Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Christopher Hitchens is Waterboarded

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Article

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3 comments:

Mendez Tropical Pool & Patio said...

Glad to see it.

Hitchens is known for parting with the "The Nation" and the left around 2002 because people like Chomsky, Edward Said and Norman Finkelstein were saying the U.S. was fucking itself w/ its foreign policy. Hitchens disagreed.

He became a staunch supporter of the Iraq War and Bush (which simply means denigrating opponents) and began writing for rightist pubs like "The City Journal" (where Judith Miller now works) and "Weekly Standard" (edited by Wm. Kristol, owned by Rupert Murdoch).

In my opinion he's a hack who for whatever reason tried to discredit the left basically from the inside. (He wrote for "The Nation" for years.) Now he writes shit for right pubs and (ostensibly) liberal pubs like Slate and Salon. A regular jack or all trades??

So does this waterboarding video mean that Hitchens is anti-torture? Is he now parting with the right?

You can read Hitchens' childish rants in "The Nation" (circa 2002) in which he tries to provoke Chomsky and others and lure them into his retarded debate.

Hitchens rants:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011008/hitchens20010924

Chomsky responds:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/chomsky20011001

Hitchens responds to Chomsky:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011022/hitchens

Chomsky responds:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/chomsky20011004

Jamon said...

thanks for posting those article links, mike. i agree hitchens. in these articles, he writes like a transparent firebrand, craving attention. i do appreciate his writings on atheism, though, specifically "God is Not Great."

a regular hack of all trades, perhaps?

and, just to clarify, hitchens' response to chomsky, "A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky," is at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/hitchens20011004

Annalee said...

Yeah, my first thought when I saw this video was, "I'd kind of like to waterboard Christopher Hitchens myself..." But I still thought it was interesting, if for no other reason than that I didn't know what waterboarding really was before. Among his many loathsome traits and whiny offensive pieces I count his somewhat recent treatise, "Why women are not funny." I believe it was in Vanity Fair. Anyway fuck that. I'm a woman, and I am hilarious. And I'm going to hilariously waterboard Hitchens if I ever meet him on the street. All that said, I agree with Jamon, when he talks about atheism, he is usually on point.