I caught the tail end of Hardball tonight (Wednesday, 8/17) just as the stand-in moderator asked Christopher Hitchens what he thinks about Cindy Sheehan. Yesterday, Slate posted a very unflattering editorial on Cindy written by Hitchens. I thought about posting my opinion of it then, but decided against feeding the troll. But here he is again tonight.
So maybe there is a little something to say about the dirt he’s throwing at Cindy. He calls her message “piffle” because it’s about feeling, and feeling doesn’t count like facts count, and the fact is (according to Hitchens), if we pull out of Iraq, the carnage we have seen will be as nothing to the carnage that will come.
I’m paraphrasing. No transcript is up yet, but that’s the gist of what he said. He also called Cindy a liar re: changing her tune about the “PNAC neocon agenda to benefit Israel.” That’s a tune I hum myself; if she thinks that way, we’re in the same choir. She says she didn’t say it, and if Hitchens is asking me to choose who’s telling the truth, he or Cindy, guess whom I’d pick. (If somebody does find a copy of her letter and she did say it, who cares? How about we wait to parse everything Cindy says and writes until she’s a professional politician and her words begin to cost lives.)
Which brings us back to the first point Hitchens made: we must ignore Cindy’s feeling and stay the course; the fact is, an immediate pull out would be a disaster.
Now I’m a fan of facts. I am a fan of the fact that there were no WMDs in Iraq and the fact that a lot of people tried to tell that to the administration. I’m also a fan of the fact that life evolved. I admit it, I prefer facts to feelings.
But I wonder if Mr. Hitchens truly does. Before the war he thought he had enough evidence of the dire threat Saddam posed to the U.S. to beat the drum for invasion, but he must have missed something. I don’t recall that he predicted then that at this point we’d be mired in disaster. So why should we suppose now that he has any better command of the facts and can predict the state of a post-occupied Iraq?
Or is that just the way he feels?
