Drink scotch whisky all night long and die behind the keyboard
By Maybe Ted Barlow is being a bit unfair–why look at this gem of insight today from Mickey Kaus:
Prodigal star Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens has returned to
that magazine’s pages with a short essay on why he would “slightly prefer” that President Bush win the election. But just try to find it from The Nation’s home page. …
Since I’m sure you’re as appalled as I am that The Nation would bury this masterpiece by relegating it to the print edition and the table of contents page you see immediately after you click on the issue date, I provide the link here . But consider the brilliance of Kaus’s implied point: The Nation is biased against Bush’s re-election. No kidding! Anyway, ever the masochist I decided to actually read the goddamned article, which is just the pompous, idiotic, incoherent strawman-burning you’d expect. To single out any passage would be like trying to identify the very worst episodes of Home Improvement, and isolating the passages makes them more rational that when embedded in the entirely muddled whole, but I’ll try anyway:
Ever since 1980, when I bet the liberals of New York that Reagan would win easily (and didn’t have to buy my own lunch for months afterward),I have sympathized with the “prisoners’ dilemma” that faces liberals and leftists every four years. The shady term “lesser evil” was evolved to deal with this very trap. Should you endorse a Democrat in whom you don’t really believe?
Well, I’m certainly convinced that Hitch has no idea what a prisoner’s dilemma is. And that Hitch has dodged the question of why, if I’m not enthusiastic about a mildly progressive Dem, I should therefore vote for a brain-dead reactionary instead.
I take pleasure in advance in the discovery that [Kerry] will have to make, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a more dangerous and better-organized foe than
Osama bin Laden, and that Zarqawi’s existence is a product of jihadism plus Saddamism, and not of any error of tact on America’s part.
Oh, you mean the guy Bush could have taken out but didn’t because it would have undermined the political case for the invasion of Iraq? Whew, let’s hope John Kerry doesn’t get elected, because we might start not taking him seriously enough!
“Anybody But Bush”–and this from those who decry simple-mindedness–is now the only glue binding the radical left to the Democratic Party right. The amazing thing is the literalness with which the mantra is chanted. Anybody? Including Muqtada al-Sadr? The chilling answer is, quite often, yes. This is nihilism.
Ah, yes. “Quite often” one hears people on “the left” say that they would
prefer that Muatada al-Sadr be elected President of the United States. I’m sure he will identify this large number of people at the same time he identifies the large number of Democrats who desperately want the United States to lose in Iraq he’s always talking about. I’m sure it’s the same group of Hitch’s closest Democratic friends: Johnnie Walker, Glen Fiddich, Cutt E. Sark…
Frankly, to the extent The Nation makes this harder to find, it’s doing Hitch a favor.