Every now and then, while I am watching Hardball on MSNBC, I will notice a wild looking man brooding over some imaginary cup of coffee complaining about something or other. That wild man is Christopher Hitchens. He appears from time to time on my television screen and broods and broods and broods. Ever since September 11, 2001 Christopher Hitchens has had only one thought. He has written many articles since that day and attended many debates. He has used many words and sentences but the thought has remained the same: I am right, and you are an apologist for the terrorists.
He has spent most of his time since 2001 attacking, shouting loudly, foul mouthedly, rudely, and irritably about the only thought that occupies his mind. His latest froth contained in a Slate article is aimed at Professor Juan Cole. In it he accused Cole of being an apologist for the Iranian regime. His alleged proof is a private email from Cole that Hitchens somehow acquired in which Cole discusses the recent comments attributed to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad that Israel "must be wiped off the map". Cole had argued in the email that Ahmadenijad’s comments had been inaccurately translated – to which Hithens foamed that Cole must be an apologist for the terrorists. Professor Cole has a clean rebuttal of Hitchens’ rant here and Jane Hamsher scores the brawl here.
Andrew Sullivan has rushed to Hitchens’ defense with nothing more than the same translation Hitchens used and an alibi for Hitchens about his state of mind. You see, Professor Cole surmised that Hitchens might have been drunk while writing his article. Sullivan claims to have been with Hitchens as he was typing the article and vouches for Hitchens’ sobriety:
By pure coincidence, I was at Hitch’s yesterday as he filed the piece. He was stone-cold sober. And on top form.
You have to forgive a person for thinking Hitchens might have been sauced at the time of the writing because the article does read like a drunken rant. We also have Andrew Sullivan to thank for perpetuating the notion that his friend Hitchens doth imbibe too much. Of Hitchens, Sullivan wrote:
He’s a bit of a libertine, a close friend of the bottle, and sworn enemy of the war against tobacco.
…
And if I ever avoided his company, it was partly because I couldn’t begin to keep up with his consumption of alcohol, and because I genuinely hated to disagree with him.
Frankly, watching Hitchens on television, it is really hard to believe at times that he may be sober.
One can only imagine what ghosts torment Christopher Hitchens. Perhaps the trauma of the Clinton years was too much for Hitchens. Perhaps he is still preoccupied with whether or not President Clinton is a rapist. Perhaps he still obsesses that Clinton is a war criminal. Perhaps he sees Islamic Fascists everywhere. Perhaps he is suffering from separation anxiety from having fallen off the left edge of the political world and having resurfaced on the right. Perhaps the trauma of September 11th applied the final blow to this man’s troubled imagination. We can never know. One thing is certain: Christopher Hitchens will continue to froth and foam at the mouth as long as Slate and other media give him a platform to do so.
Hitchen’s is sort of like a wreck on the highway, you just have to look, it’s so awful.
It’s his fixed certainly that ‘Islamofacism’ is the enemy, that Bush and the insane policies he’s fomented are the cure, and that any consideration or attempt to understand the causes of much of the Islamic world’s antiAmericanism is weakness that is so puzzling.
He and Sullivan are pushing the meme “Juan Cole = Neville Chamberlain”. Serious study of the real people and countries would tend to subvert the fantasy picture they treasure of an Islamic planet and a steel-jawed Leader Bush fighting for our very existence…