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09/16/2005:

"An Evening With Hitchens and Gorgeous George"

The crowd gathered on Lexington Avenue awaiting the chance to see Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway's debate of the occupation of Iraq wrapped around the block, and kept growing by the minute. As I stood in line, still hundreds of yards from the auditorium's entrance, I spied Hitchens and an armada of young staffers from the neoconservative cultural journal, the New Criterion, seeding the crowd with leaflets exposing Galloway in bold print as "The Toad to Damascus," an apologist for "his new fascist playmate Bashar al-Assad." The crudely composed leaflets, which seemed to have been adapted from notes Hitchens scribbled on a cocktail napkin, set the tone for a sleazy, pointless debate which ultimately had more to do with its two bilious Brit stars than its purported topic.

In fact, Hitchens and Galloway's verbal slime-fest wasn't much of a debate at all. It was more like a competition for who could do the most possible damage to his own cause. Galloway tried his best, declaring, "You may think that those airplanes in this city on 9/11 came out of a clear, blue sky. I believe they emerged out of a swamp of hatred created by us." True or not, Galloway had severely miscalculated. He was in New York City, after all, and even anti-war audience members began to boo.

Galloway bulldozed ahead at full-steam, seemingly determined to personify the terrorist-sympathizing, loony leftist lifted from the neoconservative imagination. "How dare you slander the Iraqi resistance?" he asked Hitchens with his trademark stentorian tenor. The Iraqi "resistance?" Did Galloway mean the assorted Ba'athist and al-Qaeda vampires drowning Iraq in a pool of their own countrymen's blood? Or was he referring to a previously unknown band of oppressed peasants led by a cadre of revolutionary intellectuals in a quixotic struggle against Yankee imperialism? He didn't say.

While "Gorgeous" George displayed all the political acuity of Curious George, he was not to be outdone by Hitchens, who defended not only the Bush administration's policy in the Middle East, but its hapless response to Hurricane Katrina. "For people to start pumping out propaganda saying those were black people who were killed in New Orleans is shameful," Hitchens exclaimed with indignation. "Those bodies haven't even been identified." (If only the press had been more contrarian!) He added, "Only the Governor could have given the orders" to send help. For this, Galloway dubbed Hitchens, "The court jester" of the "Bourbon Bushes."
huffingtonpost.com