What It Takes to Write for Slate

Christopher Hitchens’ pathetic decline picks up speed. (By the way, this recent cry for attention aided Eros about as much as Hitchens’ following non sequiturs should help Ares.)

[M]ay I propose some ways in which those who don’t want to be associated with Michael Moore, George Galloway, Ramsey Clark, and the rest of the Zarqawi and Saddam apologists can make themselves plain? Here are four headings under which the anti-war types could disprove the charge of bad faith.

I wonder how much more of this Slate is going to publish before shame forces them to hire a more credible resident warmonger – maybe Sean Hannity. Aside from the obvious Stalinism of demanding that the accused “disprove the charge” against them, who the hell is Hitchens to talk about “bad faith”? Has there been a single lie about Iraq over the last four years that he has not repeated, embellished, and amplified?

Anyway, the first way we “anti-war types” can earn a pat on the head from Hitch is to renounce our love of land mines. You see, “we have persuasive evidence” (no elaboration or link) “that Iran and Syria have contributed some sophisticated explosives” to the Iraqi insurgency, so one’s failure to call for regime change in those two countries makes one objectively pro-land-mine.

Next comes some riff about prewar “human shields,” who I think made up a whopping .0001% of war opponents, and ends as follows:

[W]ould not now be the ideal time for those who hate war to go to Iraq and stand outside the mosques, hospitals, schools, and women’s centers that are daily subjected to murderous assaults? This would write an imperishable page in the history of American dissent.

Imperishable! Ha! See, because they would perish. Oh, that British sense of humor. But, um, would not now be the ideal time for those who turned Iraq into a terrorist sh*thole to go be human shields? Would not now be the ideal time for, say, famous pro-war alcoholics to go stand in front of Baghdad’s rapidly disappearing liquor stores and take a car-bomb blast for the team?

Third:

Couldn’t you say at least something about the sanctions? While the Baath Party was still in power, I would receive appeals every week about the number of children who were dying because of the embargo. I think the figures were inflated to some extent, but there is no doubt that a huge and very distressing statistic concerning the death and malnourishment and health crisis of the poorer Iraqis had been uncovered. Well, I tried to point out that the best way of lifting the sanctions (which the grossly obese Iraqi ruling party was manipulating for profit and corruption) was to remove the regime that had made the embargo necessary in the first place and that was stealing baby formula and medicine for its own ends. I didn’t exactly get a standing ovation for the idea and suddenly was told that sanctions were actually a good idea since they kept Saddam “in his box” and thus obviated the need for his removal. But again, if civilian casualties are the question, is it not true that the end of U.N. sanctions has been a positive and humanitarian thing by definition?

Yes, in the same way that the end of a prisoner’s life of degradation is “a positive and humanitarian thing by definition.” Even if it comes via the electric chair.

Number four is so ridiculously red a herring that I cannot imagine anyone else – not even the dimmest b/mimbo on Fox & Friends – throwing it in the faces of the Big Bad Antiwar Left:

Isn’t it time to revive the demand that homosexuals be allowed to wear the uniform of the U.S. military?

Oh yeah? Well, ’twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, bitch.