Invite a drunk to your dinner party and this is what you get. Christopher Hitchens coming unglued.
Parker relates a dinner party attended by Hitchens and
his wife. Relaxed occasion, Hitchens and some women are shooting the
shit over Gavin Newsome’s good looks and Iranian politics, when one of
the attendees makes a “passing but sympathetic remark” about Howard
Dean, saying he felt Dean was unfairly maligned by the media. Hitchen’s
reply:Dean was “a raving nut bag,” [Hitchens said]…then he
corrected himself: “A raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag…I and a few
other people saw that he should be destroyed.Hitchens then recalls a time when Dean spoke against
mandatory parental notification laws by telling of 12-year-old child
who’d come to his office seeking an abortion. The baby was her
father’s. But Dean hadn’t told the authorities of the incident, and it
seemed that it may have happened to someone else, or been exaggerated,
or something. Hitchens uses this to brand Dean a “pathological liar,”
and when some at the table protest, Hitchens turns his shotgun full of
crazy on the assembled:“Fine, now that I know that, to you, medical ethics
are nothing, you’ve told me all I need to know. I’m not trying to
persuade you. Do you think I care whether you agree with me? No. I’m
telling you why I disagree with you. That I do
care about. I have no further interest in any of your opinions. There’s
nothing you wouldn’t make an excuse for. You know what? I wouldn’t want
you on my side. I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a
psycho and a fraud , and you say ‘That’s O.K.’ Fuck off. No, I mean it:
fuck off. I’m telling you what I think are standards and you say, ‘What
standards? It’s fine, he’s against the Iraq War.’ Fuck. Off. You’re
MoveOn.org. Any liar will do. He’s anti-Bush. Fuck off…Save it
sweetie, for someone who cares. It will not be me. You love it, you
suck on it. I now know what your standards are, and now you know what
mine are, and that’s all the difference — I hope — in the
world.”
I’m sure Hitchens’ wife was mortified. There’s nothing like your spouse getting soused and telling a whole dinner party to go fuck themselves.
