It would seem that you’ve been picking on me on this subject for goodness knows how long, and you don’t even know the first thing about me.

And, not to mention the intended insults you’ve been throwing my way. Thanks for that.

I’m a raging Christianophobe as well. Only, I don’t see you bothered by that. Why is that?

And not only did I support him as an anti-theist, but on many other issues as well – including Iraq and Iran.

Of course you did; you’re a raging islamophobe.

He used to make me angry, and I though of him as basically aiding and abetting people like George Bush and Tony Blair, but thinking about it calmly, he probably had no discernable impact on history whatsoever.

People wouldn’t be so annoyed if he was actually “one of the most intelligent journalists, critics, and general polemicists to appear in the 20th century”. The hype doesn’t match his rhetoric.

I find it ever-amusing how people respect Hitch for his desire to murder people of a different belief system at the same time they decry the horrors of religion.

It’s not a bad piece – I don’t claim the man couldn’t write. He could, and well. Still, he stops short of calling for the prosecution of torturers. You might say that’s not what the piece is about, but the actual revelation that waterboarding is torture is hardly breaking news – as he also writes, the US Army has known it for decades.

As for Mr. Hitchens’ general merits, who can say it better than Alexander Cockburn?

Between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa.  Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/

Big deal, though, right? It’s pretty clear that I could throw any number of corrections your way and you wouldn’t reconsider your position on the man, or even argue in good faith. 

Again, I encourage you to actually read some of Christopher Hitchens’ writing before you half-bake your opinion of his work.

As a celebrity journalist, Hitchens could be confident his waterboarders would not risk doing him any physical harm. And he did not suffer the psychological damage of being violated and coerced. Also, I don’t recall how he denounced waterboarding as a crime and demanded the persecution of each and every person in the responsibility chain leading to the torture of detainees (but that might include himself). Like I said, little to no integrity.

If you mean to say that he fully supported a Big Brother-style surveillance apparatus or anything even remotely like that, you’re just wrong.  His support of domestic intelligence gathering on terrorists was very much conditional.

From his Wikipedia article:
“In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA, challenging Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.”

One of his statements regarding this lawsuit, from the ACLU’s site:
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/statement-christopher-hitchens-nsa-lawsuit-client

Information on the lawsuit itself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_v._NSA

I do not agree with Hitchens on many topics, particularly his support for the Iraq war, but I have tremendous respect for the man. He was a tremendously powerful and inspirational communicator and thinker. Calling him a “tool” is dismissive and simply inaccurate.

I’m not sure he really “sucked up” to George W. Bush but he did agree with some of his foreign policies. I recall Hitchens writing about him in very negative terms – despite still supporting the Iraq war until the end of his life (a topic I disagree with him on completely, but I still respect him tremendously).

As for his feelings on torture, did you ever read this article?
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808

Yes, Christopher Hitchens underwent “waterboarding” and called it torture.  How far would you go to prove a point?

As for his attacks on Mother Teresa, there is no way that you can read his book “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” and make the claim that his attacks lacked substance. Unless, perhaps, your name is Bill Donahue.

Don’t want to read the book (it’s not that long, really)? Take a look at this article on Slate:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html
Or search Youtube for “Hell’s Angel”

The reason anyone is comparing Christopher Hitchens to George Orwell is because he wrote a book called “Why Orwell Matters” and wrote and spoke about him in glowing terms at just about every opportunity.

Something tells me that you’re not very familiar with Christopher Hitchens.
Try looking at the Wikipedia article about him before making uninformed comments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens

If that were true I’d have more respect for him, but if you look at his hit pieces on Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, or Mother Teresa and other people he spewed his vitriol on (due to differing opinions) they were full of ad hominems, name-calling, and weak arguments.

I don’t think he was a “tool”, I just think he had a differing opinion than mine.

You might feel differently if your wedding party were burned to death by foreign troops.

So he backed the overwhelming and oppressive “security” and surveillance states in the US and UK. 

This is the very definition of a tool.