Although there are good reasons to the contrary, as a contrarian, Crusader AXE remains fond of Christopher Hitchens. He's so far to the contrarian side of things that he willingly takes himself. Ok, he's been erratic, somewhat crazed, and goes off on some fairly odd tangents but the guy writes well, says what he thinks and isn't afraid to make a point. "You can almost hear his melodious English grumble as he fusses with his morning oatmeal and coffee, and finds the wine-stained post-it note stuck haphazardly on his laptop screen: “OBAMA ENDORSE, SLATE.” Well, then, let’s get on with it — before some clumsy mental midget like Jonah Goldberg beats you to it, old salt. Christ knows all the big names have already done so …."
I go back to my belief that Dick Cheney should volunteer to be waterboarded if it's not so bad...Hitchens had the balls to see what it wasand the grace to feel like he wasn't really able to be a man about it. Note: when the reptillian brain kicks in at times like, oh, when you're fucking drowning, you're not a man so much as a thing trying to survive. He describes it better and more eloquently than I..." myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass."Probably not, brother, probably not.
Speaking of a thing trying to survive, we have the phenomonon of the McCain devolution. When you're drowning, you're not a man so much as a thing trying to survive. So, Hitchens gets tired of drowning... "Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him."
So, given the guy's basic integrity, I'm not surprised that he has endorsed Barrack Obama for Overlord Mayor of Wassila and all parts evenly vaguely related and and Sarah Palin for Moosecatcher. I think he sums up well the frustration of the reality based, we have to live here in this fucking country, faction with this comment:
"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."
Nailed it.
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