"Her atheism was not like mine."

Christopher Hitchens versus Bill Donohue re Mother Teresa.

Newsbusters highlights the part where Donohue asks if Hitchens wants to "take it outside" because it's missing from the MSNBC transcript. Also missing from the transcript is the last word out of Hitchens mouth, which amused me. At the end of the whole heated debate, Donohue gets off his last line "The only people that do not have doubts today are dogmatic atheists, people like you, Chris." Hitchens mutters "Christopher."

I enjoyed watching this exchange, not only because I'd listen to Hitchens talk about anything, but because Donohue keeps up the pressure, baiting Hitchens. Hitchens always seems angry, but he keeps it at a controlled seethe, and Donohue is doing his damnedest to get him to boil over. Twice, Donohue taunts him about the physical dimensions of Hitchens' book about Mother Teresa: "the thing against her, five and a half inches by eight and a half inches long, 98 pages, not a single endnote, not a single footnote, not a single citation," "your 98 page book, five and a half by eight and a half inches long—you have no citations." And, although it only appears once in the transcript, Donohue repeatedly says "an Englishman has to be quiet when an Irishman talks." Twice, Donohue pulls out the old line about how it's the atheists who are dogmatic.

Hitchens maintains his seething control and won't get distracted into reciting citations or explaining why atheists are not dogmatic. He keeps the focus on Mother Teresa, and his new approach is to claim her as a fellow atheist and to express sympathy for her as a victim of the church:

She tried her best to believe. Her atheism was not like mine. I can't believe it and I am glad to think that it is not true, that there is a dictator in the heavens. So the fact that there is no evidence for it pleases me. She really wished it was true. She tried to live her life as if it was true.

She failed. And she was encouraged by cynical old men to carry on doing so because she was a great marketing tool for her church, and I think that they should answer for what they did to her and what they have been doing to us. I think it has been fraud and exploitation yet again....

Because of the opportunist chance that Mother Teresa offered them for publicity, [the Church] failed to restrain someone who really should have been seeking proper help that she never got. Instead, they exploited her to the very end and even gave her an exorcism, as you know. The archbishop of Calcutta has admitted it. He even had to give her an exorcism in 1997, because they had so much despair of her state of mind. It‘s a cruel exploitation of a simple and honest woman....

[The C]hurch... has an answer for everything. If you can‘t believe it, if it all seems to be radically untrue, nonetheless, faith will square that settle for you. She was trying for that. But as we now know, she failed. It can‘t be done. You can‘t make people believe in the impossible. All you can do is make people feel very guilty that they can‘t make themselves believe it.

Hitchens on "The Daily Show" and in The Weekly Standard.

Did you see Christopher Hitchens on "The Daily Show" show this week? It was a rather strange little interview in which Jon Stewart did most of the talking, asking really long questions that ostensibly begged Hitchens to explain things about the war in Iraq but left Hitchens with little time to attempt to do it.

Hitchens did manage to say he was going to have an article in The Weekly Standard on the subject. Now, the article is available.

An excerpt:

I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time....

The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty....

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"

Read the article.

I would love to have heard what Hitchens said about Jon Stewart after that interview. I wonder if it would have been something like this passage from the article:

There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side.

Too harsh for Stewart? Perhaps, but if he were interviewing any of Hitchens's gargoyles, I think he'd treat them far differently from the way he treated Hitchens.

UPDATE: Here's the video of the Hitchens interview, available at Crooks & Liars, which opines:

Jon was very focused tonight and made Hitchins lose his place a few times. (How did he ever do that?) When intelligence is met against blind ideology, intelligence usually wins. (I just made that up)

Gargoyles, indeed.

"There's a big relationship between this marvelous time of year and living in a one-party state."

Christopher Hitchens scrooges about Christmas.

IN THE COMMENTS: John wrote:

How can you get him to go home? He drank everything on the buffet, including the little sternos underneath the meatballs, pilfered the Irish whisky in your top cabinet, smoked his smelly fags in the kitchen, and passed out on the couch making his 31st North Korea joke. Everyone else left the party hours ago.

Trooper York:

Linus Van Pelt: Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem. Maybe Lucy's right. Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you're the Charlie Browniest.

Charlie Brown: No I'm not. Look at Christopher, he hates Christmas too!

Linus Van Pelt: What is doing over there?

Lucy Van Pelt: I think he is vomiting on a picture of Mother Theresa.

Linus Van Pelt: Is he sick?

Charlie Brown: No he is a political commenter. They do this all the time.... Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?

Linus Van Pelt: Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about.

[moves toward the center of the stage]

Linus Van Pelt: Lights, please.

[a spotlight shines on Linus]

Linus Van Pelt: "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, 'Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.' And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.'"

[Linus picks up his blanket and walks back towards Charlie Brown]

Linus Van Pelt: That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Charlie Brown: Mr. Hitchens what are you doing with that gun?...

Charlie Brown: Oh my god, Christopher Hitchens just shot Linus. And the little Christmas tree. Two shepherds. A donkey. And the partridge in the pear tree.

Lucy Van Pelt: Thank God Snoopy was packing and laid down a covering fire.

Christopher Hitchens: God had nothing to do with it you fools. There is no god. Only a stupid dog with a luger.

Linus Van Pelt: Thank god for the second amendment. And dogs with guns. God bless us all! Even you little Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Hitchens: (vomits)

(A Charlie Brown Christmas starring Christopher Hitchens, 2007)

"The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face."

Christopher Hitchens has himself waterboarded.

Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

He has a second go at it:

Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it....

Hitchens concludes: "[I]f waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture." But if Hitchens is willing to submit to it as an experiment, it can't be the worst torture. We can easily think of many tortures that he would not have accepted for journalistic purposes and that no one friendly to him would have perpetrated.

Hitchens doesn't deprive us of the pro-waterboarding argument:

[A] man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

But Hitchens nevertheless concludes that it is torture and that Americans should not torture, and his argument is chiefly a practical one premised on American interests.

ADDED: Video of the Hitchens waterboarding.

Friday night and the new "Real Time with Bill Maher."

Did you watch Episode 1 of the new season of "Real Time with Bill Maher" last night? I hope you didn't, because it was Friday night, and it would probably be good if you had something more exciting to do, though perhaps you had to work or participate in an argument or drink yourself into a stupor or rob a restaurant like Honey Bunny and Pumpkin:

Nobody ever robs restaurants. Bars, liquor stores, gas stations... you get your head blown off sticking up one of them. Restaurants on the other hand, you catch with their pants down. They're not expecting to get robbed. Not as expectant anyway.

But who am I to pry into your Friday night? I watched the show, mostly because I saw that Markos Moulitsas and Christopher Hitchens were going to be on -- and they're two characters I follow, more or less, not to the point where I think about what they'd do on a Friday night if they weren't doing "Real Time with Bill Maher." But they were there, Hitchens looking unusually healthy. Markos, perky as ever, with those big eyes and that turn-the-world-on-with-your smile.

Bill did his typical monologue, each joke beginning with the recitation of a recent news story and then swooping down for a low punchline. One punchline, about Mark John Karr -- he's so hilarious -- made me laugh, but I can't remember it this morning.

Then he interviewed Spike Lee, who was there -- on a video screen -- to promote his documentary "When the Levees Broke." But Lee wasn't into the promotion enough to pump any energy into the segment. Maher shifted from the subject of Lee's movies to the topic of a recent Bob Herbert column -- TimeSelect link -- and quoted the line "If white people were doing to black people what black people are doing to black people, there would be rioting from coast to coast." (The column was about Juan Williams's new book "Enough." And I wish the Times would make it available now for open linking.) Spike Lee acted like he couldn't understand what Herbert was talking about. Maher got stern and said he knew what it meant, and Lee murmured his way to the finish line.

Next up was Elvis Costello, who had something to promote, I think. And it was his birthday, which is such a less interesting fact than people seem to realize. We were supposed to care that he took time from his birthday -- like it matters when you've had 52 of them and when he was only on a video screen. For some reason, Maher went into a riff about how there's never been a whiff of scandal about Elvis Costello and his name is as pure as the driven snow or some such nonsense. Elvis opted neither to agree or disagree, and I made a mental note to Google later, because I thought there was something. Yeah. This:

In March 1979, Costello capped off this productive period in his extra-artistic life by getting himself into a scrap with Stephen Stills (of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young fame) and Bonnie Bramlett (a minor singer from the '60s) in a hotel bar in Ohio. Again motivated by an unclear principle, he did his best to offend them, finally resorting to a burst of profanity and bigotry, capped with the assertion that Ray Charles was a "blind, ignorant n*****."

There's no evidence that Costello was a racist -- he'd been active in Rock Against Racism before it was fashionable and was too smart in any event to let it show if he was -- but he was being as stupid, reckless and out of control as any of the broken-down '60s stars his energy, brains and invective were supposed to be an antidote for. In any event, Bramlett industriously publicized the exchange and Costello tried to explain and apologize. He took his lumps in a months-long transatlantic brouhaha; to this day some serious critics hold him in contempt.

In any event, Costello showed all signs of being more boring than Spike Lee so I muted the sound and finished the Friday crossword.

I unmuted when the panel came out. It was Christopher Hitchens, Senator Max Cleland, and Vali Nasr (a scholar who's written this book -- "The Shia Revival"). Maher framed a question about Iraq in terms of how finally, after all these years, even the idiots have figured out that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism. He cited a poll that showed only 1% of Brits thought it did. The other guests went along with the demonstration of how everybody knows this is true, and you, the HBO subscriber, were supposed to get the point that you're going to be an object of horrible mockery if you don't get in line. It was Hitchens's turn, and he called himself one of "the elite," because he was in that 1%, and proceeded to explain why. When the audience booed, he gave them the finger and said "F**k you." Then, when Maher tried to recentralize his point that everyone knows Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism and the audience cheered, Hitchens turned on the audience and abused them again. He abused Maher too, for leading the herd along and building himself up with their cheap support, and then he praised Maher for not letting Spike Lee wriggle out of the question he damned well understood. Hitchens knows how to do TV. [ADDED: Video!]

Maher had a comic bit set up where he had various products that you can't take on a plane anymore, like a bottle of "Jihad, Your Hair Smells Terrific" and "Behead and Shoulders." There were about ten of these things, and the funniest part of it really was how much it cracked up Senator Cleland. In case you're wondering if the format has changed, Maher also did his "New Rules" routine.

And somewhere in the middle of that, they video-screened Markos Moulitsas, who lacked any edge or ennui or signs of age or anything but the positive energy of a guy doing an interview for college admission. He believes in his blog project and it's all for the good, bringing people together, la, la, la. Maher has no material to make this interesting, so he resorts to a discussion of the word "blog." He doesn't like it. That's so 2004, Bill. Ending the interview, Maher says, "Goodbye, Carlos." Carlos. Come on. If it was Carlos, it would be The DailyLos. Ah, well, I'm sure Markos found a way to take a cloudy night and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.

"People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with."

Christopher Hitchens rails about "identity politics":

Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think "first woman president." We think -- for example -- "first ex-co-president" or "first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent" or "first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap."...

Here again, the problem is that Sen. Obama wants us to transcend something at the same time he implicitly asks us to give that same something as a reason to vote for him. I must say that the lyricism with which he does this has double and triple the charm of Mrs. Clinton's heavily-scripted trudge through the landscape, but the irony is still the same....

I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he -- like me and like all of us -- carries African genes. And I shall not be voting for Mrs. Clinton, who has the gall to inform me after a career of overweening entitlement that there is "a double standard" at work for women in politics; and I assure you now that this decision of mine has only to do with the content of her character. We will know that we have put this behind us when -- as with the vowel -- we have outgrown and forgotten the original prejudice.

ADDED: My son John IMs:

I'm sick of Hitchens's writing style!!

"I shall not vote for Sen. Obama..."

Are we supposed to take him more seriously just because he uses the word "shall"?

I can't imagine any other writer making such a pompous announcement of who they're supporting for president.

COMMENT FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE:

To Professor Althouse.

Madam,

I shan't trouble You or your Readers with my Opinions on Mr. Hitchens, except to say that, were he to stand Time on its Head and return my Century, he would be a welcome Citizen to the Republic of Letters. Mr. Hitchens's Passport would be that he refuses to write Cant, right or wrong as he may be in the Issue.

I should also say that safe arrival upon the Shores of this Republic in my Day, would not have protected Mr. Hitchens from many a Knock. An Author may have written what he would in the Papers; but he should have found that the Love of the Publick was as much a Dweller of the Rocks as that known by the Shepherd in Virgil.

As a Ghost these 250 years and more, I should, indeed, wish to stand Time on its Head and return to my Life; were that it would be concluded better than it fell out. I shall not, however, use this Occasion to make Complaints of my Fate, for 'twas that which all Men share.

Writing in Haste, and puzzl'ing over the Tense to be used if Time were to run backwards,

I remain, Madam,

Your most humble & obt. Servant,

Sir Archy

Christopher Hitchens in Madison — giving the atheists hell.

Madison, home of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, starts off loving the surly atheist they've brought in, but then — who could have imagined? — he gives them a hard time:

Responding to a question from an audience member on what he said was the futility of killing Muslims in Iraq to end extremism, Hitchens parodied:

“‘How does killing them lessen their numbers?’ You must have meant something more intelligent. … We worry too much in America about our ‘right’ to be in Iraq.

“Make them worry. Make them run scared. … I’m going to fight these people and every other theocrat all the way. All the way. You should be ashamed sneering at the people guarding you as you sleep.”

But stop laughing at the Madisonians for getting theirs. Here's what Hitchens thinks of your Heaven:

He also told the crowd that heaven would be comparable to North Korea, as they both embody a totalitarianism of eternal gratitude.

Hitchens pointed to the “horrific pointlessness and misery” of having to thank a leader for everything when the leader was never asked for in the first place — which he said is intrinsic to both the concept of heaven and in North Korea.

“At least you can fucking die and get out of North Korea,” Hitchens added.

The Dalai Lama wants to be the last Dalai Lama.

"We had a Dalai Lama for almost five centuries. The 14th Dalai Lama now is very popular. Let us then finish with a popular Dalai Lama.... If a weak Dalai Lama comes along, then it will just disgrace the Dalai Lama."

If he is the Dalai Lama because he's the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama, wouldn't the next Dalai Lama be him? Far be it from me to interpret his religion's dogma, but it's interesting to speculate about what he has in mind, as he worries about a weak Dalai Lama coming next.

Is he concerned that he himself, in his next incarnation, will be different in some ways and less successful? Does he think he'll be around but those who are looking for him will find someone else? Does he doubt the precepts about reincarnation? Does he believe that he will be reincarnated and that he will be properly located but not want to live his next life in the same kind of leadership role? He says:

"I hope and pray that I may return to this world as long as sentient beings' suffering remains. I mean not in the same body, but with the same spirit and the same soul."

That isn't even saying that he believes in reincarnation, only that he wants it (for the sake of others). He's good at putting words together in a way that can be calmly absorbed by a wide range of people. As he himself said: he's "very popular."

Also quoted in the article is Ganden Thurman, Executive Director of Tibet House US, who analyzes the statement in political terms. He thinks the Dalai Lama really is trying to move the Tibetan people away from the ancient autocracy and into a modern approach to government by the people, which could improve their relations with China.

And let me quote Christopher Hitchens, from "God Is Not Great" p. 345:

The Dalai Lama... is entirely and easily recognizable to a secularist. In exactly the same way as a medieval princeling, he makes the claim not just that Tibet should be independent of Chinese hegemony — a “perfectly good” demand, if I may render it into everyday English — but that he himself is a hereditary king appointed by heaven itself. How convenient!

Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011. What if there's a 2-year-old reincarnation of Hitchens toddling around somewhere on the face of the earth? Would we ever notice and, if we did, what would we do? What would we say to him (or her)? I think the lag time between death and rebirth is supposed to be up to 49 days, so if you have a child born between December 15, 2011 and February 2, 2012, you might be living with old Hitch, reborn. How would you like that? One thing seems obvious to me: You wouldn't want to know. You wouldn't even want to think about your child in those terms. And if you did, you wouldn't want to convey those thoughts to the child.

So it makes fine sense to me — from a religious/moral/philosophical perspective — for the Dalai Lama to say, essentially, please stop looking for me. Let me live my next life beginning, unburdened, as a child. But, as Thurman says and as Christopher Hitchens would have said, it's almost certainly political. (Or maybe Hitchens wouldn't have said "almost.")

Christopher Hitchens, meet Ron Johnson.

So Christopher Hitchens is expatiating in Slate about the dearth of decent political candidates in U.S. elections. He talks about talking to his "hosts in Connecticut" and his friends in Washington D.C., where he's lived for 3 decades. And he casts his eyes about to the states of New York and California. Having thus surveyed the American landscape, he opines that the "enthusiastic and intelligent people" are no longer "willing to give up potentially more lucrative careers" because of the risk to "their career and their family life" and "the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college." You just can't get "normal" people to run for office anymore.

What about Ron Johnson? Here's Politico, presenting the GOP Senate candidate in Wisconsin as emblematic of the new sort of politician who has emerged from the Tea Party movement:

Until last fall, Ron Johnson was just an intensely private guy with a good business and a nice house on Lake Winnebago. He kept a stack of Wall Street Journals next to his bed, folded just right so he wouldn't forget to read columnist Dan Henninger on this or Paul Gigot on that. A trim, silver-haired businessman, he was rich but unknown, even in this, his hometown, despite big donations to Lourdes High School and his thriving plastics company here.

Running for office never crossed his mind...

The Tea Party of Oshkosh was pulling together a rally for a fall event, featuring Joe the Plumber, the working man who emerged as a folk hero to small government conservatives in 2008. They needed a businessman to talk about what they saw as the scary, Big Brother approach to ObamaCare - and Johnson was happy to oblige. His daughter Carrie was born with a heart defect and saved by two doctors - a story anyone following this campaign has heard many times in ads and speeches ever since. So, he let loose with an attack on the demonization of doctors and, more broadly, the mortal threat to American exceptionalism.

The new law “will destroy our health care system,” Johnson said in an interview. “I am totally convinced of that.”

In hindsight, Johnson, in that speech, was capturing a major mood change in American politics that swept up not only business owners but also anti-government conservatives and skeptical independents. These groups, by late summer of 2009, had turned against the president and his party – and never returned.

Read the whole thing. You too, Mr. Hitchens.

Oh, it's not as if Hitchens didn't think of the Tea Party. After telling us about his elite circle of people who are so smart and informed but disinclined to enter the political fray, he does acknowledge that there is much more going on these days: his observation "may seem to discount or ignore the apparent flood of new political volunteers who go to make up the Tea Party movement." You can see the gears turning in his brain as he tries to get to the end of this article that began so easily, built on what looks to me like dinner-table conversations with his friends. How to dismiss these pesky teafolk of the flyover realms? Ah! He proclaims:

They come from a long and frankly somewhat boring tradition of anti-incumbency and anti-Washington rhetoric, and they are rather an insult to anyone with anything of a political memory. 

They are an insult. These people aren't worth talking to or about. Why, they aren't even people at all. They are an insult. 

Since when is it truly insurgent to rail against the state of affairs in the nation's capital? How long did it take Gingrich's "rebel" forces in the mid-1990s to become soft-bottomed incumbents in their turn? 

Questions. Questions. Speaking of untoned asses, shouldn't you have to get off yours and go out and talk to Americans in places like Wisconsin? One answer is that Hitchens is gravely ill, but he's still pouring out political commentary, and he's not asking for pity or showing any. He's as imperious as ever, and the respect he deserves for that bravery and effort ought to come in the form of serious engagement with his actual words he is... spewing.

"What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama — yet again—a central part of our own politics?"

Wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in January 2008, quoted in this morning's NYT in a review of a new collection of some of his essays. (The book is "And Yet...") From the review:

It’s a shame Mr. Hitchens isn’t here to comment on Donald Trump’s political moment. He saw in the ideas behind Ross Perot’s candidacy some of what he might have distrusted in Mr. Trump’s, that is the idea that “government should give way to management.”...

Yes, "management" — I was just saying that's Trump's "stock one-word answer to queries about how he'll do something he says he will do." So I dug up the old Hitchens essay. Here. It's in The Wilson Quarterly. The Wilson Quarterly? Egad. Woodrow Wilson. That name is mud this week. And the Hitchens essay is "Bring on the Mud/Mud-slinging in politics is a time-honored American tradition. But is there anything so bad about throwing a few political barbs?" It's not mostly about government as management, and the whole thing is on such a high level that I want to weep for our loss:

When asked, millions of people will say that the two parties are (a) so much alike as to be virtually indistinguishable, and (b) too much occupied in partisan warfare. The two “perceptions” are not necessarily opposed: Party conflict could easily be more and more disagreement about less and less—what Sigmund Freud characterized in another context as “the narcissism of the small difference.” For a while, about a decade ago, the combination of those two large, vague impressions gave rise to the existence of a quasi-plausible third party, led by Ross Perot, which argued, in effect, that politics should be above politics, and that government should give way to management. That illusion, like the touching belief that one party is always better than the other, is compounded of near-equal parts naiveté and cynicism.

By the way, the phrase "his name is mud" goes back to 1823:

1823   ‘J. Bee’ Slang 122   Mud, a stupid twaddling fellow. ‘And his name is mud!’ ejaculated upon the conclusion of a silly oration, or of a leader in the Courier.

But some people like to tie the phrase to Samuel Mudd, the doctor who treated the leg John Wilkes Booth broke. Whether Booth broke the leg when he jumped onto the stage in Ford's Theatre is a separate question and one question too many for this post of many questions.

"The event was disgraceful, so lame and mediocre that it is beyond parody."

That's Christopher Hitchens on why he walked out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner:

“It is impossible to decide which is more offensive: the president fawning over the press or the press fawning over the president. It expresses everything that the public means when they talk about inside-the-Beltway and access journalism.”

Mr. Hitchens didn’t storm out of the city. He stormed back to his house, where he co-hosted (along with fellow Vanity Fair contributor Todd Purdum and former Clinton aide Dee Dee Myers) the magazine’s post-dinner party, a much sought-after ticket.

Mr. Hitchens, a one-time pariah for his support of the Iraq invasion and his savaging of Mother Teresa, still serves as something of a social arbiter in Washington. And following the strange-bedfellows theme, Paul Wolfowitz, the embattled World Bank president, was chatting amiably in a roomful of journalists at Mr. Hitchens’ home.

Living like that, how do you stay outraged and sharp enough to know when other people are being lame and mediocre? So he's a "social arbiter," eh? Looking at him on TV, you'd think he was a social pariah. Funny how things are.

"I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate...."

I was quickly glancing at an article I thought might interest me enough to be bloggable, and the first thing I saw was this:

However, what Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate but who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is.

The first thing I thought was: Oh, somebody is trying to write like Christopher Hitchens. Let's see who. Oops! It is Christopher Hitchens. Hummph. That's odd. Clearly, when I know it's Christopher Hitchens, I have a much more positive reaction to his writing. In fact, even now, as I reread that, knowing it is Christopher Hitchens, I feel my hostility soften.

ADDED: LOLHitchens.

The White House inadvertently exposes the name of the CIA’s top officer in Kabul.

"The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his cover — the secrecy meant to protect his actual identity — pierced by his own government."

The only other recent case came under significantly different circumstances, when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was exposed as officials of the George W. Bush administration sought to discredit her husband, a former ambassador and fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq.

Valerie Plame was exposed. Nice use of the passive voice there by The Washington Post! As the top comment over there says:

So... Bush never actually outed a CIA agent —  Richard Armitage did — but that didn't stop the Left from engaging in a two year witchhunt. But Obama can out CIA agents with impunity, I guess, no investigation required?

What would the world be like if everyone talked like Christopher Hitchens?

Did you see Andrew Sullivan's "Quote of the Day" yesterday?

"JOE SCARBOROUGH: Mr. Hitchens, is Senator Clinton correct?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I have no idea. My presumption would be that she's just fooling with the numbers. But that's just because I don't like her and can't stand the sight of her."

Oh, that's rich. What would the world be like if everyone talked like Christopher Hitchens? I think it would be paradise!

Hitchens on the Christian right.

Christopher Hitchens digs up a kickass Barry Goldwater quote:

The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100%. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. . . . Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some god-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism.

And I use the term "kickass" with authority, as Hitchens also quotes Goldwater saying he wants to "kick Jerry Falwell in the ass."

Though I think Hitchens overstates how much of a grip the religious right had on American politics, I agree that they've overplayed their hand. He also aptly assesses the distance between the capitalism we rely on and the most fundamental statements in the New Testament, which "tells us to forget thrift and saving, to take no thought for the morrow, and to throw away our hard-earned wealth on the shiftless and the losers."

UPDATE: Well, "shiftless" and "losers" is not Jesus talk. You never get the impression, reading the New Testament, that Jesus thinks the poor are poor because they're lazy. There are some images of laziness in the New Testament, but they are about spiritual laziness. Still, as long as you repent in time, you will get the same reward as those who worked hard at their religion all their lives. And if those who did all the hard work complain, they are the ones who look bad:

"Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him." And he said to him, "Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's an excellent article on the connection between Protestantism and capitalism. (Via A&L Daily.)

Hitchens on Iraq.

If you missed Tim Russert's CNBC show tonight, try to catch one of the many repeat showings in the next day or so. The guests are Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens and the subject is, unsurprisingly, the current presidential election. It's hard to imagine a more cogent discussion of the election issues. Let me just set out one great exchange:

RUSSERT: What do we do about Iraq? What's going to happen? When American people are confronted, day in and day out -- a thousand soldiers killed -- 7,000 wounded and injured. There's a sense, obviously, in the world, that the United States will eventually say: Enough! We're getting out!

SULLIVAN: I hope to God not. If we need more troops, put more troops in there. ... You've gotta go through with this. And I think there's still a twenty, thirty percent chance of our succeeding.

HITCHENS: Let's take, I mean, let's put the case ... that the election takes place in a form that's not too contemptible, that people will say, okay, it's a good deal better than nothing, and that election is won by a party or coalition of parties that requests the United States to withdraw. What then? I mean, that would persuade me that you probably couldn't hope to hold on in the face of that. If, instead, we are fighting a war against people who are deliberately trying to sabotage the election, then there's obviously no question but that one must stay and mean that, under no circumstances, will we turn over a country of the importance of Iraq with the responsibilities we've inherited there to the Clockwork Orange fascists, the fundamentalists. They'll never go. The day will never come when they will own Iraq, and there will be no one in the United States who will be able to disagree with that even if every one of their sons has been killed in this war. Because it's self-evident. That's why, I think, there isn't more reaction to this combination of gross administration incompetence and these heartbreaking casualties. People know, in some way, that Iraq cannot be given over to Bin Ladenism. It doesn't need any further explanation. The President, actually, doesn't need to add any more. People have got this point.

Hitchens got that right, I think. Bush opponents who are tearing their hair out wondering why people aren't getting more upset about the conduct of the war in Iraq ought to see that.

Hitchens on Bush in Vanity Fair.

Hey, why doesn't Vanity Fair make its articles available online? I wanted to link to Christopher Hitchens' article about Bush and drinking: "The Teetotal Effect." It's the August issue, the one with Ronnie and Nancy on the cover. Nice article on Sasha Baron Cohen, whose new season of "Da Ali G Show" is about to begin on HBO (I've been catching all the old season episodes this week on HBO on Demand).

I'll just give you my favorite line from the Hitchens article (which rips armchair psychologists who label Bush a "dry drunk," calls AA a "quasi-cult," and thinks he can figure out that Bush was never much of a drunk):

Winston Churchill was half in the bag for the whole of the Finest Hour, if not longer.

His conclusion is that Bush should drink now and then! Hitchens doesn't like teetotaling, because why should you trust someone who can't trust himself? And: "Nobody likes a quitter."

"Fahrenheit 911" and theaters.

I see the Michael Moore film is opening in Madison on Friday, playing in the very theaters where a significant documentary would normally play, yet the local paper still found someone willing to assert that the film is being suppressed because it's not playing in the biggest, nicest theaters in town:

"This is not a small art film. This is not an indie film," [the local citizen] said. "It's a major film by a major production company that's got a full-page ad in the New York Times and big feature stories in almost every major newspaper in the U.S."

"Anything less than a big screening is an attempt to minimize it," she said. "Censorship of this kind really has no place in American society."

Oh, please. The theater in question is where "The English Patient" played and where similar high-tone films have been placed regularly for years. [ADDED: It's where "Pulp Fiction" played.] "Super Size Me" is playing there now. I like the more modern, stadium-seating theater better too, but it's hardly censorship when a private business decides to fill that theater up with action films and family fare. But if you go for theories like that, you'll probably enjoy the Moore film.

Christopher Hitchens is recommending that people who don't like Moore, rather than idiotically trying to get theaters not to show the film, go in large numbers and make noise:

By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation.

By the way, for what it's worth, my son John saw the Moore film in the same audience as Hitchens and notes that Hitchens sat alone in the middle of the front row and left very quickly afterwards. In case you're looking for insight into the ways of Hitchens. I see Lileks has some ideas on the subject.

"Literary puke Christopher Hitchens leveled a vile, hateful attack against [Wanda] Sykes that wasn't meant to be a joke."

Politics Daily's Tommy Christopher wails. It's is the first I'm seeing of this. Apparently, Hitchens said: "The president should be squirming in his seat. Not smiling. The black dyke got it wrong. No one told her the rules." Tommy chides:

I haven't heard "boo" out of the right denouncing Hitchens for this, yet they want to portray their poobah, Rush Limbaugh, who imagines that people expect him to receive anal sex from the President just because he's black, as the poor widdle victim here.

Uh... boo.

IN THE COMMENTS: I say the joke was funny and the President wasn't laughing at it. I get some pushback.

"You're disarming yourself in an important struggle if you can't produce a fucking sonnet."

Asserted Christopher Hitchens in an interview in 2010, which I'm reading a propos of a discussion we're having about the value of the childish humor that comes in the form of substituting one word for another. Hitchens and his friends — intelligent adults — cracked each other up over the years by redoing book titles, changing "man" to "cunt" or "love" to "fuck," which is endlessly productive of laughter if you give yourself permission to do it. But I drifted into the part of the interview that's about the importance — the sexual importance — of reciting poetry. Hitchens continues:

"What if I had to try on my own merits? You've got to have some sort of reserve arsenal." He looks incredulous when the photographer, a very beautiful young woman, expresses doubt about the efficacy of this seduction technique.

"Oh no, not if it's done right," he says knowingly. Go on then, I say. Give us a demonstration. "Maybe at lunch?" he suggests, cheering up immediately. "Let's have lunch, and make a day of it." And so, inevitably, we adjourn to the pub....