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Culture Where Did Hitch ‘Go Wrong’? The late Christopher Hitchens’s work was of a piece, good and bad. Credit: image via Getty Images To many of his contemporaries who approach writing as an act of creative exertion rather than just a vehicle for transmitting thoughts, an act of self-realization and of compulsive assertion of oneself, Christopher Hitchens is understandably something of a cult hero. Hitchens was born two decades too late to count himself among the Cold War greats—Buckley, Muggeridge, Vidal, Updike, Mailer, and others—but could turn a phrase with the best of them. His provenance in a younger generation did not impede his ability to produce some of the crispest, most lucid prose authored in the modern English language, but it did provide him with a novel frame of political reference. He cut his teeth not on the bipolar U.S.–Soviet competition, which had progressed well past its denouement by the time he entered his prime as a published writer, but on the 1990’s transition to a world where Western-led institutions seemed to be the only game in town.  Hitchens’s views on religion, international politics, and the interplay between the two germinated in that garden of Western triumphalism. He was, to his credit, inoculated against the most zealous paeans to unipolarity, pithily dismissing Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis as “self-congratulation raised to the status of philosophy.” Yet he always nurtured a complementary strain, friendly if not identical to neoconservative militant manichaeism, that sadly overtook him after the events of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq. His approach to the Iraq disaster was anything but that of a reluctant fellow traveler, roped into an uneasy acquiescence after many a sleepless night. To the contrary, as Hitchens later confessed, he “felt exhilarated on the eleventh of September” and is only “slightly ashamed to say that.” The tragic events of September 11 posed, in Hitchens’s anti-religious cosmology, a kind of Pearl Harbor moment; the theocratic-fundamentalist threat to civilization revealing a ghastly visage, its malice billowing from the rubble of the Twin Towers. And thus the battle lines were drawn, in a way that Western leaders could no longer paper over, in a world war between good and evil, or liberal-democratic secular humanism versus the authoritarian forces of backward fascist fundamentalism. “I thought, ok, right, I’ll never get bored of fighting against these people, and their defeat will be absolute,” Hitchens recounted.  Some of the Iraq War’s more apologetic proponents have since conceded the point, which seems obvious in hindsight but was tragically lost on many at the time, that that there was no salient connection between Iraq and those despicable attacks, and that the War on Terror has led U.S. Middle East policy down a decades-long march of folly from which American security and strategic interests have still not recovered, if indeed they ever can. But Hitchens, true to his brand if nothing else, doggedly resisted any such exercise in expiation. His defense of the Iraq War drew on all the neoconservative stations of the cross with a vim and vigor that only strengthened in the years following the invasion. “A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial,” Hitchens wrote. “The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled…  Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.” Hitchens concedes all kinds of missteps along the way, but maintains none of them can impeach the venture’s fundamental necessity and nobility. The Bush administration’s most serious mistake, he insists, was that it should have invaded Iraq much sooner. There is, to be sure, an obvious contrarian streak coloring his professional career. Hitchens was an inveterate oppositionist, always defining himself against the consensus. Hence his lifelong crusade against all religions, matched in passion and intensity only by his later crusade against the Clintons; hence the gleeful iconoclasm with which he ran a red pen through the legacy of “hell’s angel” Mother Teresa, though one may say she got off light compared to “thug, crook, liar and murderer” Henry Kissinger. Why, after all, bother reaching for low-hanging fruit? Any professional contrarian would tell you that the jabs are always wittier, the retorts sharper, the cases more elegantly argued, when cutting against the grain; or, as Hitchens put it to a none-too-amused audience during a late-night show appearance, there comes a point when joking for the hundredth time about George Bush’s intelligence says more about your own than it does about his.  It is true that the leading faces of American intelligentsia—academia, journalism, literature and the arts, etc.—had sharply turned against the war effort, much like they did during U.S. involvement in Vietnam, for reasons Hitchens dismissed as frivolous and myopic, if not downright contemptible. Under the circumstances, there would have been something distinctly un-Hitchensian in letting this popular consensus go unchallenged; it would have been contrary to his nature as a public intellectual, akin to a fox reacting with disinterest to an unguarded henhouse. And it must be stated, lest he be falsely accused of rank opportunism, that his stance on Iraq remained remarkably, even perfectly consistent all the way through his passing in 2011.  What’s noteworthy isn’t that Hitchens was wrong on Iraq, but that he was wrong for all the reasons that the neoconservative mandarins of his time wanted to be right. Here was a bona fide man of the left, a self-described Trotskyist with all the activist credentials to boot, defending the Iraq debacle—or, in Hitchens’s preferred phrasing, the “Anglo-American intervention in Iraq” and, when he’s playing to an audience, “the Mesopotamian War”—with some of the finest prose ever authored on the issue. Hitchens consecrated the war on terror as a chiliastic civilizational battle in terms that would be familiar to Americans today, and with many of the same figurants. “Who says [Bush] wasn’t right to call that an axis of evil? Everything we found about these countries is much worse than we thought,” Hitchens said in a 2005 address, referring to the Bush administration’s bundling of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as enemies of the United States.  His conviction that the West must secure a “military victory over the alliance between autocracy and jihad,” while shaped on the contours by his approach to the whole topic of religion, is in essence indistinguishable from countless other neoconservative formulations of the same underlying belief that international politics is a battle to the death between incompatible value systems, and that the energies of Western civilization must be directed with unyielding focus toward vanquishing the world’s many evildoers.  The intent behind this intellectual excavation is not to argue with Hitchens about the Iraq war, much less to nitpick his reasons for supporting it. The goal, rather, is to offer a more nuanced understanding of why he believed the things he did, as strongly as he did. A great many of Hitchens’s detractors, and a few allies, have tried to account for what is sometimes referred to as his “transformation,” as if to find that moment where it all went wrong, or, conversely, when he finally saw the light. This is an entirely false premise, built on a failure to recognize the teleology running through his career.  Hitchens’s work never presumed, and indeed, was explicitly arrayed against, a postmodern or relativized outlook on questions of good and evil. To the contrary, his affiliation with neoconservatism was a byproduct of his crusade to rid the world, one intervention at a time, of what he condemned as a backwards, repressive, authoritarian ethos that has taken root in much of the non-Western world. It was not a repudiation but a natural extension of his earlier Trotskyite views, adapted to the post-Cold War consensus that the U.S. can and should project its outsized influence to shape, and if needed, bend the world according to the universal dictates of liberal democracy.  It remains a black mark on Hitchens’s legacy that he energetically acquiesced to this crusader-state model of American power and remained resolute in his support even after witnessing its heavy toll at home and abroad. Merely being one of his generation’s greatest writers did not suffice; he labored with Stakhanovite intensity to become neoconservatism’s most eloquent defender. It’s an honorific sure to rouse everything from furious consternation to rapturous delight, depending on one’s point of departure, but never indifference. Hitchens wouldn’t have had it any other way. The post Where Did Hitch ‘Go Wrong’? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Huzzah for Transparency! Buying votes isn’t new—nor is it the worst thing in the world. (Photo by Popow/ullstein bild via Getty Images) A report from Forbes that “at least 100 billionaires” were supporting either the former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris points once again to the unseemly involvement of rich Americans in their own country’s elections.  So much earnest handwringing over this news can be expected in coming weeks that La Roche-Posay hand cream sales will go through the roof and send stock in L’Oreal, which owns La Roche-Posay, soaring. Even the factories producing O’Keefe’s Working Hands (this for the manliest among us) are said to be doubling production.  It is only the billionaires backing Trump, of course, that worry the somber guardians of “our democracy.” Those backing Harris—and Forbes says there were far more Harris supporters among the billionaires than Trumpers—are a-okay.  Leaving that aside, the undue influence of “fat cats”—a term dating at least to 1928—has been a subject of much discussion for most of our history, especially among those who see it as their mission to reform this messy system. If they cannot locate a golden age in which elections were conducted with less meddling by the malefactors of great wealth, they can at least look toward a better day.  It will of course take some doing to get there. Rich people have had the audacity to involve themselves in our elections since the beginning of our republic—I mean, our democracy—and show few signs of doing otherwise. Even George Washington, who could not tell a lie, spent his money to advance himself in politics.  Almost all his successors have used their resources (and those of their sponsors) to fund their campaigns; those in recent years who didn’t start out rich when they entered politics ended up among the one percent, and that includes those who fancy themselves among the reformers and whom we continue to regard as such.  This might mean that those of us who do not possess the wealth of, say, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, or Bad Bunny, and the options that go with it, will need to think differently about money in politics. This will require uprooting a lot of deep-rooted prejudices and breaking bad habits. Reforming the system won’t be easy, considering how people with deep pockets have always influenced our elections and how accustomed we have become to this distressing reality.  Back in Washington’s day, there was no Federal Election Commission, no PACs, and no dark money. There was no dark money because no one felt the need to hide what they were doing. Candidates routinely bought votes, and no one thought a thing about it. Hooray for transparency! Huzzah, huzzah! They also had more fun doing it. In 1758, when Washington sought a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses—his first political office—he bought 160 gallons of liquor for fewer than 400 voters and “unnumbered hangers-on,” according to Douglas Southall Freeman, one of Washington’s most distinguished biographers. Charles Sydnor in Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia calculated this to amount to “more than a quart and a half” of hooch per voter.  “An itemized list of the refreshments,” Sydnor figured, “included 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and two gallons of cider royal.” (And this was just for the day that freeholders showed up to cast their ballots.)  Those who think they want a more transparent system should study the way things were done back then. In those days, voters would have to stand on a platform in front of the candidates and announce, for all to hear, who got their vote.  Supporters of transparency might favor this practice, although with more than 160 Americans casting their ballots in 2024, this could be time-consuming. And, after a while, monotonous. Democracy, as mentioned, is messy. People lie, cheat, steal, and commit bribery to achieve their tawdry ends. That’s why I’m so leery of transparency. Some of us don’t want to know how awful it is. The only thing worse than seeing it for what it is, in our considered opinion, would be trying to fix it.   The post Huzzah for Transparency! appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs American Outreach to Middle Eastern Despots Is Shortsighted The U.S. stands to gain little from showering love on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf tyrannies. President Joe Biden is an increasingly decrepit lame duck. A Washington fixture for more than 50 years, he is lost in time, believing that the U.S. is still the unipower and essential nation, enabling him to “run” the world. Those days, to the extent that they ever existed, are long past. Biden has spent most of his term sacrificing the interests of Americans to benefit foreign governments. Particularly bad is the administration’s bizarre offer of a security guarantee to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s few absolute monarchies, headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. That would mean turning the U.S. military into a modern janissary corps, with American personnel acting as royal bodyguards. Apparently cooked up by the National Security Council staffer Brett McGurk, acting as Riyadh’s man in Washington, the plan continues to be pressed by Biden, contradicting the latter’s many embarrassing paeans to democracy. Few Washington policy proposals are so loathsome and irrational. It is tempting to write the idea off as a product of Biden’s advancing dementia. Other administration officials lack that excuse, however. For instance, Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed, “It would really change the prospects of the entire region far into the future.” Nevertheless, the so-called Abraham Accords are not peace treaties despite their strangely idyllic reputation, since none of the nations involved have been at war with Israel. Rather, the U.S. is paying Sunni Arab regimes to establish diplomatic relations with Jerusalem.  The earlier agreements were bad for America. Bribes should not be necessary if a de facto alliance against Iran is in the interests of Arab countries and Israel. However, the former governments, despite long having back-channel relations with Israel, played the U.S. In exchange for recognition of Jerusalem, Washington expanded arms sales to the United Arab Emirates and recognized Morocco’s illegal conquest of Western Sahara.  Biden would provide the Kingdom with a security guarantee backed by U.S. troops, along with a sweetheart nuclear energy deal. Americans would protect MbS, as the killer prince is known, while he imprisons and murders, and sometimes dismembers, his domestic critics, and attempts to coerce his neighbors. According to Washington’s magical thinking, heavenly peace would then take hold. Iran would surrender, allowing Riyadh to dominate the region. The Palestinians would yield, docilely acting as cheap labor for their Israeli overlords. After the lion and lamb laid down together, the U.S. military would be able to withdraw from the Mideast. Everyone would live happily ever after, especially the Saudi and Israeli lobbies in Washington.  In fact, paying off MbS and his wastrel royal elite would be bad policy in almost every way. There is no need to pay Riyadh to improve relations with Jerusalem. The Saudis and Israelis have had unofficial ties for decades. They have good reason to cooperate on intelligence and security issues. If full diplomatic relations benefit both governments, they should act on their own, without any additional inducements from the U.S. Their official relationship matters little to Washington, which already offers both countries excessive attention and support.  Turning the U.S. military into a royal bodyguard would subordinate American to Saudi interests. The KSA has always put itself first. Riyadh’s lackadaisical attitude toward terrorism contributed to al-Qaeda’s rise. Only the group’s self-destructive decision to target the royals in 2003 led to more serious Saudi intelligence cooperation with the US. In any case, Washington has no need to defend the Kingdom. Nor does the KSA require American protection. Washington has armed the royal family—some $100 billion worth of foreign military sales are currently in process—to enable it to defend itself. If the regime doesn’t believe its people would shoot in the right direction, it could liberalize the Kingdom’s authoritarian political system. Notably, the majority of Americans oppose tasking the U.S. military with the royal family’s defense. Offering Saudi Arabia an unconditional security guarantee would reward past irresponsibility and encourage future recklessness. MbS has been as great a threat to regional stability and security as the Iranian clerics, having launched a brutal aggressive war against Yemen, isolated (and planned to invade) Qatar, kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister, intervened militarily to support Bahrain’s dictatorial Sunni monarchy, and underwritten jihadist insurgents regionally. Protecting Riyadh from the consequences of its behavior would encourage even worse in the future. A security guarantee would further enmesh Washington in multiple violent Mideast confrontations and conflicts. Rather than enable Washington to reduce its role in the region, “the pact’s main achievement will be to further entangle the United States in a region that successive U.S. presidents have tried to pivot away from,” write Frederick Wehrey and Jennifer Kavanagh, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Defense Priorities, respectively. Confident in military immunity courtesy the U.S., Riyadh could become more aggressive against its neighbors. At the same time, the KSA would likely demand ever more evidence of Washington’s commitment. A ballooning American troop presence could spur terrorism. U.S. forces on holy Islamic soil triggered the 1995 bombing of the Khobar Towers compound and animated Osama bin Laden’s attacks elsewhere.  Promising to defend the Kingdom would discourage its pursuit of a diplomatic solution with Iran. Last year Tehran and Riyadh, with a push from Iraq and China, among others, resurrected relations and lowered tensions. Although the peace is uneasy, it appears to be real. The Saudi ambassador to Great Britain, Prince Khalid bin Bandar Al Saud, recently observed, “We have had our differences with Iran. But I think we are pretty aligned at the moment to deescalate this situation.” The two governments reportedly are even planning joint naval maneuvers. The KSA’s shift to diplomacy reflected the Trump administration’s refusal to retaliate against Tehran for the attack on Saudi oil facilities five years ago. A new defense commitment, especially if backed by the presence of U.S. combat troops, would tempt MbS to reverse course.  Increasing the military threat against Iran posed by both an Israel-Saudi axis and U.S. security guarantee, and providing the Saudis with nuclear power without tight safeguards, would spur regional proliferation. Tehran could not help but see a formal U.S.-KSA alliance as a threat, another reason to develop nuclear weapons. The Kingdom might seek to become at least a latent nuclear power. Other Middle Eastern states, such as Egypt and Turkey, could in turn consider joining the nuclear club. America’s international witness would suffer. The Kingdom is a human rights bottom-feeder, ranked behind Iran, Russia, and China by Freedom House. So bad is the KSA’s reputation that earlier this month the royal regime was rejected by the United Nations General Assembly for membership on the Human Rights Council, beaten by the Marshall Islands. Riyadh does not moderate its brutality even when America is concerned. The regime murdered and dismembered the journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, luring him to its Istanbul consulate and turning it into an abattoir. Dual citizens living in America have returned to the Kingdom, only to be arrested and sentenced to years, sometimes decades, in prison for tweets critical of the regime. U.S. presidents kowtowing to the Saudi royals long have put American human rights hypocrisy on global display. Offering a formal security guarantee until now available only to nominal democracies would further ravage Uncle Sam’s reputation. The Palestinian people would be even more vulnerable, with less pressure on Israel to respect their lives and dignity. So far the so-called Abraham Accords have enabled the Gulf kingdoms to evade their professed commitment to press for a homeland for the Palestinian people. That, in turn, has eased pressure on Jerusalem to seek a sustainable political solution. So long as the Israeli government believes that it can treat Palestinians like helots in ancient Sparta, they will suffer. Optimists imagine prying Netanyahu away from his violent allies to form a more moderate coalition, but his continued tenure, not Riyadh’s recognition, remains the central issue in Israeli politics, and he has long emphasized his opposition to a Palestinian state. Many Israelis evidently desire Saudi recognition, which would offer a boost to Netanyahu and his extremist government.  Turning American military personnel into royal bodyguards would not exclude China from the Middle East. The PRC has shown no interest in entangling itself militarily in the region’s endless and fruitless conflicts. Beijing is making steady economic inroads in the region, but these would be unaffected by America making the Mideast safe for absolute monarchy. A more prosperous PRC will inevitably play a larger commercial role in the Mideast. Even if turning the U.S. armed services into MbS’s bodyguard improbably curbed the Kingdom’s appetite for Chinese investment, the price for America would be too high. Ironically, wasting even more U.S. resources on defense subsidies for dubious allies would further weaken America economically, inadvertently aiding Chinese efforts.  The Biden administration will soon come to an ignominious close. Among its failures worth applauding is not adding Saudi Arabia to the list of participants in the Abraham Accords. Observed Sarah Leah Whitson of Democracy for the Arab World Now, what such an agreement would “actually secure is strengthening—with an unprecedented U.S. security guarantee—an axis of dictatorships who will ally with Israel’s apartheid government and stay mum about the Palestinians.” Neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel constitutes a vital interest worth the shedding of Americans’ blood. A defense guarantee would be a bad deal for everyone involved, especially those expected to give their lives to protect the corrupt, brutal, and licentious Saudi princes. Let Middle Eastern countries make their own deals without sending the bill to Washington. The post American Outreach to Middle Eastern Despots Is Shortsighted appeared first on The American Conservative.

Another young healthy doctor with many names just died suddenly. Someone who worked with him reported that he did indeed get the shot. I didn't need to know that though. It's best to assume it unless proven otherwise. I'm sure they'll claim his LDL was too high or low, or he had an unknown heart defect. Yes that's it. UTL COMMENT:- Sorry for him and his family.......he clearly fell for the lies and deceipt from his funders - Bigpharma.... How come some of them are 'in the club' and knew not to get the toxic shots and others still did? With thanks to THE KURGAN REPORT Sources https://www.lewisfuneralhomemoorestown.com/m/obituaries/George-Mark-Iv/Memories https://m.facebook.com/hearthousenj/ Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr3o2n4YO7s Music: Summer Wine - Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood

When Chris Palermo's 7-year-old daughter, Ella, said she wanted to show him something, he was expecting another painting, or a piece of writing, or something that she had built. He never expected a lengthy – and thorough — To-Do list!However, a To-Do list is exactly what he got. Ella had created a detailed table in the Notes app to keep track of all the things she hoped to accomplish. Chris posted a photo of the list to Reddit, where it was an instant hit, brightening the days of thousands and thousands of users.Most of us keep a To-Do list of some kind, or a running list of chores and tasks we need to accomplish.I have one of my own just like Ella's, sitting in my Notes app right now. For the record, Ella's is way better.I've got lists of bills to pay and administrative phone calls to make, things to fix around the house, and upcoming appointments to keep.Ella's got dancing and blowing bubbles. NuevoJerz/RedditBut it's not all fun and games for this 7-year-old: The list also includes chores like cleaning up, eating dinner (always important), and reminders to 'learn something.'However, the list is mostly fun and games.And that's exactly the way it should be.It's important to Ella that she never forget to:SingDancePlay with dollsDance againTake a video of herself dancingTake a video of herself dancing again!And do some writingNow if she could only get around to painting that darn cupcake!(How relatable is it that even Ella struggles to check off everything on her list? She even included 'Check Box' as the first item to give herself a little momentum to get through all her tasks!)Chris never expected the list to go viral. He just hopes people can learn something from it.Being an adult can be mind-numbingly boring.Our routines get stagnant, and our lists of responsibilities and Have-To-Dos get longer and longer every year. It's easy to forget to make time for things that have no productive value, things that we only do because we enjoy them.And not just big things like planning your next vacation or meeting up with friends — although those are great, too."I hope [the list] gives us adults a pause and makes us think about our own to-do lists and responsibilities and the importance of having those joy-filled activities in there, too," Chris told Newsweek.Ella's incredible list reminds us that we should be seeking out moments of joy every single day. Whether it's watching the clouds roll by, dancing in the kitchen, or learning something new just for fun.And despite what you've been told, you're never too old to blow bubbles.

A moment of reflection. The post “It gets me every time”: the Pearl Jam song that makes Mike McCready emotional first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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