Bill Maher tonight?

[kimmerspixelated]

I know he's losing some fans lately, but like everyone in his line of work, he has to stoke the fire sometimes...not that it's forgivable, but just wondering who is on and if it's worth staying up for... Thanks!

[rcrush]

1. Mos Def

Bill Maher will probably make fun of him for believing 9/11 was a conspiracy.

[tridim]

2. That's too bad, last week's show was one of the best I've seen.

It's new this week according to my TV schedule.

[babylonsister]

3. Here's the guest line-up:

Tonight's Guests
Bill Bradley, former US Senator
Christopher Hitchens, author
Mos Def, actor/artist
Salman Rushdie, novelist

[stopbush]

5. Hitchens is always worth hearing, as is his bud Rushdie.

[GreenTea]

6. Fucking Hitchens...maybe he'll fall off his chair & provide some entertainment because

his republican point of view most times is so full of holes and shit!

[stopbush]

8. Hitchens is not a R. He voted for Obama.

He supported bush's war, that's it. That's the big bug-a-boo everybody has against Hitchens. Well, guess what - John Kerry and Hillary and Biden and a fuck lot of other people also supported bush's war. At least Hitchens' support of the war was based on a worldview he holds, rather than being a decision of political expediency, as it was with Hillary. He believes that you don't turn the other cheek with enemies like al Quaeda - he believes you beat the shit out of them.

Hitchens is extremely intelligent, well-read and well-expressed. The "he's a drunk R" shit is untrue, childish - and was old a couple of years ago.

I'll be listening to Hitch tonite, for no other reason than he'll probably be forced to provide corrective detail and context to Bill's surface-only comprehension of most issues.

[MADem]

9. I wonder if he's on or off the wagon. He dried out for awhile, but it never lasts.

He's always good for a tirade against Mother Theresa or Princess Diana when he's in his bloodshot-eyed, sweaty cups.

[stopbush]

11. I have no problem with Hitch going after the fraud that was Mother Teresa,

in his cups, or not...and I'm not talking about her struggle with her faith being the fraud. Read his book on her. You'll be shocked.

[MADem]

12. Mother Theresa, for all her faults, did a lot of good. She was an imperfect human.

She did more than most were willing to do. She helped MANY.

I'd like to see "Hitch" wipe a few leper's asses and see how well his attitude holds up.

[stopbush]

13. Mother T didn't even provide rudimentary medical attention to the

sick who came to her "care centers." She "cared for" the dying, but she did not treat them. The reason she didn't treat then was because the philosophy of her order is the belief that they (the nuns) will become closer to god by observing the suffering of others. She "helped" no one, at least if one considers that such help was medical in nature. Indeed, her ideas of what constituted proper medical attention had the effect of allowing people to die in her "care centers" of curable diseases.

The only thing she promised her charges was a "Catholic death," whatever the hell that was.

You've bought the PR on her. You believe the sick came to her, she gave them adequate if not superior medical attention and helped to ease their suffering and eventual death. The truth isn't so warm and fuzzy. Hundreds of millions of dollars came into her coffers. Did that money go into care for the afflicted? Nope. Some of it was used to open additional "care centers" with the same lack of medical treatment and the same dedication by the nuns to watch people suffer so they (the nuns) would get closer to god. The remainder sits in the Vatican vaults.

You probably won't bother exploring past your preconceptions, but here ya go:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html

[MADem]

14. I could also say that you bought the "Hitchens" PR on her.

I rather doubt that, if she was such an unmitigated bitch, that people from every station, from all walks of life, from the poorest of the poor to the wealthiest in the world, would have passed by her bier with such reverence. You're buying Hitchens' insistence that an old crone was able to pull of a massive con. I don't think so.

I am very well aware of Hitchens' rants about the woman. When he's not on her like a cheap suit, the drunkard is bellowing about Princess Diana in similar fashion. Just because he bloviates like Stewie Griffin about her doesn't make his ramblings true. An affected accent won't turn a lie into fact.

I think Teresa was acerbic, no nonsense, and anything BUT "warm and fuzzy." She often wasn't very nice. However, I also simply don't think Hitchens' drunken, angry "truth" is the only truth. Love the way Hitchens has her "conspiring" with the Vatican, when every account I've heard is that she fought with the Pope and clearly wasn't intimidated by him. She also was less than certain of her faith, as the letters released well after her death reveal.

Hitchens hates the Catholic Church as much as Andrew Sullivan adores it. I tend not to trust people who are trying to sell me a line of crap, be it "love it" or "hate it," about any organized religion or charitable arm.

Odds are good some priest interfered with Hitchens in his youth, and he'll spend the rest of his life alternating between getting very drunk and seeking revenge against the RC church for his loss of innocence. He'd be better off getting some therapy and directly confronting his accuser, IMO.

[stopbush]

15. Why not address the merits of Hitchens' arguments which he documents and

sources, rather than engaging in an ad hominem attack? And, I must say, yours is an example of the dictionary definition of an ad hominem attack - not a single fact stated, just an attack on the man's character and personality with a healthy dose of bizarre and sick speculation thrown in for good measure.

Read what you've written - it's really quite loathsome to hear such shit coming from a fellow DUer.

[MADem]

17. His sources are other people with similar opinions.

It's not an ad hominem attack to call a bullshitter a bullshitter. Not all arguments are created equal--some are pure shit, some are part-shit, and the most compelling ones of all mix grains of truth with chunks of horseshit, so that the gullible listener/reader will keep digging for that pony. That's Hitchins' stock in trade.

I do read what I've written, and it's quite astonishing that you'd call me "loathsome" simply because I find the rantings of a vicious, crude, cruel, former-rightwing/now-leftwing-because-it-pays-more, drunken asshole "loathsome."

You need to grow up, stop worshipping at the altar of Hitchins Horseshit, and realize that you don't own "The DU Opinion." You're quite free to disagree with me, but when you start characterizing me because I don't share what I view as your halfassed opinion, you've lost the argument.

[stopbush]

18. "His sources are all people with similar opinions?"

Sorry, but what you have written above tells me you are talking through your hat...no comment on what part part of your body your hat is currently covering. If you have read the book, then present a serious counter argument with some data to back it up, rather than further engaging in "an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made" - ie: the dictionary definition of an ad hominem attack (cite: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ad%20hominem). "It's not an ad hominem attack to call a bullshitter a bullshitter." Says you. The language disagrees.

BTW, have you read the book? Be honest. Could you answer that simple question without beating around the bush? Thanks. I'd think any effort to "win the argument" would include having read the book in question.

BTW - Hitchens was a Marxist and continues to be a leftist. His occasional embrace of a rw position hardly makes him a right-winger.

And, sorry, but I don't worship at the altar of Htchens. I disagree with his support of bush's war, not that there's anything earth shattering about that disagreement. And I don't find him to be infallible - of late, he's been repeating the urban myth that the World Series is so named because it was first sponsored by the NY World newspaper.

If you've got the goods to disprove Hitchens on Teresa, then present the evidence. I'm open to being enlightened. But spare us your whining righteous indignation and the name calling.

[MADem]

21. No, I'm not--even the NEWSWEEK review of his book called his source for that book "disaffected"

and the book itself (a painfully thin tome) shy on something most writers employ--actual research....which is hardly a ringing endorsement. To put it kindly.

So, the person talking through their hat, apparently, is you.

I have read excerpts from that ninety eight page piece of shit. It's trash and he wrote it first, to make a fast buck (he probably had a load of overdue bar bills) and second, to titilate easily led, fact-free people who love controversy and delight in any sort of rude, crude behavior, even stupid behavior, that has a tinge of outrage. The work is crap.

Hitchens was not always a leftist. Do know your subject matter before you lecture me--it helps your veracity.

Here, a cite:

Christopher Hitchens, the Washington-based British journalist, has made a career of being a bad boy. But in attacking Mother Teresa of Calcutta-in The Nation and Vanity Fair, in the British documentary "Hell's Angel" and now in The Missionary Position (98 pages. Verso. $12.95)--he's found the muckraker's holy grail: the story to offend everyone. "Who would be so base," Hitchens writes in his foreword, "as to pick on a wizened, shrivelled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?" Three guesses. But he's got his reasons.

Hitchens's Mother Teresa is an antiabortion "demagogue" and a "servant of earthly powers," cozying up to such slime as S&L swindler Charles Keating, on whose behalf she wrote to Judge Lance Ito during his 1992 trial. In a well-reasoned reply, a deputy D.A. explained to her how Keating stole the money he'd donated and suggested she return it to "its rightful owners"; she never answered. The editor of the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet was "disturbed" by haphazard procedures and inadequate management of pain at Mother Teresa's apparently well-financed Calcutta clinic. "I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor," Mother Teresa has said. Yet, Hitchens notes, she herself has "checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West." She does charitable work, he argues, "not for its own sake but . . . so that she may one day be counted as the beatific founder of a new order and discipline within the Church itself."

Disquieting as his specifics are, Hitchens hasn't done the extensive investigative work to justify his scorched-earth condemnation. He quotes one disaffected member of Mother Teresa's order who claims some $50 million accumulated in a single checking account in the Bronx and that the vast sums taken in never reached the poor. But Hitchens has no idea how much the order takes in or what it costs to run its far-flung operations. And his flippant tone--why the title's sophomoric double-entendre?--and refusal to take into account Roman Catholic dogma make us distrust his objectivity.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/104081

How you can suggest that he is a leftist, and then, in virtually the same breath, dismiss his support of "Bush's war" makes me wonder if you actually understand the meaning of the term.

You know, you can't get more "lefty" than the old World Socialists, now, can ya? Here's a little essay on your buddy Hitch courtesy of those folks: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/hitc-n27.shtml The US election
Journalist Christopher Hitchens: from "left" charlatan to mouthpiece for the Republican right


This article is full of all sorts of Hitchens "specialness" that refutes your assertion about the drunkard's "staunchly held" views:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/seymour261105.html

Here, a sample:

Coterminous with Hitchens' shift on imperialism was a definite move to the right. He ceased, for instance, to call himself a socialist. He began to reminisce about his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, and expatiate on the virtues of capitalism. Capitalism was more revolutionary than its opponents, he suggested. In fact, Hitchens went so far as to say that he regretted not having voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and that he had actually wanted her to win. Unemployment, union-bashing, homophobia, and nationalism are of little consequence in this equation, since the "radical, revolutionary forces" were led by the Right, who broke the "political consensus." This is a fairly consistent theme for Hitchens, inasmuch as he needs to believe that whatever his position is on a given topic on a given day, it is contrary to whatever the consensus is.

Perhaps you might want to read some of "Hitch's" Iraq War cheerleading articles. FWIW, he's not cheerleading from the "left" side of the field. He wrote at least one for the WEEKLY STANDARD (not a terribly lefty publication, in case you didn't know):
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/995phqjw.asp?pg=2
A War to Be Proud Of
From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
by Christopher Hitchens
09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47



Here--a small chunk of shit from your lefty buddy:

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"

I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep and bitter is the split within official Washington, most especially between the Defense Department and the CIA, that any claim made by the former has been undermined by leaks from the latter. (The latter being those who maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan, that Saddam Hussein was both a "secular" actor and--this is the really rich bit--a rational and calculating one.)

There's no cure for that illusion, but the resulting bureaucratic chaos and unease has cornered the president into his current fallback upon platitude and hollowness. It has also induced him to give hostages to fortune. The claim that if we fight fundamentalism "over there" we won't have to confront it "over here" is not just a standing invitation for disproof by the next suicide-maniac in London or Chicago, but a coded appeal to provincial and isolationist opinion in the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that American civilians are as near to the front line as American soldiers.

It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates. But in reply, why bother to call a struggle "global" if you then try to localize it? Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration....At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions...

He also wrote a book, citing the HUMANITARIAN reasons for the Iraq War. Oh, yes...he did!

http://www.slate.com/id/2124157/

While you're at it, read THIS Hitch beauty: Bush's Secularist Triumph
The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, at 10:34 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2109377/

Sure doesn't sound like he's identifying himself as a lefty there, now, wouldn't you concur?

Sorry--you're wrong. Hitchens changes positions like people change their underwear. He's a goader, a shitstirrer, and really, an asshole. If you say up, he says down. If you say black, he says white. And he does it just to be obstreperous. The pro-war Hitchens IS, as the also annoying, but certainly more amusing, Gorgeous George Galloway famously noted,

"A drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/may/18/usa.iraq

And his supporters are people who like seeing drunken popinjays bloviate for the sheer sake of bloviation.

[stopbush]

22. So, you didn't read "The Missionary Position."

"I have read excerpts from that ninety eight page piece of shit." says you. Why didn't you just say so a couple of posts ago?

However, it seems that you DID read a review of the book in Newsweek. Too bad you use the Newsweek review to imply that the only way Hitchens could come up with a negative view of MT was by interviewing a sole disaffected worker from Teresa's gang and nobody else. Why no mention of Dr Robin Fox's first-hand account of the squalor and lack of proper medical attention at Teresa's center in Calcutta as reported in The Lancet in 1994 and cited by Hitchens (pgs 38-39, TMP) in the book under discussion? BTW - Fox was not only a doctor. He visited MT's center as a fan, expecting to be favorably impressed with her work. He wasn't. He was disgusted. Doesn't sound like a source who "agreed with Hitchens" going in, does it?

M-kay.

Thanks for the response. :shrug:

As to Hitchens' leftist bona fides:

"Hitchens was educated at The Leys School, Cambridge (his mother arguing that "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it"),<6> and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics, and economics. During his years as a student at Oxford, he was tutored by Steven Lukes.

"Hitchens joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967 along with the majority of the Labour students' organization, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam."<7> Shortly thereafter, Hitchens joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect."<8> He became a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism,<9> which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism". In addition, like many who came of age politically in the late 1960s, Hitchens was a great admirer of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Hitchens has remarked that " death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do — fought and died for his beliefs."<10>" In the 1970s, he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, among others, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. At the New Statesman, he became known as an aggressive left-winger, stridently attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War and the Roman Catholic Church. After emigrating to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation. While at The Nation he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America." - Source, Wikipedia

How does the above not square with my statement that Hitchens started out as a Marxist and still has leftist tendencies? He was born in 1949 and joined the Labour Party at age 16. Are you saying he was "not always a leftist" BEFORE age 16?

You then cite a number of Hitchens articles where he supported bush's war, a point that I have already made myself. What's your point? Are you agreeing with me, or challenging me?

For good measure, you throw in a few articles written by others whose opinion of Hitchens matches your own. So what?

Who's lecturing who sans facts?

[kimmerspixelated]

7. Thanks BSISTER!

[GreenTea]

4. Last week was an excellent show. But Mahr is so uninformed sometimes on important progressive issues

and actually repeats and believes republican talking points & spin.

[stopbush]

10. Yep. He has no depth on the issues, so he never has a comback when an R

deflects his original thought, which is usually delivered as a canned monologue.

Bill can't debate because he doesn't have the facts.

I've said it before: Real Time is a show where the guests are allowed to speak at length, rather than in soundbites, yet at the end of the show one feels that every guest was short changed, and it seems like nothing of importance got said.

[Cleita]

16. I had no idea who Mos Def was but I really liked him

and his opinions hit home with me.

[walldude]

19. He had the only solution to the "nuke" problem yet

Rushdie and Hitchens looked at him like he was crazy. "Disarm? What are you nuts? Hezbolla has the mushroom cloud on their flag!!!! Gimme a fucking break. None of these terrorist groups have the knowledge or finances to create an atomic bomb from scratch, which means their only way of getting one is to steal it or buy it. If there was no way to buy one or steal one then the problem wouldn't exist.

[stopbush]

20. Who doesn't have the knowledge how to build a nuke?

That's pretty much in the public domain, don'tcha think? Sure, they may not have the money or materials to build one NOW, but who says they won't in the next 25 years? There was a time when India and Pakistan and Israel also "hadn't the knowledge or finances to create an atomic bomb from scratch." Did that stop them? Did Israel steal or buy their nukes, or did they develop them?

Rushdie and Hitch were right to look at Mos like he was crazy. Crazy and simplistic. Their point was that the Islamic terrorists are the only people in the world averring that they wish to develop a nuke to USE it. Every other country/entity that develops a nuke says that it's only for the sake of deterrence, not be assigned a target and launched ASAP. Do you not find that a significant difference?

Universal disarmament of nukes does not remove the knowledge required to build one from the world, at least as long as you can find it on the internet.