“Suppose a brilliant physicist were asked onto a popular comedy TV show to explain the theory of quantum physics in less than a minute while constantly being interrupted by gibes and horn blasts from the wise guy host.
“For the past two months the columnist Christopher Hitchens has endured similar ordeals in guest appearances on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Al Franken’s Air America show, and other leftist political-comedy shows. Granted, defending the Iraq War policy is not as complex and tedious as explaining quantum physics, and granted Hitchens brings it on himself. No one is forcing him onto The Daily Show, but the lure of a national audience (Jon Stewart’s audience: 1.4 million. Charlie Rose’s audience: an insomniac in Fargo and his cat) is irresistible and Hitchens’s real purpose is, after all, to hawk his latest book.”
[Hey, lay off cat lovers.]
“But more than any Bush administration official, more than any Republican talking head, more than W. himself, Christopher Hitchens has been making a credible, practical, and important case for taking out Saddam….”
The above is from the American Spectator, explaining why a man who not too long ago was a correspondent for the Nation magazine, one of the last bastions of old line leftwing thought. There is a video of the Hitch on the Daily show, but here’s an AmSpec summary of the scene:
“‘Tell me why I’m wrong?’ said the host. So the mumbly Hitchens laid out the Four Criteria which must be met before the International Community is Morally Obligated to Remove a Dictator from Power — call it the ‘Hitchens Doctrine:’
* Iraq had invaded its neighbors
* Iraq had committed genocide on its own soil
* Iraq had harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers
* And Iraq had flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“So we went in and removed a fascist dictator with nuclear ambitions from power. Bad, Bad, America!”