"Cowboy" Bush challenged by bovines. [Christopher Hitchens]

Slate - MSN ^ | 1/27/03 | Christopher Hitchens

[pikachu]

If Bush is a cowboy, the Europeedons are the cows. Get the banding irons hot, Dubya, and make your mark!

[danneskjold]

IMHO, when Hitchens is right, there's no one better...

[linn37]

according to Laura ,George is a windsheild cowboy. Meaning he only rides around in that gas guzzling Ford.

[mewzilla]

Cows? Don't you mean steers?

[stlrocket]

The European Parasites still want "Slick Willie"

[Mike Darancette]

Most ranchers allowed a little inventory slippage when it came to hungry Indians, in order to keep the Peace. There was really little open conflict between working cowboys and Indians.

[fightinJAG]

Agreed. Hitchens can be a master of the turn of the phrase and the turn of the knife. His logic, as Justice O'Connor once said, is "relentless."

[wretchard]

This Hitchens piece is doing the rounds on the blog sites. It doesn't tell us anything new, simply an old truism in a new way. If the world survives the next few months, historians of the far future will remember the Hitchens article as a benchmark of the American mood before the war. And it is a good mood: slightly irrational, slightly defiant and entirely determined.

We have come to the final edge of the cliff. In the coming months, there is a real chance that thousands, perhaps even millions of Americans, Australians and Brits will die. Saddam Hussein probably has enough pathogens to cause significant damage in revenge before he dies. But we are going nonetheless.

Hitchens forgot one thing about the cowboy: that he lived a simple life beneath the stars, attuned to the rhythms of life and accepting of the possibility, nay, the inevitability, of death. In these days before the balloon goes up, let me say for the record, that there are worse things in life than to live or die as a man, an American or a cowboy.

[dts32041]

Hitchens can be forgiven for not getting the metaphor rally correct, after all he is englsih.

[billorites]

giddyup.

[KC Burke]

But it turns out that refined Parisians are keener on such "unilateral" gestures—putting a bomb onboard the Rainbow Warrior, invading Rwanda on the side of the killers, dispatching French troops to the Ivory Coast without a by-your-leave, building a reactor for Saddam Hussein, and all the rest of it.

Rainbow Warrior. Ah, yes! A good reference to another one of the great French Battle victories.

For those that don't recall, that was the Greenpeace ship that the French Government thought was such a threat that they had to blow it up in Aukland Harbour on the other side of the world.

A Green Peace photographer was unGaulic enough to die and the French ended up having international damages of over $8,000,000.00 found against them.

Dont' get me wrong, Green Peace isn't my favorite child compared to a whole nation of French men and women, some of whom, I'm sure, have their head on straight, but Hitchens know how to hit the ball out of the park.

[ClearCase_guy]

But we are going nonetheless.

I wish I had the Churchill quote in front of me, but he once said something like:

"It is a terribly thing to fight, when the odds are against you and you are not confident in achieving victory. It is more terrible to fight when the odds are so against you that you fear you will lose. But there is something even worse: to fight, knowing for certain that you will fail and all that you love will be destroyed. no matter how hard you struggle."

The key is to fight at stage 1 or stage 2 so that you never get to stage 3. Churchill understood that. He was half-American.

[dts32041]

rally correct=incorrect.

Note to self do not post without spell checking or without finishing that first cup of coffee.

[SevenDaysInMay]

The international socialists forgave the bozo hillbilly's foolishness because he was corrupting America in favor of the politburo brotherhood. Red China was prime beneficiary of Clinton's 5th Column successes.

Clinton's bimbo flavored cigar is part of his legasssee. The image of his CiC photo-op lense covered blindness at Korea's DMZ tells nearly his entire life's story.

He may not be the last elected psychopath in our Whitehouse, because he should have been the first president to serve years in prison for his felony crimes committed while president.

[ravingnutter]

Meaning he only rides around in that gas guzzling Ford.

WRONG MORON...Bush's Ford F250 is PROPANE POWERED. He also has his own propane refueling station on his ranch. What do YOU drive?

[basil]

Hitchens bump!

[kassie]

Quite a contrast, huh?

[job]

What?

[2right]

If I remember correctly, his home on the ranch was built using thel latest in green technology. Whether built that way for frugality or environmental reasons no matter. The environmentalist wacko's present him as an enemy to their cause.