I disagree this was typical Chris Hitchens. For starters he didn't mock Michelle's name, rhyming it with some monkey's ass or some other thing like that (though he did infer that there couldn't be very many black Princeton graduates--a source of shame more to Princeton than to blacks as a group). Second, he didn't name-drop an important literary figure (unless you count Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael) in the piece. Thirdly, he didn't pull out his thesaurus and give us countless lists of different ways of saying the same thing (something that reduces his time at the keyboard, while at the same time filling the column up with less of his mind-numbing 'logic'). Also, he didn't inflate to his word count by throwing in a gratuitous Shakespeare quote. I almost forgot, he didn't remind us that he's a Brit.

Incidentally, Hitchens does benefit from the perception of being a scholar. If the definition is limited to someone who has done well in their university work to have earned a graduate degree or otherwise excelled academically, then Hitchens is no scholar. His Wikipedia page defines his UK degree as "a gentleman's degree". Ergo, his dismissive comment of Barak Obama being a Harvard-educated pinhead.

Hitchens' college years were basically like John McCain graduating at the very bottom of his Annapolis class. (Come to think, kind of like George W. and his Yale flunky Dick Cheney: maybe that's why Chris loves them so, they share so much.)