Following on the heels of Christopher Buckley's surprising endorsement of Obama, now Hitchens comes on board:
On “the issues” in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their “debates” have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.
I don't agree with that first sentence, but well said otherwise!
Hitchens also provides a little mea culpa for his earlier contrarian defense of Sarah Palin:
The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her--her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations--were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.
Hard to argue with that!
This being Hitchens, he can't resist opening his column with some gratuitous shots at the Clintons, and ending with some gratuitous shots at critics of the war (about which Hitchens' early prognostications were wrong n every particular). Still, with Hitchens you have to take what you can get, and this is mostly a good column throughout.
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So when Hitchens puts something online, is that called a "Hitchen Post"?
Always hard to know quite where you'll stand with Chris Hitchens. On the one hand, I'm quite happy to have ANY prominent figure endorse Obama, and I think Hitchens' insights about religion have been unduly ignored or caricatured.
On the OTHER hand, the REASON Hitchens' insights have been ignored or caricatured is that he makes it so easy. If - as seems to be the case - the more honest and straightforward one is in criticizing religion, the less productive one's criticisms will be, Hitchens is at the far end of both spectra. He's a jerk in many of the right ways, but he's SUCH a jerk that nobody listens who doesn't already agree.
sohbet