Why Christopher Hitchens’s Political Writing Will Be Quickly Forgotten

I received some understandable pushback for asserting that as far as his political punditry goes the late Christopher Hitchens was “a highbrow Maureen Dowd or Mark Halperin.” Thanks to some of Rob’s dumpster diving archive restoration, I now think this was unfair…to Dowd. I note that Hitchens emitted the following thing:

“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.

Often!

There are various standards one can use to evaluate political writers. I’m inclined to think that if a paragraph could (tonier prose aside) appear verbatim in a Glenn Reynolds op-ed you’re ipso facto a political writer of very little value.