'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'

June 24, 2004 4:51 AM

Liberal columnist Christopher Hitchens (he of Mother Theresa-criticising fame) rips Michael Moore a new one on Slate.
posted by Tlogmer (47 comments total)

Oh FOR FUCKS SAKE!!!!

1. Will you stop with the stupid Michael Moore POSTS.
2. Double Post! Double Post! Double Post! Double Post! Double Post! Double Post! Double Post! Double Post! Double Post! Double Post! Double Post! Double Post!

Hey - I don't read MetaFilter, I just Post worthless SHIT.

/me pauses for breath.
posted by seanyboy at 5:02 AM on June 24, 2004

<snark>
Hey, if something high-profile and newfilterish isn't reason enough not to post something, why should it having been posted a few days ago to MeFi be reason enough? I bet lots of people didn't see the link then.
</snark>
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:10 AM on June 24, 2004

Jesus, sorry.
posted by Tlogmer at 5:21 AM on June 24, 2004

*seppuku*
posted by Tlogmer at 5:22 AM on June 24, 2004

Seriously, though. That Mother Theresa link is pretty interesting. (I didn't see it when the topic was here awhile ago but it could very well have been posted.)
posted by Tlogmer at 5:24 AM on June 24, 2004

He's quite famous for his Theresa-bashing. He's fighting an uphill battle, but I think he's largely correct in his judgment about her.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:27 AM on June 24, 2004

Hitchens has been a republican shill for years nows. I'm not sure how you could call him liberal unless you're being ironic.
posted by sheila t at 5:30 AM on June 24, 2004

Christopher Hitchens has such godlike debate powers that he could pick a stance that's complete bullshit, that he doesn't even believe in, and make you believe it. I suspect that is true of this. I've skimmed some of the "moral frivolity" pomposity but I'll wait to read it until I've watched the actual movie for myself, thanks much. I'd rather not have a sneering Hitchens voice in the back of my mind, as he's a hateful, venemous little being even when he's on the right side of an issue.
posted by inksyndicate at 5:30 AM on June 24, 2004

Christopher Hitchens is no longer a liberal. See here, here, here, and here.

Please stop calling him one.
posted by dyaseen at 5:32 AM on June 24, 2004

"Liberal Republican" is not a contradiction.
posted by techgnollogic at 5:33 AM on June 24, 2004

It's a lifestyle.
posted by sheila t at 5:36 AM on June 24, 2004

I think it's funny how people can think that Hitchens is a "Republican shill". He's not. What he is is extremely contrarian (within the left) on the issue of 9/11, terrorism, and the Iraq war. I'm not aware of any other issues on which he's budged from his leftism.

I'm not defending him, I never paid any attention to him in the first place and particularly began to ignore him in the last few years.

But it's funny how people think about political partisan apostasy. Consider McCain. In the recent Kerry-McCain thread, it was pointed out over and over and over again that he's not really anything other than truly right-wing, despite differing from the Repubs on a very few issues. But if you ask practically any partisan Republican/Conservative, they'll tell you that McCain isn't a "real" Republican—for exactly the same reason that sheila says Hitchens isn't a real liberal. And I guarantee you that the right will as adamantly refuse to call Hitchens one of its own as the left is willing to call McCain one of its own. And for good reason.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:38 AM on June 24, 2004

Hitchens is a liberal?
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:38 AM on June 24, 2004

Since this thread is doomed anyway, I'll just throw in a link to the (heavily blogged) piece that Roz Kaveney wrote about her memories of Hitchens which ends by asking "how could you at once embody and betray the hopes of your generation so totally?".
It's a terrific piece of writing and pretty much demolishes the man.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:40 AM on June 24, 2004

posted by Mayor Curley at 5:42 AM on June 24, 2004

The quote that's used as the page title -- "a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness [and] a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery" -- strikes me as a perfect summary of Hitchens's own work. I've often thought that the only difference between Hitchens and the common internet troll is a better vocabulary and the dead-tree medium.
posted by Zonker at 5:43 AM on June 24, 2004

Mother Theresa bashing is quite funny, the Dalai Lama bashing is less compelling but the audacity is welcome.
posted by bobo123 at 5:44 AM on June 24, 2004

What inksyndicate said. Except for Hitchen's power of persuasion, which I've generally found is successfully countered by the negativity which seems to ooze from the man (and his considerably more odious brother - both of whom share the same dead eyes - well not the same pair obviously (squabbling over which brother gets to use them for their next tv appearance)).
posted by Blue Stone at 5:53 AM on June 24, 2004

This just another step along the well trodden path which revolutionaries often take: disillusioned and out of power, they hunger for the glory once promised to them, and slaughter old comrades.

Plus ça change...
posted by dash_slot- at 6:19 AM on June 24, 2004

Hitchens... liberal...

BWAWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

thanks for the laugh, it was a lame newsfilterish, op-ed double post but worth it!!!
posted by matteo at 6:24 AM on June 24, 2004

Double post, indeed. And an ignorant one at that.
posted by insomnia_lj at 6:56 AM on June 24, 2004

The Mayor wins.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:58 AM on June 24, 2004

Bad Idea Jeans.
posted by dong_resin at 7:03 AM on June 24, 2004

Hey, has anyone made the clever jibe yet about how Hitchens isn't much of a liberal???
posted by dhoyt at 7:09 AM on June 24, 2004

You're still discussing this seriously despite my efforts to turn this into a crap-fest? Despite the fact that the same exact article has been discussed to death in a previous post? Here's Hitchens in a nutshell so that we need never discuss him again:

1. Hitchens is like George Will in that every article is a smug "I'm smarter than you" piece. You might like to be condescended to, but the bulk of us resent it. There's no reason to encourage him by reading and linking to his articles.

2. He's unlike George Will in that he's consistently against everything he writes about. If you can garner the subject of the column from the title, rest assured that Hitchens thinks its bad and/or stupid. Move along.

3. If Hitchen's mother was very well-liked and she died, Hitchens would write a column about what an asshole she really was. He writes to encourage discussion about him, not the alleged topic.

4. Hitchens is a whore, and if we followed my advice and ignored him enough to put him down a few pegs, he'd happily re-find the far left and start writing for The Nation again. His politics shift whenever there's a commerical opportunity in having different politics.
posted by Mayor Curley at 7:12 AM on June 24, 2004

This is the same guy who had to write right after Bob Hope's death that he wasn't at all funny.
posted by ALongDecember at 7:25 AM on June 24, 2004

I don't keep up with Hitchens for the many reasons others have derided him above. Even so, I'm not aware of (and am skeptical) conservative positions he's taken on any issues other than the terrorism and Iraq. On everything else, from economic policy to social issues, I'm doubtful he deviates from leftist positions. Please point me to some examples if I'm wrong. But being outspoken in favor of "The War on Terrorism" and the invasion of Iraq, and defending this admins policies on those issues, does not by themselves make a mockery of someone claiming to be "liberal". That's just silly.

He is a jerk, though, you'll get no argument from me about that.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:31 AM on June 24, 2004

This just in. Christopher Hitchens just took a dump. It was described as brown and odorous. More details soon in an upcoming FPP I'm working on at this very moment.
posted by Outlawyr at 7:33 AM on June 24, 2004

Oh, and as to the "Liberal" question; there are people I think we could get 99% of us to agree are liberal (Ted Kennedy for example) and people we could get 99% to agree are conservative (oh, let's say Dick Cheney). With Hitchens, I think you're pretty close to a 50/50 break on those who would agree that he is liberal. Therefore, labeling him as a "Liberal columnist" is perhaps ill advised if one doesn't want one's doublepost Moorefilter post to be derailed by the liberal/not liberal issue.
posted by Outlawyr at 7:38 AM on June 24, 2004

At least Tlogmer created a fresh FPP a couple days away from the other one, through, one assumes, lack of attention to what had been on the front page, rather than idiotically adding his link as a supposedly ironic counterpoint to the thread that was already about that very same link, but which he couldn't even be bothered to mouseover to confirm.

And EB, if you haven't read No One Left to Lie To, I recommend it, only because I think it reveals the tipping point at which Hitchens, who at first disliked Clinton only because he wasn't Left enough (as many of us did), turned into an abject hater upon being personally dragged into the Lewinsky nonsense, and became a staunch ally of anyone who wanted to trash that administration. I don't buy the common notion that 9/11 suddenly converted him.
posted by soyjoy at 7:46 AM on June 24, 2004

This is the same guy who had to write right after Bob Hope's death that he wasn't at all funny.

OK, give him credit for that at least.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 7:48 AM on June 24, 2004

Oh, yeah, I forgot about his anti-Clinton mania. That's why I stopped paying attention to him long before 9/11. Now I remember. Still doesn't make him a conservative, though.

I mean, from what I know, you can't compare him to David Horowitz (which people have in this thread), for example. Horowitz hews to an almost ultra-rightist line on most topics. So much so, and so fatuously, that I often think he's still a radical lefty who's found a sneaky way to discredit the right.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:54 AM on June 24, 2004

"Niall Ferguson has the same schtick"

please don't compare apples and rotten oranges

I've actually taken the trouble of reading Ferguson (Pity of War, Empire, The World's Banker, I admit I haven't read the Cash Nexus), I've heard him lecture and he's been kind enough to discuss a few points with me afterwards -- the worse you can say about him is that he's prone to being too prolific, bordering pop-history at times.
but Jesus Christ, comparing a serious (Conservative) scholar like prof. Ferguson with a sorry contrarian attack dog like, ahem, Snitchens, is terribly, terribly unfair to Ferguson

about the only thing they have in common is that they both went to Oxford.
but then again, JFK and George W Bush both went to Harvard, too

________

"Still doesn't make him a conservative, though"

so joining the Starr gangbang, shitting on The Nation, horribly insulting a true legend like Studs Terkel, foaming at the mouth against all those who doubted the wisdom of Dick Cheney pre-Iraq-attaq is politics-neutral for you? not bad.
then Tom DeLay is a centrist, too
posted by matteo at 8:01 AM on June 24, 2004

Don't worry, Tlogmer, someone likes this post.
posted by Blue Stone at 8:02 AM on June 24, 2004

I didn't see much in the way of facts in Hitchens' piece.

Just crude invective.

Blech.

Convince me with thought, please, not with shabby excretions smeared on the walls.
posted by troutfishing at 8:08 AM on June 24, 2004

Matteo: most of those look like personality things, not policy things, to me. The ones that aren't have already been mentioned: anti-Clinton, pro-Bush admin policy on Iraq. It means he's not much of a leftist partisan, but we already knew that. It doesn't mean that he's not a leftist in policy terms. I happen to think there's a big difference. I'd expect you do, too, if you think about it some. Isn't what you really care about the core issues of leftism? Economic and social policy? Hitchens breaks with the left on internationalist policy only with regard to these two recent wars, to my knowledge, and he has his stated reasons for doing so.

Single-issue litmus tests, personality tests, and partisan (as opposed to ideological) conformism tests, are all, in my opinion, not the right way to determine what's someone's political ideology is. On the other hand, if you are defining "leftist" and "rightist" in partisan—not policy—terms, then your reasoning makes sense. But do you really believe in a "my party, right or wrong" political ethos?
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:16 AM on June 24, 2004

Given that it's a FPP by acclamation lemme derail it a bit:

According to M-W Liberal means a bunch of things, including "supporter of Liberalism" which seems to be a theory much more welcome to Republicans then to Democrats , at least the Economic Liberalism subset.

Indeed, Liberal Republican is not a contradiction. So, do the ones who oppose Liberals oppose Liberalism and therefore oppose free market theory, individual freedoms and liberties ? That's more like opposing Republicans then opposing Democrats, I guess ?

Or maybe are the anti-liberal media pundits opposing "liberal media" using the world liberal, in hope that they'll be able to say they were opposing Republican when the Democrats win the next round ?

Divide et impera by confusion ?
posted by elpapacito at 8:17 AM on June 24, 2004

the left obsessively hates Michael Moore as much as the right?

Explain again, concretely, who this "left" and "right" are? Sounds a little vague. I was under the impression one could have varied, even contrary political views without having to loyally stay on one side of the aisle. Though in my experience, this sort of thing gets you crucified here on MeFi.
posted by dhoyt at 8:19 AM on June 24, 2004

Is this Hitchens character someone I would have to own a TV to know about?
posted by Quartermass at 8:23 AM on June 24, 2004

A liberal who doesn't oppose war? *gasp* The guy must be to the right of Genghis Khan!
posted by David Dark at 8:33 AM on June 24, 2004

Christopher Hitchens is the Ethereal Bligh of Slate.
posted by bshort at 8:43 AM on June 24, 2004

If Hitchens ever writes a piece that is actually intended to be understood, I'll faint dead away.

Shill, attack-dog, whatever: who cares? JF Christ, I have a reasonably advanced reading level, and most of the time I can't tell what the FUCK his FUCKING POINT is, until I spend a really rather inordinate amount of time P-A-R-S-I-N-G his prosody.

I've got no real problem with writing to impress, but Hitchens obscures his points on purpose. And I have no sympathy for that at all.
posted by lodurr at 9:01 AM on June 24, 2004

no, he is the David Dark of Slate
posted by matteo at 9:02 AM on June 24, 2004

For the record, I didn't know anything about Hitchens; I googled him and found his The Nation bio page (and his recent article on The Stupidity of Ronald Reagan) and assumed he was liberal.

I do dislike Michael Moore's work (though he seems like a cool guy and I saw him buying popcorn at the Michigan Theater once) -- or, at least, I'm frustrated with it, even though I agree with his politics; this article played to my suspicians that his supposed renewed fact-checking efforts were irrellevant, which was why I liked it enough to post it (despite gleaming logical errors like "how dare you criticise not sending enough troops when you were opposed to the war!").
posted by Tlogmer at 9:03 AM on June 24, 2004

And actually, now that I read the column again, I like it a lot less. It didn't seem incomprehensible, but lodurr does have a point -- his prose obscures his bad reasoning ("Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not.").
posted by Tlogmer at 9:10 AM on June 24, 2004

Ah, Hitchens, you trollish little scamp. Bless the little screamer for not keeping it all bottled up.

I've met Michael Moore a couple of times, and he seems way more gracious and thoughtful in person than you'd ever guess from his movies. Not that that matters. Hitchens is being a prick because that's what pays the bills. Right, left, whatever.

Though I do like the truly liberal definition of the word liberal being used here.
posted by chicobangs at 9:18 AM on June 24, 2004

(To clarify.) The problem isn't the "how could they support bush and oppose his wars?" implication, it's the either-ors directly stated. For all Moore's other faults, he does a fair job capturing fuzzyness, and there are plenty of conflicts of interest that skew policy.
posted by Tlogmer at 9:19 AM on June 24, 2004