The drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay speaks (does he ever stop?)

[swag]

via http://www.warandpiece.com

Badly needs a drink:

"I am a spiteful man. I believe my liver is diseased."
- F. Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
http://www.observer.com/pageone_newsstory1.asp

“George Packer has to live in the world of the readers of The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and so forth. Those of us who are strongly for the war are still in the minority. But, I don’t give a shit.”

That was how Christopher Hitchens summed up a recent spat he’d had with Mr. Packer over the war in Iraq—which played out in the pages of The New Yorker and then, oddly, made it to Page Six. “I feel no obligation to please or to massage the huge consensus of pseudo-intellectuals that formed against the policy ,” he continued, speaking by phone from Washington, D.C. “I have the feeling that George Packer wants to split the difference. Mr. Packer’s apologizing for his position. I’m not.”

The famously pro-war Mr. Hitchens was just coming off of a summer fellowship with the right-wing Hoover Institution, and his sentiments about “pseudo-intellectuals” and high-brow reporters speaks volumes about the current uneasy state of mind of those who get paid to share their opinions for a living. While the Vietnam War provoked widespread intellectual skirmishes, the war in Iraq has been one of low-simmering tensions and a fractured left. But as an eerily familiar debate over withdrawal gathers momentum, these various liberal camps of ego-brains have been quietly eyeing one another, wondering why they failed to sell their vision of a humane, pro-democracy war, and if anyone beyond their small universe even cares what they think. Not surprisingly, it has contributed to some widening schisms among writers who once considered themselves compatriots.

Mr. Hitchens, who writes for Slate and The Atlantic Monthly, clarified what world he’s currently living in. “It’s a matter of solidarity with the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, and trying to turn American policy in their favor,” said Mr. Hitchens. “I’m on their side, win or lose …. I could never publish an article saying, ‘Come to think of it, we never should have done this,’ because I could never look them in the face …. So, no, I don’t have any second thoughts.”

Beyond Mr. Hitchens’ world of certitude, things are more complicated. While liberal publications such as The Nation and The New York Review of Books have been steadily grinding out anti-war pieces, the left has suffered from the absence of some of its heavy hitters—Mr. Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, among others—who made high-profile alliances with the pro-invasion camp back in 2003. According to their critics, many of these “liberal hawks” haven’t yet published harsh critiques of the Bush administration’s handling of the war or re-assessments of their own positions—the kinds of pieces that might benefit the anti-war movement.

. . . more

[Fenris]

1. The cable was out at my parents house and I read a piece of his in VF.

It was about the South. A more odious piece of garbage I have yet to suffer through. The Knight Commander of Bombay Sapphire was really trying to connect with working class southerners. So much so that his piece was limited in its references to French writers, philosophers, and other thinkers the people of the working-class south don't give two fucks about.

Ooooh Christopher, you went to a NASCAR race. How big of you, baby. And you live in Washington, which is below the Mason-Dixon, so you think you are a Southerner.

I wish that miserable greasy prick would high-tail it back to Merry Olde England and leave us the fuck alone.

[Canuckistanian]

2. His hands are shaking.....

And pandering to the anti-intellectuals will do him no favor. And what is this "heavy-hitter" crap?

Since when has Hitch been a beacon for the left? I've only known him as a shill for the RW ever since PNAC and Chalabi exerted their ungodly influence on the aristocracy known as "The Bush Administration".

[Jim Sagle]

3. Long before that, actually. He was ranting about Clinton's cock back in

1998.

[Canuckistanian]

5. Really? How... enlightening...

In a Freudian sort of way.

[BillZBubb]

4. Give the WORTHLESS BASTARD an M16

and make him back up his own stupidity in, say, Fallujah.

The irony is Hitchens calling someone else a pseudo-intellectual. That buffoon has used his accent to pass for someone intelligent. Strip away the British accent, and he's another dumbass Freeper.