Well, shit.

Looks like Christopher Hitchens’ appear­ance at Powell’s tomor­row is can­celled. I was look­ing for­ward to that.

As a proxy for the gen­uine arti­cle, I’ll sup­ply links to a January inter­view with Hitchens con­ducted by local jour­nal­ist Michael J. Totten. It’s in two parts. Hitch goes for the throat from the get-go. Regarding the January attack on Danish car­toon­ist Kurt Westergaard by an angry Muslim with an axe, Hitch says (emphases mine):

Let’s do a brief thought exper­i­ment. I tell you the fol­low­ing: On New Year’s Eve, a man in his mid-seventies is hav­ing his grand­daugh­ter over for a sleep-over, his five-year old grand­daugh­ter. He is attacked in his own home by an axe-wielding maniac with homi­ci­dal intent. Your mam­malian reac­tion, your reac­tion as a pri­mate, is one of revulsion…

…then you pick up yesterday’s Guardian, one of the most lib­eral news­pa­pers in the Western world, and there’s a long arti­cle that says, ah, that pic­ture, that moral pic­ture, that instinct to pro­tect the old and the young doesn’t apply in this case. The man asked for it. He drew a car­toon that upset some peo­ple. We aren’t at all enti­tled to use our moral instincts in the cor­rect way.

…This is a sort of cul­tural and moral sui­cide, in my opinion.

Classic, unmit­i­gated Hitchens, for sure. But as always, he throws us some curve balls, par­tic­u­larly in his praise for Barack Obama:

There’s some­thing every­one has for­got­ten, and Obama has never tried to remind them. He doesn’t get credit because he’s never asked for it. Do you remem­ber when the American crew was taken by the pirates off the coast of Somalia? It’s the same coun­try of ori­gin of the axe-wielding maniac who just tried to mur­der Kurt Westergaard in Denmark.

Someone went to the Oval Office and said, “Mr. President, you have three choices. We can have a stand­off with the Somali gov­ern­ment, we can nego­ti­ate with the pirates, or you can order the Navy SEALs to fire four shots.”

I wouldn’t like to be a newly elected pres­i­dent and have that dumped on my desk. He must have said, how­ever long it took him, “Use the SEALs.”

But that’s not what impresses me. The point I’m mak­ing is not the one you thought I was going to make. What impresses me is that he didn’t give a speech later about it. If Reagan had done that, every­one would remem­ber it. There would be hubris. “They can run, but they can’t hide.”

I like his nature. Those who need to know, know. We don’t have to make a big fuck­ing cir­cus out of it.

Fair albeit arguable points, I sup­pose. At some point, though, I’d like to hear Hitchens’ take on Obamacare and aspects of his gov­er­nance that don’t involve war. The cynic in me thinks Hitchens is wealthy enough that mat­ters like health care don’t hit him in the pock­et­book as much as the rest of us, so he has no inter­est in dis­cussing it.

But that’s merely a guess. (FYI: Yes, I do know that Hitchens endorsed Obama in the 2008 election.)

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