The damnation of St Christopher [Hitchens]

[unrepentant progress]

He was a bully. This may have been because he was so often drunk. But it is also because to him - both as a matter of character and, no doubt, owing to his long years on the left - this was a binary world, good and bad, right and wrong. In that, he had the appeal more of a Fox News personality than of an essayist dwelling in the grey areas.

Still, he was theatrical or clownish enough to be forgiven for his often near-violent opinions - "Oh that's just Hitch." Except he wasn't just theatrical. He wielded something close to an actual stick. He could be dangerous.

There was his malevolent animosity towards Bill Clinton, a companion piece to his blithe satisfaction, at age 14 (repeated with renewed satisfaction in his memoir), over JFK's assassination.

His issue, and his-near violent reaction, was about the relativism of American liberalism - its crafty compromises, its moral triangulation, its Clintonianism. The purity (and verbal violence) of the American right was much more to his temperament. Clinton, the master relativist, caused Hitchens to froth wildly - and to madly insist he was a rapist who should be in jail.

http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2013-04/01/michael-wolff-on-christopher-hitchens/viewall

[still_one]

1. He was on both sides of the spectrum, however, whether his opinion wa left or right he was never

Moderate

[unrepentant progress]

4. Aye that

And I will always appreciate the perspective that both he and Cockburn provided all those years ago on the pages of The Nation.

[longship]

2. He was also often very polite with his adversaries.

When he went on his book tour for God is Not Great he insisted on traveling first through the heart of the Bible Belt and not the east and west coasts where he would be received with open arms. What he found -- he spoke of it often -- was that people were always gracious and polite and would throng to his lectures and debates in spite of disagreements. Often he had to schedule an extra debate to accommodate the demand.

If you do not understand that Christopher Hitchens was neither a bully, let alone an unkind person, you don't know much about Hitch and you are erecting a straw man Hitchens to shoot down.

And when one starts an essay by saying he was a bully, one couldn't be more wrong about him. That sounds to me like the writer has confessed that he is about to bully Hitchens, who is not alive to defend himself, which he would do.

Defending ones position is not being a bully. Why do people opposing atheists always use such rhetoric? Bully? Militant? Strident? It's rubbish from people who have no intellectual argument so they resort to ad hominem.

I am sick to death of this shit. So was, I imagine, Hitch.

[Laffy Kat]

3. Yes, he was a bully, and a sexist, and a drunk. And I miss him. nt

[Archae]

5. Hitchens was an asshole.

His unabashed support of the Bush Iraq fiasco, and his smears of Bill Clinton showed just how craven he was.