For balance. Slate doesn't want to be seen as a lefty ragzine. By putting a neo-con suck-up like Hitchens on the payroll, they kinda look like the NYT picking up Kristol. Hitchens' basic position is simple. The war on Isamofacists must continue and the heirs of Reagan must rule forever. Just have him write that and his column can then rest in peace.

Are you staking out the position that political language in the United States hasn't been displaced by glittering banalities?

What?

No, I'm staking out the position that Christopher Hitchins is his own collection of glittering banalities (frequently dressed up conserative talking points).

Hitchins, like Kristol, Wolfowitz and the rest of them, got the IRaq war completely wrong.

Rather than do a mea culpa, they just continue to pretend that they were right all along, often repeating claims that have long since been discredited.

Besides, I've heard Obama speak enough to know that here is more there than glittering banalities.

The issues of this campaign are quite clear. Ending the war, undoing Bush's reckless economic policies, doing something about health care, and adopting a real energy policy.

Obama and Clinton are not too far apart on some of these things.

But Obama is the only one talking about all of them together.

And that's why he resonates.

I know that Fox and talk radio are trying to portray him as empty, but his positions are well defined and clearly stated.

McCain doesn't even adress many of them.

Well, we disagree, but perhaps more because you are more concerned with laying out a certain agenda that addressing the column under discussion. Hitchens' point is that the standards for public discourse have declined. That's rather inarguable.

Okay I'll address the column under question. It's over-written, badly-written, and full of cliches itself. The ideas it expresses are simple-minded and they're also wrong.

If Hitchens is your standard for public discourse, then thank god public discourse is looking elsewhre for its standards these days.

Using ten-dollar words in an archaic style doesnt make a writer sound intelligent, it makes him sound pompous. The passive voice ( "it is to be assumed"), the name-dropping, the meandering outdated style-- these are not signs of intelligence, they're signs of bad writing.

Hitchens is the one doing the assuming, here. He's assuming that all anybody pays attention to is the slogan. Slogans are just branding. Nobody I know buys products or picks politicians on the strength of their slogans, but slogans exist nevertheless.

The advertising industry in general overestimates its own importance, and Hitch is just adding to that on the politician-advertising side.

IF you didn't like the top post, you didn't have to join this thread.

You're right in one respect, I have been a critic of Hitchin's pompous, arrogant, and often banal comments for over a decade now.

He has not improved with age.

Quite often, he has no more to contribute than Rush, or O'Liely, as in this case.

He may have been commenting on the decline of political discourse in general, but he singled out Obama, thus undermining the idea that his comments were general in nature.

He certainly has offered his own contributions to the decline of poltical discourse, and his allies in the conservative movment have made the dumbing down of poltical discourse their life's work.

Hitchin's major contribution seems to be his steady work in dressing up this drivel in flowery Buchleyesque language, although, on the air, he sounds more like the character actor George Saunders.

So these threads are only for those who agree with each other? How boring. You know, balance is what makes life fun. Besides, if everyone agreed with you, who on Earth would be left for you feel intellectually superior to? Everyone from Aristotle to Lao-Tze would say balance is a good thing!

I never said I was against balance.

That's not the topic.

But I'll share my favorite Hitchins story.

He was once on a local talk radio show in my home town.

This was during the Clinton impeachment fiasco. Hitchins was al in favor of impeachment and was busy streaching the envelope with his usual habit of dressing up the current conservative talking points on the subject,

Trouble was, many of the claims he was making at the core of his argoments were false.

When the host, and several callers challenged him on his assertions, he got all huffy and threatened to walk off the show.

The host showed him the door.

The rest of the show was devoted to her taking congradulatory calls from listeners who had quite enough of the arrogant pompous and dishonest Mr Hitchins.

He famously tried to pull the same stunt on Terri Gross at NPR a few years ago too.

BTW, wonder how Hitch feels about his old hero Ahmed Chalabi these days???

My comment on balance was based on your quote, “IF you didn't like the top post, you didn't have to join this thread”. As for your anecdote about Hitchens and the Clinton impeachment thing, I’m not sure what you are tying to get across other than you claim Hitchens is a no good liar. I get the feeling that anyone that doesn’t agree with you is a liar or a fool in your mind. Is there anyone you don’t agree with that you also admire, or are they all liars?

You're welcome to that opinion if you like.

I do have a special place in my rogue's gallery for people like Hitchins, Richard Pearle, David Frum, and Bill Kristol.

All of these men have worked hard to promote a radical political agenda centered on fear, extreme nationalism, and intolerence.

They have all, to a man, done their best to give an intellectual facade to arguments that are intended to appeal to the worst elements of the body politic.

And all of them share a starring role in the long fraudulant campaign to promote a war in the wrong country. All of them advanced that cause with questionalble intellectual arguments,. and all of them used false claims (generally knowingly) to advance that cause.

They are fellow travellers a well oiled propoganda machine that caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people and have weakened the United States considerably and driven us deep into debt and disrepute.

I suspect that you didn't even get my rhetorical question about Ahmed Chalabi.

Hitchins was one of Chalabi's biggest supporters in the media (another was now disgraced Judith Miller). Chalabi plied Hitchins with the full fantasy of Islamic democracy, while using him to consolidate his plan to have the American take over Iraq and hand it to him

Chalabi is still working that plan, BTW.

Hitchins, Pearle and the rest of the neo con establishment worship Chalabi., Pearle once called him the "George Washington of Iraq". IN reality, he's more like the Chaing Kai Shek.

Most of the phoney claims about terrorist links and non existant weapons of mass destruction were manufactured by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and gleefully recirculated through the American conservative media and the Bush White House.

Chalabi was front and center in parroting these dubious claims.

One might argue that Hitchins was duped. But Hitchins continued to defend Chalabi long after his duplicity was exposed.

That makes Hitchins both a liar and a fool.

And that's not just a matter of opinion.