Reported on JU that Christopher Hitchens supports Kerry was an excusable falsehood owing to inbred snarling of Christopher himself in The Nation weekly. He still “slightly prefers Bush.” He mentioned his support of Kerry only sadistically so he could gleefully continue — second only to Limbaugh — his snide, vindictive remarks upon the liberal wing. He claims he can’t wait for a Kerry president reaction in the discovery “al-Zarqawi is more dangerous and better-organized foe than bin Laden...” as if Kerry with the grim reality of insurgency and beheadings did not already know this, though surely not equal to the global extent of bin Laden.
Hitchens slightly prefers Bush because he is impressed by the president’s “conversion from isolationism” implying Kerry’s “lapse into isolationism” is skeptical. Outrageously — but for his iconoclastic history — Hitchens decries the left’s “anybody but Bush” as nihilism and suggests the left would even prefer al Sadr without the slightest exploration as to what the cry really means. The mantra was blared out of the primaries that even Lieberman or a Graham would be a preference to Bush, if they were winnable. Hitchens has the audacity to accuse the left, without qualification, of sneers and smirks — this coming from one who invented them — over the deployment of troops in Afghanistan, as also holds true in Iraq, ignoring the obvious that both ventures were poorly executed and undermanned. Given the elections there apparently, the “astonishing success” he sees in Afghanistan, nonetheless, requires a much needed reality check into warlord domination and drug trafficking.
He dares the left to challenge “the battle against terrorism and the battle against dictatorship are the same thing.” With this tautological mantra, the left-wing apostate smugly avoids the implications of a foreign policy bogged down in routing all dictatorships while trying to ferret out pockets of terrorism — let alone evading the reality that a dictatorship, however it admittedly terrorizes its own people, seldom, unless territory is in dispute, take terrorism abroad.
I wish The Nation would stop kowtowing to this pompous miscreant.
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: October 30, 2004.
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