September 15, 2005
The Swamp Thing
Browning Porter explains in the comments why a debate between George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens needed to happen.
Some of our dovish comrades are having trouble understanding the value of last nights debate. So let me explain.All true. But it’s not good enough for someone like Hitchens to publicly spank George Galloway. Left-liberals who oppose the war in Iraq need to step up and take a few cracks at him, too.There is a large element of the antiwar Left that is willing to overlook Galloway's shortcomings as a Leftist and as a human being and to make common cause with him. Don't tell me there isn't. I heard with my own ears, and read with my own eyes, all the chattering admiration for him after his congressional testimony. It's comes from the same impulse that is willing to give the demegoguery of Michael Moore every benefit of every doubt. Galloway is currently on a book tour through the US, organized by the antiwar Left, to capitalize on his "success" before congress. He is also, without apology, whipping up support for jihad in Iraq. Someone needs to expose him, especially to the Left, as the fascist-fellating fraud that he is. And that exposure has to come, to some extent, from the Left. It means nothing if Limbaugh or O'Reilley have a go at him.
Hitchens is the perfect man for the job. He's intelligent, witty, and he is not intimidated by the likes of Galloway. In every debate on the Iraq war I've heard him in, it has seemed in the show-of-hands straw polls that more people have left agreeing with him than came in.
Those of you who abhor an apostate have much to hate in Hitchens. And we can count on you to fling all manner of feces at him. (I'm taking odds back channel on how long before someone accuses him of holocaust denial, or ratting out his buddy, Sidney.) But those who can be persuaded at all by a reasonable argument may just barely be reachable by Hitchens.
For example, where Galloway has been visiting with Tariq Aziz, Hitchens has been visiting with the Kurdish resistance, and that is a hard fact for someone with any moral center at all to overlook. Hitchens has also been very critical of the Right and the Bush administration on all the right issues. You can't simply smear him, as Galloway tried to do last night, with something Marie Antoinettish that Barbara Bush apparently said about the Superdome. It won't stick.
Marc Cooper is the man for that job, and he does a fine job indeed working over the Swamp Thing from Scotland. Go read it.
Posted by Michael J. Totten at September 15, 2005 4:37 PM
