Site Of The Day

I am pleased to see that a New Zealander who goes by the moniker "Sonic" has a Hitchens Watch blog with the tag line Dedicated to exposing the lies and distortions of the New Right's favourite ex-Marxist. This is sorely needed.

Hitchens once upon a time presented himself as an (pseudo)intellectual on the left side of the spectrum, a bit radical/outrageous and leaning toward the Marxist end of the spectrum. Now he is a broken down alcoholic who looks like he never bathes nor bothers to put on clean clothes. He was on Bill Maher's show a week or so back wearing a rumpled white suit and looking as if his hair hadn't seen a comb in a decade. He speaks slowly, thinks slowly, and moves slowly. Steve Gilliard described him thusly a few months back: Hitchens, unshaven, with a tweedy brown coat, circles under once bright eyes, dulled by a sea of booze, prattled on, attacking a woman who's eldest son has died in service of this country. Hitchens thought he was being brilliant, but he, like all old drunks, was just sad, looking in desperate need of a stiffner. I wonder if he travels with a flask now. George Galloway nailed him as a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay.

None of this would be of any consequence if Hitchens weren't still treated like an intellectual elder statesman by the media. Inexplicably, he still writes for Slate, having penned a piece on Harriet Miers church as recently as Friday. The only part that remains of his former intellectual ability, which he always grossly overestimated, is the occasional glimpse of a vocabulary. Otherwise he has become a drone, a sycophant for the Bushy pseudo-men who think that the more you bomb, the larger your penis grows. And he has become increasingly mean and less funny. It seems that we are getting closer and closer to his core, whatever might exist of his soul.

So thank you Sonic. This is an ugly job, but it needed doing.

Post Script: I turned on the Sunday morning shows only to find that there he was on a Chris Matthews panel, wearing an Iraqui flag in his lapel, babbling about how he thinks he knows who actually outted Valerie Plame, but he doesn't want to tell us. He mumbles while others are talking, literally wrings his hands while waiting to speak, and when he can no longer stand to wait, leaps in speaking over his copanelists. He is billed as being from Vanity Fair. Is he really the only apologist for the administration's policies in Iraq who will appear on television?