Comrade Hitchens, your Order of Lenin is waiting.....

He makes Kim Philby look honorable, sober and a patriot

SHOVELING COAL FOR SATAN
Christopher Hitchens collects check from Microsoft, calls Moore a coward.

By Matt Taibbi

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental... Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.


—Christopher Hitchens,
Slate.com, on Michael Moore

Well, that's rich, isn't it? Christopher Hitchens crawling out of a bottle long enough to denounce Michael Moore as a coward. I can't imagine anything more uplifting, except maybe a zoo baboon humping the foot of a medical school cadaver.

All journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know it, everybody in this business knows it. If there were any justice at all, every last goddamn one of us would be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over Arizona. Shoot a nice red mist over the whole state, make it arable for a year or two. A year's worth of fava beans and endive for the children of Bangladesh: I dare anyone in our business to say that that wouldn't represent a better use of our rotting bodies than the actual fruits of our labor.

No one among us is going to throw that first stone, though. Not even Chris Hitchens, a man who makes a neat living completing advanced Highlights for Children exercises like the following: "Denounce a like-minded colleague, using the words 'Lugubrious' and 'Semienvious.'" Such is the pretense of modern journalism, that we are to be lectured on courage by a man who has had his intellectual face lifted so many times, he can't close his eyes without opening his mouth. By a man who, if the Soviets had won the Cold War, would be writing breathless features on Eduard Shevardnadze for three bucks a word in Komsomolskaya Vanity Fair ("Georgia on His Mind: Edik Speaks Out." Photos by Annie Liebowitz...).

Which is fine, good luck to him, mazel tov. Everybody's got to make a living. But let's not leave people confused out there. The idea that anyone in today's media is either courageous or cowardly on the basis of what they write or broadcast is ridiculous.

Hitchens is a pathetic old drunk. Why isn't his ass in Iraq covering the war? He is a journalist, even if needs rehab as badly as George Bush. If I remember correctly, Michael Moore makes films. Hitchens, between boozeups, insults people he used to agree with. It's a good thing he didn't become a spy for MI-6, or he'd be cooling his heels in Moscow by now.

Is it some desperate need to be a sad contrarian, reject the support of his friends, or just be on what he thinks is the winning side? Well, if those are his instincts, he's going to hate the next four years.

posted by Steve @ 9:21:00 PM