christopher hitchens on michael moore

[xatalantax]

He's often good, but I do enjoy him ripping Moore to tiny shreds. Not that it's a challenge.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/#ContinueArticle

"I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation of our politicians."

Comments

Re: hitchens

[atalanta.livejournal.com]

oh, no way! there's no comparing moore to hitchens.

Re: hitchens

[cris.livejournal.com]

I'll certainly give you that Hitchens has a more nuanced view than Moore, but in the same way that Moore is totally working his "angry citizen's advocate iconoclast" role, Hitchens has totally pimped out his "former Leftie who found religion" niche and his writing seems increasingly focused on trying to simultaneously villify both ends of the political spectrum without paying any heed to his own sense of consistency.

Consider the two recent pieces he did on Abu Ghraib. The first one tries to suggest that Hersh is being illogical in stating that the cause for torture did not stem from the administartion, and but then turns around in his second piece to say that Hersh was right, but Hitchens then pins blame on the torture scandal on Bush critics who say that he wasn't tough enough on taking out al-Qaeda and thereby exerted undue pressure for results. That, by Hitchens' logic, if you criticized the administration's inability to take out Mullah Omar or Bin Laden then you've tacitly given permission to use torture. Let's, of course, ignore the possibility that a criticism of the administration's mishandling of Afghanistan could be a call for smarter strategy rather than more extreme tactics. Also, let's not ignore his conflation of recent public pressure from the publicized 9/11 hearings with the relative lack of anti-terrorist pressure in 2003, when the memos were supposedly drafted.

I won't even get into Hitchens' all too stubborn defense of Chalabi, except to say that the comparison with Aquino was bloody insulting.

Hitchens has a gift for artfully turned rhetoric, but all too often, it sounds like he's fallen in love with his own voice and his perceived niche in the literary side of political discourse, and in this respect, he's just like Moore.

Re: hitchens

[atalanta.livejournal.com]

haven't read the abu ghraib pieces you mention so I can't speak to that .. but they are just on such different levels. intelligence-wise.

Re: hitchens

[cris.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'll totally agree with you on intelligence but, as I said, my comparison was just how both of them base their careers on being extreme niche provocateurs. I don't mind Hitchens taking down Fahrenheit 9/11 for an essential lack of imagination. It's when he starts tearing into Moore because it's "a big lie sustaining itself on a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods" that I feel the Pot-Kettle-Black nerve twitching.