Posted on 10/04/2004 2:09:25 AM PDT by kattracks
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And quite conflicted. I love the guy!
Bump for later read.
Bump.
The neocon dream of using the american military to liberate and then birth jeffersonian democracy is S-T-U-P-I-D and amazingly naive. It is no accident that a system of freedom, checks and balances, and representative democracy grew out of a hotbed of Calvinistic Puritianism. We have tried to install our governmental models for YEARS in South and Central America, and all we ever get is a couple of charismatic leaders who give a nodding acceptance in passing to some key buzzwords, as the corruption continues. The fact that men share the desire for freedom in their hearts (the religionists call this "made in the image of God") does NOT eradicate the culture of oppression, hatred, fear, and servitude that Islam embodies. The very IDEA that men have "rights" as an individual is hostile to islam. Islam is statist at its core and will always be so. It is the essense of silliness to try and establish a government based on individual exercise of rights in a culture like this.
Oh please, who wants an echo chamber? Hitchens philisophical stance carries weight with both the left and right because it originates outside politics, regardless of whether its agreeable.
I like Hitchens but I wish his brain could be totally free of the leftist fog. It is clouding his mind and holding him back from really great thinking. He says things like this: "Not without what that took - which is an absolutely convincing defeat and discrediting. Something unarguable. I wouldn't exclude any measure either. There's nothing I wouldn't do to stop this form of fascism."
On the other hand he is against the death penalty. Would he be against the death penalty if we caught Osama alive?
"I haven't forgotten the 152 people George Bush executed in Texas."
First of all George Bush didn't execute them--the state of Texas did it. Secondly, the people that were executed were Osamas to the people that they tortured/killed and the families of the murdered that were left behind. It took 9/11 to wake him up--would it take a grisly murder in his family to change his tune on the death penalty? Time to get out of the fog completely Mr. Hitchens.
Hardly any of they prisoners executed during W's nearly six years as governor were arrested or tried during his time in office. He just happened to be governor when most of the legal issues regarding executions and capital crimes had been settled enough that the state could begin to clear some of its backlog of cases. Both Republican and Democrat governors supported the death penalty with more than just lip service. It is political suicide in Texas for a governor or attorney general to oppose it. The same number of prisoners would have been executed even if Ann Richards had won a second term.
excellent article - it seems Mr. Hitchens has discovered the essence of a Jacksonian within him.
He's a little too acerbic regarding Kissinger for my taste. It indicates an unwillingness to grow as a human being.
He stands by them because they weren't bogus. Two tons of refined uranium and 500 tons of yellowcake brought back from Iraq say so. That was always the only WMD that really counted.
Hitchens is a fascinating case of what happens when an intelligent man measures his ideals against the policies of a group of people who ostensibly share them but end up working against them. It is no accident that he admires Orwell.
A good friend of his, Martin Amis, wrote a letter to Hitchens that appears in Amis's Koba The Dread - Laughter And The 20 Million, one of the most brilliant studies of Stalin in recent years, and a book I highly recommend. Amis thinks that Hitchens' transition is still incomplete, and I agree. But a relentless search for a truth that no honest person can dismiss will get him there. What most offends Hitchens about is erstwhile political soulmates is precisely that convenient denial of truth where it suits them, an activity that he can no longer tolerate. It is the sort of dishonesty that equates Bush with the Taliban because it must, and in doing so loses what Hitchens refuses to give up - his soul.
I enjoy reading Hitchens, even when he lapses back into his old leftie ways, but the author of this "interview" is obviously a brain-dead commie rat.
After Hitchens ripped into Ronald Reagan a day after his death, it was clear to see this guy was one huge ahole. The left wing bats can keep him. Dont be fooled by this JO
Really? Where? Show me. They seem to extremely well hidden if they exist. I certainly haven't seen them. PLEASE point them out to me.
"Can't Hitch agitate for a fight against Islamofascism without backing this awful President?"
What choice has The Left given him? What's he gonna do, become a British subject and back Mr Blair? Hope that Sen. Clinton is really becoming a "moderate" instead of completing the transformation from "marital victim" to "political whore"?
Like Reagan Democrats, We Welcome 9-11 Democrats. Where else can they go. Kerry, Dean, Hilary. This is way more serious then Karl Rove.
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