Still, he’s just canceled a range of speaking engagements due to esophageal cancer (H/T).  We aren’t sure if he’d appreciate prayers, but we’ll lift a glass to him and toast his good health tonight.

Theodore Dalrymple wrote a dual review of Christopher and Peter Hitchens’s memoirs.  It’s painfully accurate about Chris’s strengths and flaws:

For me, indeed, there hangs over his writing the air of a clever adolescent alarming the less clever grown-ups with pronouncements he knows they will find outrageous or annoying; and, taking to heart his mother’s dictum that the one unforgivable sin is to be boring, he has eschewed moderation because it is so rarely amusing. This air of the naughty boy is present even when (in my opinion) he is quite right; and, unlike religion, it spoils everything.

By all means, read the whole thing.

Almost every week, I go and debate with spokesmen of religious faith. Invariably and without exception, they inform me that without a belief in supernatural authority I would have no basis for my morality. Yet here is an ancient Christian church that deals in awful certainties when it comes to outright condemnation of sins like divorce, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality between consenting adults. For these offenses there is no forgiveness, and moral absolutism is invoked. Yet let the subject be the rape and torture of defenseless children, and at once every kind of wiggle room and excuse-making is invoked. What can one say of a church that finds so much latitude for a crime so ghastly that no morally normal person can even think of it without shuddering?

It’s interesting, too, that the same church did its best to hide the rape and torture from the secular authorities, even forcing child victims (as in the disgusting case of Cardinal Sean Brady, the spiritual chieftain of the Catholics of Ireland) to sign secrecy oaths that prevented them from testifying against their rapists and torturers. Why were they so afraid of secular justice? Did they think it would be less indifferent and pliable than private priestly investigations? In that case, what is left of the shabby half-baked argument that people can’t understand elementary morality without a divine warrant?

For the record, I believe that the Catholic Church is one of the great forces for good in the world, but unless it cleans house, whether it will so remain is an open question.  I realize that Hitchens is hardly a friend of religion, but some things are true about the church even if he says them.

But the problem with populism is not just that it stirs prejudice against the “big cities” where most Americans actually live, or against the academies where many of them would like to send their children. No, the difficulty with populism is that it exploits the very “people” to whose grievances it claims to give vent.

My favorite reaction so far:

I haven’t read the piece yet, but can’t help but immediately react: One of Sarah Palin’s biggest fans is John O’Sullivan. I know and love many “hicks”; John O’Sullivan is no “hick.”

I’m sure Ms. Lopez doesn’t like it when people judge her without reading what she writes. One would think she would give others the same courtesy.

This [President Obama's] naiveté is worrying, and it means that among the global Muslim audience, the wrong sort of people were laughing at us, while the ones who ought to be our friends and allies were shedding a disappointed tear.  – Christopher Hitchens

And Hitchens has particularly lost it when discussing Sarah Palin:

And it must be easy for a woman who couldn’t, when first asked, name a single newspaper or magazine that she had ever read…

The subtle distinction between “couldn’t” and “wouldn’t” isn’t one that Hitchens would normally miss, and one he particularly should not ignore in a column defending a man who defended terrorists. I wouldn’t complain about the “low blows” of others if, in the same column, I dishonestly painted the most popular governor in America as illiterate.

We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of “teaching the argument,” as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now.

A. All the recent stories have been that Palin is the only one of the four major candidates frequently having discussions with the media. It seems that lots of people get to ask her questions these days.

B. It doesn’t require a federal research grant to search the interwebs and find that Palin actually doesn’t promote the teaching of creationism. Hitchens has no excuse for peddling lies, though the irony of doing it in this particular column made it worth my time to read this. Flippin’ Wikipedia even got this one right.

C. I don’t think that Sarah Palin has said whether she’s a creationist or not, so the last line of speculation is largely baseless. I actually like that she doesn’t talk about that, since it’s a complete non-issue what our politicians think about the vast majority of scientific issues.

For someone so concerned about science and research, this was a remarkably fact-free tirade.

Hitchens then proceeds to a lengthy paragraph of unhinged and unsupported speculation about Palin as a religious fanatic. There’s not too much actually connecting Palin personally to religious fanaticism (and, by any historical or global standard, Pentecostals are some pretty mild religious fanatics), though I’m not sure it’s a terribly American past time to begrudge politicians their peculiar theological beliefs. It’s interesting for Hitchens, who hates all religion, and who understands the finer points of Christian theology about as well as a hammer understands a wine glass, to involve himself in such a discussion.

Christopher Hitchens is no Walter Cronkite, but McCain today should probably be thinking, “If I’ve lost Hitchens, I’ve lost the 9/11 Democrats.”  From Hitch today:

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that “issue” I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the “experience” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.

Not good for McCain.

In the realm of pure speculation, let’s try to figure out his mindset if Obama, understanding that he wasn’t really ready for the presidency but wanting some practice, ran in 2008 thinking that he wouldn’t win the nomination. So his plan would be that 2008 was supposed to be a dress rehearsal for the real event in 2012. Winning the nomination would put him in the position of a dog who suddenly caught the Honda Civic. He hadn’t planned for this, and on some psychological level didn’t want to abandon his original plan of coming up short in 2008.

But an intelligent person, which Obama surely is, would try his best to adapt. He’s brought in a small army of consultants. For all his intelligence, Obama didn’t anticipate winning, and that’s scared him somewhat, made him trust his judgment less. It was one thing for him to luck into his Senate seat, where his primary and general election opponents self-destructed; it is quite another for him to luck into the White House. Expecting, quite reasonably, to lose, and then winning, would make anyone question his judgment and look for someone with a sounder grasp of affairs. Unfortunately for Obama, he’s surrounded by true believers, whose judgment is (almost by definition) lacking. My hunch is that Obama doesn’t have anybody in his inner circle who tells him the bad news, not because they’re afraid of his reaction, but because they’ve all drunk the Kool-aid.

So we have an intelligent but unsure man, isolated from dissenting opinions, who perhaps doesn’t want to do what everyone around him wants him to do. His advisers, convinced of his inevitability, probably wanted someone who could plausibly take charge of the presidency if, God forbid, something should happen to Obama. Meanwhile, Obama himself probably wanted someone intelligent and experienced, who has Washington insider knowledge and foreign policy background that he himself lacks, and who is independent of the true believers. Picking Biden—chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a senator for 36 of his 66 years on earth, a former sharp critic and rival for the presidency—fits the bill. It also satisfies Obama’s subconscious desire to lose.

Now I see (H/T) that Christopher Hitchens thinks like I do (but writes much better, curse him):

By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea about Obama? To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.

Look at the record, and at Obama’s replies to essential and pressing questions. The surge in Iraq? I’ll answer that only if you insist. The credit crunch? Please may I be photographed with Bill Clinton’s economic team? Georgia? After you, please, Sen. McCain. A vice-presidential nominee? What about a guy who, despite his various qualities, is picked because he has almost no enemies among Democratic interest groups?

Ah well.  We’ve still got about 6 weeks to go.  If Obama really wants to blow it, he’ll do something screwy in the debates.