… or leaning left, perhaps to grab onto a wall … whatever … he’s damn good tonight. And, you know, like Andrew Sullivan, Hitchens has moral grounding and a hatred of torture and invasions of privacy that any true conservative or liberal would treasure simply because it’s the decent thing to believe …
Although I am named in this suit [the ACLU suit filed today] in my own behalf, I am motivated to join it by concerns well beyond my own. I have been frankly appalled by the discrepant and contradictory positions taken by the Administration in this matter. First, the entire existence of the NSA’s monitoring was a secret, and its very disclosure denounced as a threat to national security. […]
We have recently learned that the NSA used law enforcement agencies to track members of a pacifist organisation in Baltimore. This is, first of all, an appalling abuse of state power and an unjustified invasion of privacy, uncovered by any definition of “national security” however expansive. It is, no less importantly, a stupid diversion of scarce resources from the real target. It is a certainty that if all the facts were known we would become aware of many more such cases of misconduct and waste.
We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: ….
Read it all. When he’s good, he’s very, very good …
that fucker can write.
Yeah, just like millions of people were supposed to trust that the Medicare D rx program would really work!
Stupid diversion of scarce resources…
Doesn’t that kinda sum up the decision to go into Iraq too?
…in an understated sort of way.
Thanks for pointing this out, Susan. I’d heard Hitchens was in on the suit, but I hadn’t chased down his article.
Hitchens is just lost these days. I remember watching the Galloway/Hitchens debates. It was erie for me. On one hand, I agreed with most of Galloways conclusions, but Galloway resorted to a lot of rhetoric and ad hominem attacks; whereas, Hitchens presented his case rather clear (even though I didn’t buy it). Anyway, I think Hitchens is a clever guy, it just seems like he had too much faith in this war and doesn’t know how to distance himself from his former position and save face at the same time.
Maybe not “former position”…
That was a sad affair. And Amy Goodman should have taken the reins a bit, and forced those two to get more specific … if Galloway is capable of it, that is. He was not very good.
Let’s see which Dems he starts sucking up to next.
Nightline is covering the Gore speech right now.
Started out with the ACLU cases and then said that the legal battle is only one battle and the current battle is the political battle. Then they showed Scottie saying “bring it on” (more or less).
Not much but better than nothing I guess.
As poignantly as Hitchens describes the dynamics of this illegal spying, I wouldn’t go so far as to declare “He’s back!”, as though he’s had an epiphany and returned to sanity. I think there are more complex forces at work here.
First and foremost, I think Hitchens, like most former Trotskyite or Leninist lefties, (including people like Irving Kristol and to a certain extent Leo Strauss, putative Godfathers of the Neoconservative blight), suffers under a delusion that the public has certain enforceable rights to be free from government interference in their private affairs. And they believe in this even though, despite having been leftists, their leftist ideology and heritage is one of leftist authoritarianism, not left-leaning liberal democracy.
In other words, they believe the populace has certain individual rights even though they support governments which are, in the end, authoritarian in nature, and which, compelled by that nature, always act on it eventually by overruling those rights.
It’s laudable for Hitchens to make an eloquent stand in defense of the individual rights we all are supposed to have to be free of government snooping, but his perspective is cognitively dissonant in that he supports this particular regime’s right to wage war and to lie to the public to do so. Indeed, Hitchens himself has been a purveyor of many of those lies, and has many times in the last 4 years or so expressed a visceral antagonism towards any and all who do not agree with and support the BushCo game plan for “killing off” whoever he and Bush define as the “enemy” in the Middle East and beyond.
I’m afraid this posture of Hitchens now represents a very narrow stripe of liberal-left thinking on his part, and is by no means in sync with his broader, authoritarian, “right makes right” ideological affliction. He’s not “one of us”, is what I’m saying.
Having said all this, the guy can write.
He is still a blood-thirsty war-monger.
Yes! That was my point.
Don’t know where that ‘3’ came from, sorry.
Doesn’t this reinforce the principles that certain groups and/or individuals feel a natural seperation of class and entitlement? I think Hitchens aligns himself with whichever side suits his ego and his compromised integrity is more apparent when looking back to the Clinton administration. He has been far too kind to those in power he would appease for his own benefit and it’s likely that he’s more concerned with saving his own ass. The greatest downfall of th regime is when they turn on each other.
I don’t think Hitchens is quite so far gone as someone like Leo Strauss, for instance, who makes a point of supporting the absolute right of leaders to lie to the public on the grounds that the public, by and arge, is not posessed of sufficient cognitive skill to understand the finer points of issues requiring governmental action. Hitchens is a snob, and an intellectual snob at that, but I doubt we’d hear him advocate this sort of complete contempt for the hoi polloi’s intellect like Strauss and his Neocon acolytes.
But, like Strauss, like Nietszche, like Lenin and Trotsky and Pinochet and numerous other tyrants, Hitchens remains rooted in the “Father Knows Best” authoritartian mindset. This is why his argument against “illegal” government spying on the public is not based on “democratic principles”, it’s base on the idealistic notion that a responsible government shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing.
In short, his view on this might have some synchronicity with ours, but in the end we support the idea that the people in a Democractic Republic are the ones ultimately empowered to make and demand aliegance to the laws of the land, and I don’t think hitchens believes in this fundamental democratic principle at all.
That’s probably completely correct but do you think there’s a touch of ‘oh shit, I know what all they have on me now. Hey, that’s not right, they wiretapped me, too‘ in there?
No. With Hitchens I don’t think a sense of him being personally “violated” by (potentially) being spied upon is likely to be a factor at all. His ideological zealotry is almost certain to trump such merely personal umbrage.
I disagree but that’s what makes America great. I think if he were true to his ideological zealotry he would not have been such a cheerleader for BushCo. Along those lines, it’s difficult to consider him sincere for human suffering or civil liberties when he was not vocal against many of Bush’s appointments. I find it hard to support any of these folks who capitalized on the opportunity to side with Bush when they should have been speaking out for what was right.
Hitchens ideology is authoritarian in nature. He believes nevertheless that it’s wrong for the government to spy on it’s own citizens in this way. his views are cognitively dissonant, at odds with each other, which means his perception and overall ideological formulation is dysfunctional. there is nothing in his words or his character to suggest a sensitivity to human suffering. Even his excellent takedown of the fraud Mother Teresa didn’t really reveal such a sensitivity on his part, except as an academic point.
I thoroughly repudiate Hitchens as an irrational ideologue who has no real concern for democracy but this doesn’t mean I must invalidate his commentary on this particular issue of government spying. I happen to believe he is sincere in his support of this one solitarty “civil iberty”, but this in no way leads me to assume he supports the broad sweep of civil liberties we of the liberal left advocate for, nor does it presume that Hitchens accords the right to have those liberties to everyone equally as we do.
That seems to be a very accurate description. You even included some reasons why I don’t trust him. I respect people I disagree with, but as in the case of Hitchens, if I see a wavering standard of justification then the mistrust creeps in. I think he would have himself tied into a pretzel if it was Clinton.
I think he might be sincere in how it affects or applies to himself, only.