How did this piece slip into the American Unconservative? For Pat Buchanan, neocon is nothing more than a code word for GOP Jews.
NAILED it! ping
If adversity to religion is considered, you can find a plethora of people right here at FR who are extremely hostile to Christianity. Therefore, this author would condemn them, too, like he did Hitchens, right?
Like David Horowitz, Christopher Hitchens knows the Left inside and out. Therefore I find him very useful.
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
They're going fast!
The words Hitchens had for President Reagan upon his passing were despicable. I haven't cared too much for his input since then.
A really good read, the Bolsheviks were really a sad lot.
Hmm. I admit to not knowing much about Hitchens but his name.
But I admit, I watched him completely evicerate Galloway in that debate they had, and...I didn't know the guy was a Trotskyite...
Hell, I nearly thought of him as a personal hero the way he stuck a pin in that bag of obnoxious hot air, Galloway...
I know there are a few atheists on this forum. According to you, are they Bolsheviks too?
This is really quite a good and insightful piece. I have liked Hitchens ever since he came out slugging somewhere in the middle of Clinton's reign of terror. I was always aware of his Leftist "past" and how much of it he still carried/carries around with him, but this essay really dealt with it all comprehensively and chronologically. Hitch is so powerful a spokesman for "the Right" to some degree BECAUSE he still has within himself sizable quantities of Leftist conceit, duplicity, and wishful thinking. Leaving some of this baggage behind is a process Hitchens will go through as a way of dealing with himself as an engaged intellectual in the postwar European sense, alive in this moment of history.I have full faith that he will change and change some more, as the author also shows he does, in his final sentences. What I would really like to see is a debate between Hitchens and David Horowitz , also a former Leftist who has more thoroughly shed his bad habits of thought and mind than Hitchens has. It will probably never happen, because it would lapse into too much subtlety too quickly to be of interest to more than a few hundred people in the English=speaking world. For the time being, we will have to be content to see how Hitchens currently deals with the likes of George Galloway, with Galloway serving as a stand-in for the nearly dead Hitchens of the past, who remembers that some of his allegiances and judgements about the geopolitical scene were not always as "Right" as the ones he holds today.
And the sight of Pat Buchanan's mouthpiece calling someone "bigoted" is pretty hilarious.
But Hitchens kept referring to his credentials as an Internationalist, which, since everyone here is into "code words", means Trotskyite.
So he admits it, and does so in an approving manner about aggressive war, as long as it's for "a good cause".
All doubts about what he really stands for were erased for me by that. No one should think that it's just name calling.
Needs a strange bedfellows alert.
The Communist Parties worldwide protested to save Saddam Hussein's regime.
And paleo-cons cheered them on.
Now they are dissing Hitchens for standing up for the oppressed of Iraq.
Why dont they save their red-baiting for, say, ANSWER or William Kunstler, or Cindy Sheehan roving band of leftist fellow travellers?
Hitchens isn't a "neo-con", or any kind of a Con for that matter.
He is hawkish on foreign policy and terrorism,period.
He is still a Trotsyite at heart.
He wrote a vile book about Mother Theresa and an even worse one about the Pope.
However, I can understand being extremely bitter toward him for many things he has said in the past on other issues.
I won't trust him until he says he was wrong on those things. He has done much harm in the past. Until he repents he is not to be trusted.
Hitchens is an atheist. So what? Does that negate the validity and logic of his political arguements? I hope your intellect is not as stunted as your posts imply.
Hitchens is entertaining.
Sometimes I can look beyond what I don't like.
I do the same with Vanessa Redgrave as an actress.
but I can't with most
bttt
I would like to see him delivered and saved. I pray for him. It's surely is not easy walking around hating God and his people. It is for the likes of him (as well as all of us) that Jesus died. I use to be a Christian mocking atheist because I thought Christians naive and simple but I never hated them. I actually wished that I could be so "stupid" as to gain comfort from a fairy tale. If you don't believe that God exist what is the point of hating those that do?
I would like to see him delivered and saved. I pray for him. It's surely is not easy walking around hating God and his people. It is for the likes of him (as well as all of us) that Jesus died. I use to be a Christian mocking atheist because I thought Christians naive and simple but I never hated them. I actually wished that I could be so "stupid" as to gain comfort from a fairy tale. If you don't believe that God exists what is the point of hating those that do?
Ah yes Religion, the last refuge of the bankrupt political ideologue. Unable to defeat Hitchens ideas on the merits, the Neo-isolationist of the Moveon.org "conservatives" suddenly discover RELIGION, as a rational to cling to their intellectually bankrupt Isolationist dogma. Pathetic and weak even for your lot.