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CounterPunch
February
21, 2003
Another Ad Hominem
Attack on Christopher Hitchens
I'll Drink to
That
by JACK McCARTHY
Dry drunk Bush's wet drunk apologist Christopher
Hitchens announces startling health discovery in Vanity Fair
magazine: Drinking like there's no tomorrow and smoking until
your teeth and fingers turn jaundice yellow is actually good
for your health!
But seriously, oh fellow Hitchens hating
Counterpunchers everywhere, enjoy a good and healthy laugh --at
Hitchens's expense and read this unintentionally hilarious piece
which should have been titled, "Confessions of A Functional
Alcoholic."
If you were amused by Michael Jackson's
rationale for sleeping with little boys, you'll just love Hitch's
limp attempt to rationalize away his life as a clownish lush
who bellows for war--and another drink--all in the same martini/tobacco
stained breath.
The article while disguised as a fun
loving chaps slap at prudes who are annoyed at Hitchens enjoyment
of fine wine, is actually a generic response aimed at his political
enemies on the left who have taken note of our boys evolution
over the years from erudite intellectual to booze bloated eccentric.
Aimed, indeed, at those of us less than
amused that such a bright fellow as this-- who once wrote an
insightful, scathing essay on how alcohol had turned a one time
progressive intellectual named Paul Johnson into a towering reactionary
bore--has turned into, well, Paul Johnson.
A reactionary bore who compulsively attacks
the left, blusters about our right to Iraq's oil, and well, the
list of nutty behavior is endless.
A booze addled man who enjoys the flattering,
undeserved title "IF Stone Scholar"(WC Fields scholar
would be more apt. Well the alcohol part anyway, Fields is funny,
Hitchens anything but.) but brags in print that he will vote
for ex-lush George W Bush in the next presidential election.
Once you read this wanker's advertisement
for his drunken self you can't help but conclude that the man
gives new meaning to the phrase "a drunk in denial."
As if to demonstrate his tenuous relationship
with reality, Hitch desperately grasps on to the much ballyhooed
study from the New England Journal of Medicine touting a drink
or two a day as a preventive way to ward off heart attacks.
But its only a few graphs into the article
that Hitchens turns two to twenty and implies that the much written
about NJM article is actually a vindication for fun loving blokes
like himself who, he proudly proclaims routinely drink enough
to floor a mule. You might well believe a guy with the DT's wrote
it.
The meaning of a "drink or two a
day" is quickly forgotten by the booze addled, titular head
of "Lush's For Bush" and suddenly translated to mean
drink till you drop.
Hitchens, oblivious to the obvious, proceeds
to inform readers that not only does he drink like the proverbial
fish and enjoy a healthy heart, but he also has this amazing
ability to do lots of work.
He defensively reels off his busy work
schedule, books, articles, TV shows, etc which we are to understand
means his imbibing has only improved his productivity.
In reality our man Hitch is further confessing
that besides being an alcoholic, he's also a workaholic.
Or in the parlance of A.A., Hitchens
is actually revealing that he's what they call a "Functional
Alcoholic."
On his blogging website Hitchens recently
published an angry, paranoid private letter to Nation publisher
Victor Navasky.
Here Hitch alleges that Navasky and editor
Katrina Vanden Heuvel have conspired to ruin him by running a
rather innocuous letter from Studs Terkel. This paranoid tirade
evidence is yet another piece of circumstantial evidence that
Hitchens's faculties are out on a three-martini lunch.
In the letter Terkel accuses Hitchens
of being vain and unfair to those who disagree with his stand
on war with Iraq, and recounts a night in which he and Hitch
tied one on during the latter's visit to Chicago. Terkel's footnote
about the drinking was hardly the point.
But Hitchens's paranoid obsession with
that part of the letter clearly indicated he viewed it as part
of a vast conspiracy of his former comrades to label him a drunk.
To which I'd say, based on this self-revealing
Vanity Fair piece, the leader of the vast conspiracy is the IF
Stone scholar himself.
In fact, I'll drink to that.
Jack McCarthy
Yesterday's
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Pablo Mukheree
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A View from Iceland
Kamil Madhi
War Will Bring Disaster to Our People, Not Liberation
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