced for the general public and designed, like all such writings, to teach its readers something. As leftists, our job is to teach people why they should join us. Hence, we have to find the most appealing ways to explain what we see to people who arrive without our leftist angle. We have to dress Republican and talk Socialist, in other words. It just isn't an legitimate intellectual maneuver to assess Churchill's essay and book on the basis of how we commies might see it most charitably. The question is how ordinary people will see it. From that perspective, it is an even bigger disaster than Hitchens, who at least admits he's a renegade from left principles.