Odd how many Americans can agree with Christopher Hitchens on many issues, i.e. his rage at Henry Kissinger. I sympathize totally with such disgust.
The Hitchens contempt for the Tea Party, however, is the grandest dividing line, largely due to the tea Party’s fervent belief in God and its faith in Sarah Palin whom Hitchens repeatedly heaps fear and loathing on.
Hitchens, however, warns the world to not patronize Sarah Palin!
He points out that his favorite film on American Presidential politics is Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.
With an almost bottomless irony of ironies, he further adds that at one time Ronald Reagan was considered for a role but he was dismissed as “insufficiently Presidential”.
Therein lies the substance of his concerns about Sarah Palin and her Presidential Insufficiency.
It also strengthens my faith in the fact that Sarah Palin will, indeed, be America’s next Ronald Reagan and more.
The “more”, I’m certain, is what most terrifies Christopher Hitchens.
His contempt for America and anything classically American is so deep it makes him blind. He traipses out the history of the 19th Century Pledge of Allegiance, smugly noting that the words “under God” didn’t reach the Pledge until the 1950’s. He finds it “funny” that Palin cross-referenced the Pledge of the Allegiance with the Declaration of Independence.
“God” reached the Declaration of Independence in the 18th Century. In that profoundly obvious sense she was totally correct in saying she stands with the Founding Fathers.
A smirking history professor who is also a repeatedly self-described atheist would consider the ultimate truth of her statement irrelevant in the face of her historical liberties.
More the pedant he.
I have no doubt Hitchens knew that when he waxed contemptuous but … well … his fellow atheist, Bill Maher, would have broached the subject of “insufficiency” with fewer words.
Therefore Bill Maher has become the crass but funnier Christopher Hitchens.
From the other point of view, Christopher Hitchens is an eloquent but less entertaining version of Bill Maher:
It’s hard to imagine that there will be any more unwanted pregnancies or shotgun weddings when or if the Palins move to the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, whereas with the Clintons, the very thing that made all Bill’s friends turn white and pee green was that they made him the president, and he still wouldn’t stop.
Here, however, comes Hitchens’ own, possibly Marxist justification for pushing the Progressive Panic Button on Sarah Palin:
Walter Dean Burnham, one of the country’s pre-eminent Marxists, used to attract ridicule back in the 1960s and ’70s by saying that Ronald Reagan would one day be president.
Nice to hear Christopher Hitchens and I agree on that same possibility for Sarah Palin, though from profoundly different points of view. One must applaud his absolute consistency as an atheist:
Interviewed by Rick Warren at the grotesque Saddleback megachurch a short while ago, Sen. Barack Obama announced that Jesus had died on the cross to redeem him personally. How he knew this he did not say. But it will make it exceedingly difficult for him, or his outriders and apologists, to ridicule Palin for her own ludicrous biblical literalist beliefs.
There will always be a Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher to do that.
Here, however, is where Christopher Hitchens hands Sarah Palin a priceless gift for the hoped-for debate she will have as the Republican candidate with President Obama.
I cannot wait to see Obama and Biden explain how this isn’t the case or how it’s much worse than, and quite different from, Obama’s own raving and ranting pastor in Chicago or Biden’s lifelong allegiance to the most anti-“choice” church on the planet.
Don’t hold back, sir.
The difference, if there is one, is that Palin is probably sincere whereas the Democratic team is almost certainly hypocritical. The same is true of the boring contest over who can be the most populist, and of the positively sinister race to see who can be the most demagogically anti-Washington. With this kind of immaturity right across both tickets, it’s insulting to be asked to decide on the basis of experience, let alone “readiness.”
“The difference, if there is one, is that Palin is probably sincere … “
God bless Christopher Hitchens for knowing that!
“… whereas the Democratic team is almost certainly hypocritical.”
Yes, sir, God bless you!!
God bless Christopher Hitchens, indeed for his own indisputable honesty and lack of hypocrisy!!!
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