Carter a la Hitchens

I like Christopher Hitchens, or at least as much as you can like someone you've never actually met. I enjoy what he writes and I like to hear him speak. There's a lot he and I disagree on (especially the subject of religion), but at least I know he'll have a well-thought position on whatever the topic is. He illustrates that you can disagree with someone on some points without loathing the entire person, which is the norm pervading much of the blogosphere and elsewhere.

Michael Novak makes much this same point in his review of Hitchens's latest, God is Not Great. Novak's review begins:

One of the writers whose courage and polemical force I highly admire is Christopher Hitchens. He gives frequent proof of a passionate honesty, which sometimes has obliged him to criticize ideological soul mates when he thinks they are wrong on some important matter. Many of our colleagues today pretend publicly to have no enemies on the Left out of a panicky fear that they might “help the wrong people” on the evil Right. Though always a man of the Left, Hitchens will have none of that.

Novak then takes Hitchens to task on many of the assertions Hitchens makes in the book. Wonderful stuff, not the least of which is that he stays on point, the review being more about the book and less the writer.

I was a little disappointed when I saw Hitchens join in the vitriolic parade "celebrating" Jerry Falwell's death, but today I read something that puts him back in form. Namely, his comments re Jimmuh Cahtuh, the worst president in US history (in my not-so-humble opinion), and especially Carter's laughable comments on the current Bush administration.

Leave aside the sophomoric slackness that begins a broken-backed sentence with the words "as far as" and then cannot complete itself. "Worst in history," as the great statesman from Georgia has to know, has been the title for which he has himself been actively contending since 1976. I once had quite an argument with the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who maintained adamantly that it had been right for him to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 for no other reason. "Mr. Carter," he said, "quite simply abdicated the whole responsibility of the presidency while in office. He left the nation at the mercy of its enemies at home and abroad. He was the worst president we ever had."

Now that is vintage Hitchens, and not just because I agree with him. He's not just engaging in beautifully constructed hyperbole, he's rattling off facts as well as opinion. If you need any confirmation of that you need only read Carter's "retraction" of his own statements.

Hitchens also stands up for Tony Blair, toward whom Carter was particularly vile (statements he did not retract or correct). Carter has said nicer things about the late, ungreat thug Arafat than Blair, which alone demonstrates his, er, questionable judgement.

HT: Hot Air.