Wingnuts

Lenin has a very nice piece in The Monthly Review that skewers Christopher Hitchens, and his slow, self-regard-fuelled alcoholic transformation from reasonable facsismile of a human being to sodden, prancing political jester of the bloodthirsty ‘bumpkin billionaires’.

In the process he nails Hitchens in a blatantly self-aggrandisng and stupid lie:

… a curious myth abounds, which appears to have been generated by Hitchens. The myth is that he was in a jeep with some Kurds in 1991 following the Gulf War, who allegedly evinced some warmth for George Bush Senior, and in the course of that exchange he changed his mind about the war on Iraq. Conflict with Saddam, from then on, was both inevitable and devoutly to be wished. 20 That is hardly thrilling political fiction, but fiction it is. As noted before, he in fact opposed the invasion of Iraq as late as 2002, and he had criticized Clinton for bombing Iraq in 1998’s Operation Desert Fox. 21 As Dennis Perrin, a friend of Hitchens, writes:

He may have been in a Kurdish jeep, but the [story about his conversion therein] is a complete lie, and Hitchens knows this. I spent time with him in the period he mentions, and he never stopped criticizing Bush’s “mad contest” with Saddam, much less opined that “co-existence” with Saddam was “no longer possible.” I have a tape of him debating Ken Adelman on C-SPAN in 1993 where he’s still critical of the Gulf War, and again no mention of wanting to overthrow Saddam. As late as 2002, when I asked him directly if he did indeed favor a US invasion, he waffled and said that W. would have to convince him on “about a zillion fronts” before he could sign on. 22

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It never ceases to amaze me how many jourmalists just lie like this, though that Hitchens has done so comes as mo surprise whatsoever.

My only caveat with the article is practical and comes from someone from someone with lousy eyesight; it is that his footnoting makes the article a bugger of an online read, though of course this this may be due to submission guidelines. But layout that reads well on the page doesn’t always work online, and I’d’ve preferred keyword linking to the references rather than actual book-style footnotes. But that doesn’t detract from the actual quality of the article.

Sometimes it’s handy to be une femme d’un certain ?ge: I might be misremembering, but casting my mind back, haven’t a couple of fictional characters been based on Hitchens? Hitchens was a popular target of Private Eye‘s in his London journalistic days and IIRC their continuing character, the sodden correspondent Lunchtime O’Booze, is based on him: then there’s the louche, English, alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow in Wolfe’s Bonfire of The Vanities, leeching off his megarich New York socialite friends while acting the complete drunken asshole.

Well, he seems to have got that schtick down to a fine art to have got to his current position in NY party-literati circles. What else could explain Graydon Carter’s continued employment of Hitchens at Vanity Fair? (Unless, of course, they’re hoping to pick up a few readers because of the outrage. How very cheap of you, VF) But if the magazine has pretensions to being a home of serious political journalism how long do they really want a proven liar writing rubbish in their pages every month?

One might speculate about what levers Hitchens has available to him to ensure his continued imrobable success as a paid journalist, bobbing along from speaking enagemnt to public debate to tv studio.. He must have had companions in such a long career of debauchery and could write quite an illuminating memoir if he chose. Could that be the reason for Hitchen’s continued high public profile?

You might say so, I couldn’t possibly comment.

Read more: Media, Journalism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Christopher Hitchens