19 January 2009
Hitchens Still Loves Bush
For most people, the headline above would describe a healthy appetite, but Christopher Hitchens is telling the world one last time how great he thinks the departing president is. He tells us that he voted (having become an American citizen) for Barack Obama, and has no regrets yet for that, but also that he remains glad that Bush has been president for the past eight years instead of Al Gore or Senator Kerry. How one can endorse Bush yet vote for Obama is a mystery to me, unless Hitchens has something very specific to hate Senator McCain over. In any event, Hitchens stands by his man because Bush did what Democrats might not have dared. He toppled the terrible tyrant of Iraq, and Hitchens believes that history will vindicate him for that. History will have to forget the thousands who have died since the invasion who almost certainly would not have, not being the sort who stick their necks out, had Saddam survived, before it can confirm Hitchens's verdict. He also argues for some strategic necessity, based on a hysterical overestimate of Saddam's potential for mischief in the Persian Gulf. But Hitchens is hysterical when it comes to dictators. He's the sort who doesn't feel safe, apparently, as long as there are dictators anywhere. That suggests to me that Hitchens is as much a megalomaniac as any of the tyrants he denounces, since he cannot seem to stand the idea that there might be a part of the world where he wouldn't be welcome to do as he pleases. He's willing to pay any price in other people's lives to feel safe. He might even be willing to say that those who've died from acts of terror that Saddam would not have permitted are even better off dead, so long as they died free -- free according to a piece of paper or the will of President Bush. The Bush-Hitchens notion of freedom and how it's achieved is an obscene parody of the real freedom struggles carried out by people like Martin Luther King, so it's probably appropriate to have this garbage available today for comparison.
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3 comments:
"He's willing to pay any price in other people's lives to feel safe."
Obviously you don't know much about the man. He walked the walk and fought with the peshmerga against Saddam Hussein. He put his own life at risk after the American bombers went home in the First Gulf War. He fought for freedom with sweat and a gun, let him like a man who did the same with a stroke of the pen.
For who's freedom? And who asked him to? He most certainly didn't fight for my freedom, which has not been seriously threatened during the course of my life. Apparently you're just another cuntservative, echoing the rhetoric without any understanding of its real or implied meaning.
"Figure it out for yourself, or obey without question!"
Mr. Avitabile: Thanks for posting. I'm quite familiar with Hitchens, and my comment wasn't meant as a reflection on his courage or lack of same, but as a criticism of his excessive fanaticism. He can't overthrow every tyrant on earth alone, so someone's going to have to fight most of those battles in his place, probably despite not sharing his sense of threat or necessity. But in the end, no country is liberated unless its people do it themselves. Otherwise they only get scraps of paper with "a stroke of the pen" on them declaring them free, for what that's worth.
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