Christopher Hitchens

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

As the reckoning over sexual abuse finally reaches Bill Clinton, with handwringing by some of his former defenders in the press and in politics, one Clinton White House veteran is following developments with particular interest—and a large measure of skepticism.

Lebanese media reports that the man who hit the late Christopher Hitchens in an altercation in Beirut in 2009 has been killed in Syria, fighting alongside forces allied with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Adonis Nasr, an information officer with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), often…

"One way of describing him, as well as of valuing him, would be to say that he was a man at war.”

Washington Post: "In Iraq, sense of relief is chilled by political crisis"

For the November 1993 issue of Washingtonian, Andy Ferguson profiled Christopher Hitchens:

In February 2009, Christopher Hitchens got into a fight with fascists in Beirut. Visiting the country as part of a delegation of foreign journalists hosted by Lebanon’s pro-democracy March 14 movement, Hitchens was walking through the Hamra district with two colleagues when he saw a plaque…

...I highly recommend starting with this Vanity Fair piece where Hitchens confronts the consequences of his support for the Iraq War, and in the process pens a moving tribute to a fallen soldier:

I wasn’t a close friend of Christopher Hitchens—more like a friendly acquaintance—but he was so outsized a presence, had so fertile a mind, was gifted with such a bold personality, and was altogether so much larger than life that I already feel his loss deeply. I lack the gifts to convey what…

No secrets are being divulged when I report that Christopher Hitchens liked a drink every now and then. Preferably now. He wasn’t sloppy about it. In fact, he always seemed in perfect control. (I once saw him steer a beach bike through the streets of Key West without spilling his Scotch.) He just…

Christopher Hitchens, arguably one of the most rhetorically gifted writers in the English language and occasional WEEKLY STANDARD contributor, has passed away at age 62. I say "arguably," because if there's one thing he was good at, it was provoking arguments over his very public opinions on…

You know, for all the Soros money shoveled at Media Matters for America, it's really quite a monument to what a bunch of hapless ideologues run the place that they have absolutely nothing to show for it.

Two scathing must reads today on the Libya situation are out today from two eminent journalists. Here's Christopher Hitchens:

Classic Hitchens:

Safire's Political Dictionary

"At his desk," wrote Christopher Buckley in his email to friends, "in Stamford this morning." Well, one had somehow known that it would have to be at his desk. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was a man of incessant labor and productivity, with a slight allowance made for that saving capacity for…

Looking back over the nearly 40 years since I first found myself immersed in a Flashman story, perhaps the single most striking thing about the experience is the date. It somehow didn't seem to "fit," amid all the feverish enthusiasms of the late sixties, that one should be so thoroughly absorbed…

How's Your Drink?

Moral Minority

LET US CREDIT the Senate Intelligence Committee with almost getting the name right. On pages 25-26 of its latest report appears the following:

Among the Dead Cities

An International Relations Debacle

Remember, Remember

LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

Bevan

London

EVERY JOURNALIST HAS A LIST of regrets: of stories that might have been. Somewhere on my personal list is an invitation I received several years ago, from a then-Labour member of parliament named George Galloway. Would I care, he inquired, to join him on a chartered plane to Baghdad? He was hoping…

Dylan's Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks

Malcolm Muggeridge