When the glitter fades...As you will all have noticed, I somehow seem to know almost everyone.
The down side of this is that I sometimes wish I didn't, or rather never had.
Christopher Hitchens is, these days, an urbane drunken fop who still lays some sort of claim to left principles, and argues that supporting the Iraq war was a form of those principles. He made something of a name in the US by arguing for the prosecution of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, and by debunking Mother Theresa - and by denouncing Bill Clinton as a rapist, a drug dealer, a war criminal, a signer of death warrants for political advantage and so on.
He is now, according to sources, acting as a consultant to the George W. Bush White House.
I used to say that those of us who had never supported the death penalty for anyone were entitled to condemn Clinton for making the decision that, to be effective in American politics, he had to be prepared to kill people because the American public believes in it - but that those people who, like Hitchens, admired Lenin and Trotsky, and the Marxist-Leninist concept of the necessary murder of entire classes, were not so entitled. If you regard condemning people to death as a legitimate form of politics, then it does not seem to me to make much difference whether you actually get the chance to do it..
<much, much more...>
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