1. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #70520 by Veratyr82 on September 15, 2007 at 9:39 pm

There's a very fun parlor game called "Moonbat Bingo" that has brought me many hours of delight. It can be played with a group or alone, and the rules are simple and flexible:

A player visits a fanatical left-wing forum and makes a post purporting the most outlandish beliefs supported by the most distorted of facts; the objective being to pull one over the denizens of the forum and to see how many of them agree with it ("Wingnut Bingo" is the right-wing counterpart.) Points are awarded for creativity, subtlety, absurdity, and popularity among the site's frequenters, and a fun time is usually had by all.

For my money, the most effective submission is the resilient canard that Saddam's regime was secular. My signature move was to lift passages from "Politics and the English Language" and adjust the wording to fit the matter. Thus: "While freely conceding that the Saddam regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Iraqi people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the broader struggle against Western hegemony and for secularism"

You of course, I hope, see that this is complete nonsense. Saddam openly sought alliances with theocratic elements, the most brutal of them being the murderous thugs in Sudan, whose hideous atrocities 'dae' clumsily compares to the efforts of the coalition (may this sinister instance of breathtaking stupidity haunt the rest of your life with sudden bursts of regret and anxiety). Saddam adopted the propaganda and regalia of the Islamists to buttress his failing regime; he began an enormous mosque-building project, he often wore the robes of the Imam, and he used the language of jihad to celebrate the attacks on 9/11:

"[W]e hope that the people of the United States will remember that the souls that were killed with US weapons and US machinations and plots can rise to God, lord of heavens and earth, to complain about the injustice of the United States. In fact, God, the omnipotent and great, can see. When God strikes, no one can stand in the way of his power."

It would take an intense session of mental calisthenics to rationalize the supposed secular nature of man whose pronouncements are more fanatical than those of the relievedly late Jerry Falwell, but I suspect the lack of cerebral effort is the problem to begin with.

2. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #70468 by Veratyr82 on September 15, 2007 at 3:50 pm

Windwalker said:

"Hitchens is as much a part of the manipulative media as any journalistic hack. To quote Ed Herman:

"Christopher Hitchens is a real asset to the war party, because he is a facile writer and covers over by vigorous assertion and imagery his new reactionary politics and the feeble intellectual defenses he musters for it. His value is enhanced by the fact that he is a "straddler," that is, a man in transition from an earlier left politics to apologetics for imperial wars... and a harsh critic of Kissinger and Pinochet. He is therefore presentable as a member of the "rational left" or left that has "seen the light." Such folks are much honored by the mainstream media."

Few people have devoted their lives to distorting the truth more than Ed Herman, a man who denied that there was anything like a massacre at Srebrenica, yet seemed fit to deem the media coverage surrounding a photograph of an emaciated man in a Serbian death camp a "bloodbath". He makes molehills of mountains and mountains of molehills; it's his profession and his pathology. Even Chomsky, who co-authored a very tedious book with Herman, is afraid to stand by his man. To quote Christopher Hitchens:

"I then took the chance of asking (Chomsky) whether he still considered Ed Herman a political co-thinker. Herman had moved from opposing the bombing of Serbia to representing the Milosevic regime as a victim and as a nationalist peoples' democracy. He has recently said, in a ludicrous attack on me, that the "methods and policies" of the Western forces in Kosovo were "very similar" to the tactics of Al Qaeda, an assertion that will not surprise those who are familiar with his style. Chomsky knew perfectly well what I was asking, and why, but chose to respond by saying that he did not regard anybody in particular as a co-thinker. I thought then that this was a shady answer..."

Moving from the delicious ad hominem to the rancid substance of Herman's argument, I think any fair minded viewer of the videos that frequently appear on this site will conclude that no media outlet has control of Christopher Hitchens, and that he is more often then not positioned as the antagonist on news programs. It pleases me to see that Herman knows that most people regard his faction as the "insane left". (If Herman can invent phrases to scare quote, why can't I?)