Why hitchens hates clinton

He was known for taking some unpopular stands and if you hated him for that, he was just fine with it. In fact, he once remarked: "If you don't like what I say, or disagree, take a number, stand in line and kiss my ass. His followers regarded him as the most memorable iconoclast of our time. He was born in the English middle class. His mother did everything to pay for his education in a much revered private Christian-based elite school, which he attended from the age of eight to eighteen.

She apparently said to his father that if there was to be an upper class in this country, her son was going to be part of it. He attended Oxford as contemporary of Bill Clinton , was a Marxist and leader of the revolutionary left. In the Seventies he started to work as a journalist at a left-wing publication.

However, everything changed after In his opinion the radical elements in the Islamic world posed a mortal danger to Western principles of political liberty and freedom of conscience, which he later would define as 'Islamfascism'.

Oscar Wilde's phrase, "the problem with socialism is that it wastes too much time on evening meetings" , inspired Christopher to reconsider the cause he had chosen. The events of had this British Trotskyite lost his faith in socialism. He ended his year relationship with the The Nation magazine which shocked everyone around him. After that he supported the invasion of Irak and Afghanistan and loosely became a 'libertarian socialist'.

He once admitted being Republican, but only because he was Antiroyalist. It was his reason for leaving Britain in to become an American citizen.

Hitchen, or Hitch, and 'The Hitchman', as he was known to his plethora of friends and supporters, became a highly sought-after speaker and orator all over the country. A one-man-band of rebellion and straight talk.

Some people described his form of investigative journalism as direct and acerbic, although his lectures and speaking gigs were enthusiastically attended by thousands of people who just could not endure the lies and deceit any longer. It has gone on for too many years. He called Henry Kissinger a war criminal and Bill Clinton a raging psycho, whose legacy, he said, would be one of a regime of nothingness punctuated by nastiness. The American Right was 'rather an unpolished crew, the sort of people who tore the country, calling for sexual abstinence among teenagers.

Dick Morris coined the term Triangular which forms part of the title of this book. He regarded Princess Diana as, first an foremost, a cult figure, and secondly 'a slow ranger, narcissistic, good-time girl with a very bad taste in men'. Mother Theresa was no saint, more like a fraud, a liar and a thief. His book God Is Not Great - how religion poisons everything became an international bestseller.

He regarded himself as a neo-atheist Hitch became a crusader against 'clerical and theocratical bullying'. Religion, according to him, included 'nuclear-armed mullahs, as well as insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry.

Quite an irony. At first they fight for the freedom of speech and then eventually withdrew it, often with tyrannical fervor. Many sociologists agree on the similarity between political Fascism, Religion and Communism. All three movements often require the followers to distinguish themselves by wearing a uniform, differentiating them from everyone else around them the burka and white robes Islam , yellowish-orange robes Budha , black cassocks or long white robes Catholic priests , the Jewish black robes and long beards, different uniforms, with red scarves by Communists, etc.

I wish I could ask Mr. Hitchens to comment on that. In fact, the urge to find global peace is a common goal in all three ideologies.

It probably explains his passive aggressiveness towards all three ideologies, landing himself in a No Man's Land, throwing stones at all the followers of the three 'No-No's' in his book.

His moral compass, of treating everyone even Bill Clinton and a few others with respect, as well as a deep gentlemanly compassion can probably be found in all of it. Nevertheless, I am forever a huge admirer of Christopher Hitchens for the very same reasons as the thousands of others who mourn his passing. He made me laugh and challenged me to think and explore.

He was straightforward, honest, extremely intelligent, and to the point. Kind, warm, humorous, witty, and deeply human. I just loved his ironic, sarcastic wit. You can watch numerous videos of him on Youtube.

This book has gone places, for sure. It remained an international bestseller for many months. Somewhere around the time that the Warren Commission said there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy and the Johnson administration insisted there was light at the end of the Vietnam tunnel, Hitchens made a pact with himself to be a principled avatar of subjective journalism. So when five-term Arkansas governor Bill Clinton became U.

Or, more simply put, its bottle vintage holds up well. Hitchens proves to be a dangerous foe to Clinton precisely because he avoids the protest modus operandi of the antiwar s. In these chapters, the hubristic Hitchens dismantles the Clinton propaganda machine of the s, like a veteran safecracker going click-back click-click-back click until he gets the goods.

Hemingway famously wrote that real writers have a built-in bullshit detector—no one has ever accused Hitchens of not reading faces. What goaded him the most was that Clinton, the so-called New Democrat, with the help of his Machiavellian-Svengali consultant Dick Morris, decided the way to hold political power was by making promises to the Left while delivering to the Right.

This rotten strategy was called Triangulation. All Clinton gave a damn about, Hitchens maintains, was holding on to power. His well-honed sense of ethics, however, made that impossible. In the post—Cold War era, Hitchens was the polemicist who mattered most. Like these esteemed literary predecessors, Hitchens will be anthologized and read for years to come. There's nothing cheesy or cheap about this book. Hitchens is no gossip-monger. He is a professional, courageous journalist on a quest to balance the scales of history.

Hitchens can well be regarded as one of the last journalists to stand up and defend the readers and voters of the world against the spin-machines of ruthless politicians. He heard the voices of the working classes whose slogan till today is Taxation without representation. He was as popular with the Left as with the Right.

Needless to say, this is my kind of book. And yes, my kind of author. This is the kind of journalism I want to read. We all should insist on it. Read this before you vote for Hillary James Richards. It is quite rare to see Bill Clinton's name appearing in any 'worst' President lists, certainly when compared with the likes of Nixon and W. This despite the impeachment proceedings brought against him over the Lewinsky affair.

This is no doubt due largely to the period of economic prosperity associated with his Presidency. Hitchens contention in this book is that Clinton was a serial liar, guilty of treating appallingly a great number of women.

Clinton is accused of amongst other things rape, handing out government jobs to keep various women quiet and causing those who wouldn't accept such 'hush money' to be intimidated.

Some of the evidence marshalled by Hitchens could be said to be circumstantial, although it is telling that Clinton refused to deny the rape accusation and never, it seemed, contemplated suing Hitchens for the accusations in this book. The lack of a paper trail for such crimes is one thing. The long list of potential female accusers quite another. That aside, to my mind the most disturbing accusation in the book is that Clinton personally oversaw the execution in of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired man accused of killing a police officer in Arkansas.

Hitchens' contention is that Clinton saw this as a suitable way of avoiding any 'soft on crime' tag during the Presidential election and unusually broke off campaigning to return to Arkansas to ensure 'justice was done'.

The diversion of headlines away from the ongoing Gennifer Flowers affair was, Hitchens contends, an additional motive for Clinton. If half of the accusations in 'No One Left To Lie To' are true then Clinton would certainly have to be regarded as one of the most devious, oleaginous Presidents in history.

Hitchens is on devastating form here, turning his pen against someone he believed to be utterly unfit to hold such high office. The book forms part of his 'holy trinity' of excoriating critiques that also included Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa, all of which are highly recommended. Certainly Hitchens recalls some episodes that bring nothing but shame upon Clinton, that make him look just as calculating and slimy as Hitchens claims he is.

Perhaps the worst was Clinton's return to Arkansas during the presidential campaign to oversee the execution of a mentally handicapped death-row prisoner named Rickey Ray Rector. The execution went horribly wrong, with Rector's arm finally being slashed to insert a catheter when a vein for the lethal injection could not be found.

Rector was clearly unable to comprehend what was happening -- thinking that his executioners were doctors coming to his aid, he attempted to assist them. And it's not particularly difficult to conclude that, taking place as it did during the New Hampshire primary, this execution was Clinton's preemptive strike against charges of being soft on crime -- that he was damned if anyone was going to catch him off guard by asking what he'd do if Hillary were raped and murdered.

At moments like this, Hitchens is once again the writer who has such a talent for marshaling exactly the facts people don't want to hear -- a talent he has taken a lot of flak for even when he's been on solid ground.

I know of no better way to startle people than to give them Hitchens' brilliant polemic "The Missionary Position," which should have laid the myth of Mother Teresa's saintliness to rest once and for all. But in "No One Left to Lie To," Hitchens almost always overplays his hand, coloring in decisions that are incompetent or mendacious or just plain wrong with hints of dark and covert deeds. In the case of the disastrous August bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, we are told that Clinton was appeasing Southern Christians who were lobbying Congress to prohibit business with countries that discriminate against Christians.

At other times Hitchens writes with the outraged disgust of someone just discovering that politics, much like journalism, is an incredibly dirty business that brings you into contact with all sorts of disreputable people.

W hen there is no real evidence of wrongdoing, Hitchens allows mere association to suffice. It isn't making excuses for corruption to suggest that a political writer of some years' experience is striking a note of willful naiveti by pretending shock that certain shady people have easy access to political leaders. Those people are, to Hitchens, exactly the sort with whom the Clintons belong, and the inference he makes again and again is that theirs is a particularly Southern species of depravity.

He is not as obvious as most writers who can barely hide their disgust with white Southerners. Hitchens raises the charge of racism in the story of Clinton's withdrawal of Lani Guinier's nomination.

Cowardly, yes, but racist? In the midst of a passage describing the results of Clinton's scaling back welfare, Hitchens tosses in the wholly unsubstantiated complaint that women who still receive benefits are "not infrequently pressed for sexual favors as the price of the ticket"; the clear implication is of a plantation state presided over by debauched Massa Bill.

Elsewhere there are out-of-the-blue references to "the tawdry pieties of Baptist and Methodist hypocrisy" and to Clinton's making "the most of his Dixie drawl. Like the Republicans who drove the impeachment machine, Hitchens is motivated by his disgust for the man.

Like them he trots out the ludicrous rationale that Clinton's relations with Monica Lewinsky are the public's business both because they took place in a public building, the White House are the relations between the president and his wife subject to the same scrutiny? And like the right-wingers who were determined to get Clinton, he refers to the president's head inquisitor with the respectful appellation "Judge Starr" -- a correct title, to be sure, but one that tells us a good deal about the person who uses it.

Suffice to say that Hitchens is not concerned with Starr's abuses -- the leaks, the intimidation of witnesses, the smearing of reputations and the burdening of lives with legal bills -- nor with the consistent rejection of Starr's charges by both the public and the juries who heard the cases that were the withered fruits of his investigation.

He isn't concerned with Starr's ties to the Jones lawsuit "It's not much of a riposte However shady they were, they didn't fall to the standard of Dick Morris" or with the notion that the impeachment was an attempted coup: "a coup refers, properly as well as metaphorically, to an abrupt seizure of power by unelected forces. Yet perhaps we should be grateful that Hitchens doesn't go too far into the impeachment; we are thus spared further embarrassment. When an unnamed Democratic senator points out that the Republican House managers "haven't presented the case very well," Hitchens' response is "as if the Republicans had really been allowed to present their case at all.

Perhaps the only place you can venture from there is even further into fantasy, which Hitchens does when, inevitably, he gets around to the matter of the affidavit he submitted to the House Judiciary Committee.

Immediately he adopts the language of the victim: "At this point, I became the hostage of a piece of information that I possessed. Hitchens' defense of the affidavit is much the same as it has been since February: that he had already told the story many times, including once in print, and that before signing it he had "made it plain that I would not testify against anyone but Clinton, and only in his Senate trial.

I have scattered memories of riding in the car with my father and listening to Rush Limbaugh talk about some of the scandals. But when Hillary Clinton declared that she was running for president, I thought I would read the book. But it was clear in reading it that Christopher Hitchens just did not like the Clintons. So I thought I would share several passages from the book so that you can see the types of comments that Hitchens makes.

Some of you might not care to read this. But maybe some of you do. And it maintains, even insists, that the two most salient elements of Clintonism——the personal crookery on the one hand, and the cowardice and conservatism on the other——are indissolubly related.

This contribution secured them a small place at a large lunch with other Clinton donors, but no action. According to the Washington Post , a Democratic political operative named Michael Copperthite then petitioned [Nate] Landow to take up their cause. Then he demanded that the Cheyenne-Arapaho sign a development deal with him, handing over 10 percent of all income produced on the recovered land, including the revenues from oil and gas. And, of course, Mr. Under any managed-competition scheme, the small ones will be pushed out of the market very quickly.

Clinton was often said to be worried sick about his place in history. That place, however, is already secure.