Hitchens on Supreme Court Nominees Shows His True Colors, Red.
Christopher Hitchens' latest piece on Slate on the nomination for Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement, Miers and Brimstone - Let's stop pretending there's no religious test for nominees, is "a sad performance" accoring to Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner on National Review Online. Hitchens had previously essentially argued (also in Slate) after the Roberts nomination that Roberts should not be confirmed because he is Catholic. It is due to people such as Hitchens that the Constitution contains the prohibition on religious tests for public office.
Despite Hitchens' vehemence and venom on the subject of Miers, his arguments are not too well thought out. He notes that Miers' purported faith has been offered as an assurance to those in the GOP who doubt her conservative credentials and contends that such an offering is a religous test. No doubt students the world over would love to be subjected to a test in which they, themselves, are asked no questions on the subject.
What Hitchens' verbal gymnastics in his recent pieces on the high court nominees come down to is this - despite Hitchens' recently donned appellation of "neocon", when you pull away the mask, he is still what Tom Piatak in the The American Conservative revealed him to be, an unreconstructed Trotskyite and an anti-Christian (particularly anti-Catholic) bigot. This half concealed Pinko called the blessed Mother Theresa a con artist and John Paul II a "barely sentient" fool, yet he still will not condemn the thousands of murders of Russians clerics - according to Piatak more than 8,000 in 1922 alone - committed by his still beloved Commies.
So how is it that Hitchens finds himself counted among American "neocons"? And this brings us back to his desired religious test, i.e. no religion, for Supreme Court nominees. As Piatak ably observed, Hitchens sees American neoconservatism as a practical way to accomplish some of his still cherished Bolshevik aims - after all, the Russians certainly aren't going to get it done:
Dictatorship of the proletariat is a tough sell to Americans, but dialectical materialism and scientific socialism...Hitchens is still hawking those concepts, albeit under a new brand. For Hitchens, putting a practicing Catholic from Indiana and a Texas evangelical into robes doesn't help him and his fellow travelers go a long way toward selling their junk.
Despite Hitchens' vehemence and venom on the subject of Miers, his arguments are not too well thought out. He notes that Miers' purported faith has been offered as an assurance to those in the GOP who doubt her conservative credentials and contends that such an offering is a religous test. No doubt students the world over would love to be subjected to a test in which they, themselves, are asked no questions on the subject.
What Hitchens' verbal gymnastics in his recent pieces on the high court nominees come down to is this - despite Hitchens' recently donned appellation of "neocon", when you pull away the mask, he is still what Tom Piatak in the The American Conservative revealed him to be, an unreconstructed Trotskyite and an anti-Christian (particularly anti-Catholic) bigot. This half concealed Pinko called the blessed Mother Theresa a con artist and John Paul II a "barely sentient" fool, yet he still will not condemn the thousands of murders of Russians clerics - according to Piatak more than 8,000 in 1922 alone - committed by his still beloved Commies.
So how is it that Hitchens finds himself counted among American "neocons"? And this brings us back to his desired religious test, i.e. no religion, for Supreme Court nominees. As Piatak ably observed, Hitchens sees American neoconservatism as a practical way to accomplish some of his still cherished Bolshevik aims - after all, the Russians certainly aren't going to get it done:
Hitchens still wants world revolution; the only difference is that now he sees us Americans as perfectly placed to do the fighting and the dying needed to achieve his Trotskyist dream.
...Hitchens was able to overcome his past squeamishness about American military force not because America is threatened, but because the threat now comes from men who believe in Allah rather than Marx. ... Hitchens also wrote—in the same column in which he extolled the priest-killing potency of the French and Russian Revolutions—that “George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the US armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled.” Hitchens’s entire politics is motivated by his hatred of religion and tradition; he’d be just as happy bombing St. Peter’s as the Taliban.
Dictatorship of the proletariat is a tough sell to Americans, but dialectical materialism and scientific socialism...Hitchens is still hawking those concepts, albeit under a new brand. For Hitchens, putting a practicing Catholic from Indiana and a Texas evangelical into robes doesn't help him and his fellow travelers go a long way toward selling their junk.
posted by BarbariansAtBay at
5:21 PM
