Lower & Lower

Referred the other day to Hitchens's recent appearance on MSNBC, where he casually picked apart Ron Reagan Jr. with little visible effort (to the online hoots of warbloggers and their lib cronies). As I suggested then, Reagan should disappear for a time and work on his debating skills. There's no excuse to have the present-day Hitchens beat you so soundly, esp when he leaves so many openings for an effective counterattack.

Take Hitch's ongoing insistence that before the US/UK invasion and occupation, Saddam's Iraq was a leading terror state, home to international criminals and assorted vermin which, taken alone, justified the invasion. Reagan stepped right into this simple trap by suggesting, at least where American lives where concerned, Iraq posed no real threat. Hitchens then dropped several names: Zarqawi, Abu Nidal and Abdul Rahman Yassin, who was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. A terror celeb roster meant to shut Reagan down, which it pretty much did. Clearly, Reagan didn't know much about these figures, apart from some general information. But had he committed to a little study, he could've responded to Hitchens with:

"Well, Christopher, if memory serves, Yassin was jailed by Saddam (this after the FBI interviewed Yassin stateside and then released him) and according to '60 Minutes,' he was twice offered to the US, once to Clinton, the second time to President Bush, and the US rejected both offers. Plus, I don't seem to recall you making much of Yassin's presence in Iraq as an excuse to invade. Maybe I missed it, but I remember you making much more noise about WMD which you were convinced Saddam had seriously stockpiled. I can see why you've shifted arguments.

"As for Zarqawi, yeah, he's pretty disgusting, but he's hardly unique in the Middle East. I mean, we backed similar cutthroats in Afghanistan in the 1980s who performed equally grisly acts as has Zarqawi. And I don't recall Abu Nidal being all that active in the decade before he died. Indeed, given that most of his targets were PLO figures and other Palestinian nationalists that Israel and its supporters reviled, I'm surprised that Nidal earned such a terrible reputation. As you yourself once put it in the London Observer, there were many in the Palestinian movement who thought Nidal was a double-agent, and you respectfully cited Patrick Seale's book on Nidal which advanced this hypothesis.

"And when it comes to harboring terrorists, how much longer do we Americans provide sanctuary to Luis Posada, the Cuban terrorist? Or what about our harboring Emanuel Constant, the Haitian paramilitary thug? And what's been your feeling about working alongside such terrorists as John Negroponte and Elliott Abrams? My guess is that what those two did in Central America in the 1980s far outweighs whatever charges you can bring against Zarqawi and Nidal."

Of course, Reagan wouldn't make such an argument. And with Hitchens's propensity to bellow and interrupt, I doubt that he'd get that far if he did. But try one must, and the above was certainly better than what Reagan put forth.

It's funny how Hitchens now clings to the Saddam-harbored-terrorists-and-thus-was-a-dire-threat line. I went back to read all I could find that he wrote about this threat in real time, and there really wasn't much. His April 16, 1983 piece in the Spectator about meeting with Nidal raised none of the alarms that he raises today, and that's when Nidal was still operating (as Hitchens then noted). It's much like his continual (and false) contention that he turned in favor of regime change in Iraq in early 1991. When you read his stuff from that period, no such turn is mentioned. There's a good reason for that: it didn't happen until 11 years later.

In other words, Hitchens, post-invasion, is trying desperately to find any justification that will stick. His original defense of the invasion, "just you wait" till you see all that WMD, is no longer useful. So, as my fantasy Reagan put it, he must shift ground, even if it means dragging in the late Leon Klinghoffer, who was killed by Nidal on the Achille Lauro in 1985, as a bloody prop to distract the audience. Note that in neither of Hitchens's collections from this period is a single mention of Klinghoffer's death. Yet now, Hitchens can't stop talking about him. You'd think that if Klinghoffer's murder so sickened Hitchens and reinforced for him the criminality of terror against civilians, he'd catalogue something about it at that time. But he didn't. Today, however, Klinghoffer serves a higher and better purpose -- getting Hitchens out of rhetorical corners.

Pretty disgusting stuff. But it doesn't stop there. Max Blumenthal unearthed a couple of emails that takes all this even lower. An outraged viewer of MSNBC wrote the network to complain about Hitchens's appearances. This inspired Hitchens to reply --

"Do you imagine that I am talking only to you when I appear on TV? You probably do. Check your fillings. A related delusion overtakes you when you assert that I am on MSNBC all the time. It might seem like that to a person who sits in front of the set playing with his needle-dick and plotting a later email complaint, but I have appeared perhaps a dozen times on the network in the whole course of this year. It must be awful to have your life. Try and keep your lonely misery to yourself, though. Nobody else is interested."

Dunno if he noticed that it was a woman he was addressing. But the above does show us how absolutely batshit bitter Hitchens has become, and why he's content to "debate" the likes of Reagan Jr. He knows he won't be seriously challenged, and therefore he can say anything in order to defend what is increasingly indefensible.

There will be more of this, sad to say. I'm starting to suspect that chat show producers are booking Hitchens to serve as a sideshow grotesque. He's certainly acting the part.

UPDATE: Hitch Heart Rove -- or, How Deceiving The Public In Order To Promote Imperial War Is A Radical Act (complete with I.F. Stone quote!).

Grotesque, indeed.