today’s AR-online DAVID HOROWITZ Right On! Defending Christopher LET’S BEGIN BY ACKNOWLEDGING THE OBVIOUS: I am the last person Christopher Hitchens wants to see defending him in his current imbroglio with White House henchman and ex-friend, Sidney Blumenthal. Like them, Christopher and I were also once political comrades, though we were never quite proximate enough to become friends.
But for nearly two decades we have been squaring off on opposite sides of the political barricades, and I know that Christopher’s detractors will inevitably use my support of him to confirm that he has lost his political bearings, and betrayed them to the other side. For that reason, let me add that I do not believe Christopher is about to have second thoughts, or to join Peter Collier and myself as critics of the movement to which he has dedicated his life. On the contrary.
As everything Christopher has put on the public record in the last year attests, his contempt for Clinton and his decision to expose Clinton’s servant as a liar and knave spring from his deep passion for the left and for the values it claims to hold dear.
In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens has demonstrated that the nation’s commander-in-chief cynically and mendaciously deployed the armed forces of the greatest super-power on earth to strike at three impoverished countries, with no clear military objective in mind.
Using the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen, Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, for only one tangible political purpose (as Christopher puts it) to “distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake.” Hitchens’ claim that Clinton’s military actions are criminal and impeachable is surely correct.
Republicans, it seems, were right about the character issue, and failed only to show how this mattered to policy issues the public cares deeply about. Instead they got themselves entangled in legalistic disputes about perjury and constitutional impeachment bars, and lost the electorate along the way.
In making his own strong case against Clinton, Hitchens has underscored how Republicans botched the process by focusing on criminality that flowed from minor abuses of power — the sexual harassment of Paula Jones and its Lewinsky subtext — while ignoring a major abuse that involved corrupting the office of commander-in-chief, damaging the nation’s security, and killing innocents abroad.
Reading Hitchens’ riveting indictment stirred unexpected feelings of nostalgia in me for the left I had once been part of. Not the actual left that I came to know and reject, but the left of my youthful idealism, when I thought our mission was to be the nation’s “conscience,” to speak truth to power in the name of what was just.
This, as is perfectly evident from what he has written, was Hitchens’ own mission in exposing Blumenthal as the willing agent of a corrupt regime and its reckless commander-in-chief. Unfortunately, in carrying out this mission, Hitchens was forced to trip over the Lewinsky matter, specifically Blumenthal’s effort to smear the credibility of the key witness to the President’s bad faith.
But that is because it was through Lewinsky that the Starr investigators had set up the character issue in the first place. It is difficult to believe that a sociopathic personality like Clinton’s could be compartmentalized to stop at the water’s edge of sex, or that he is innocent of other serious accusations against him that Starr and the Republicans have been unable to prove.
In fact, the same signature behavior is apparent throughout his administration (an idea aptly captured in the title of Hitchens’ forthcoming book about the President — No One Left To Lie To).
The presidential pathology is evident not only in his reckless private dalliances (the betrayal of family and office), but also in his strategy of political “triangulation” (the betrayal of allies and friends), and in his fire sale of the Lincoln bedroom and advanced military technology to adversarial powers (the betrayal of country). Hitchens is quite right (if imprudent) to strike at the agent of the King, when the King is ultimately to blame.
Given the transparent morality of Hitchens’ anti-Clinton crusade, it is all the more remarkable, and interesting, that so many of his comrades on the left, who ought to share these concerns, have chosen instead to turn on him so viciously. In a brutal display of comradely betrayal, they have publicly shunned him in an attempt to cut him off socially from his own community.
One after another, they have rushed into print to tell the world at large how repulsed they are by a man whom only yesterday they still called “friend,” and whom they are no longer wish to know. Leading this pack was Hitchens’ longtime Nation colleague, Alexander Cockburn, who denounced him as a “Judas,” and “snitch.” Cockburn was followed by a second Nation colleague, Katha Pollitt, who smeared Hitchens as a throw