RIP Christopher Hitchens

Today America ended its war in Iraq and Christopher Hitchens passed away.

Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, With Wit 

By WILLIAM GRIMES Published: December 16, 2011 

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62. The cause was pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, said the magazine Vanity Fair, which announced the death. 

In recent days Mr. Hitchens had stopped treatment and entered hospice care at the Houston hospital. He learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for his memoir, “Hitch-22,” and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently. “In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,” Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor. 

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There is a fluke symmetry there that might tempt some to find a deeper meaning, but there is no deeper meaning.

America's occupation Iraq -- a Neoconservative abomination which should never have happened -- lasted far too long, cost far too much in blood and treasure, and was ended by the conscious actions of sovereign governments.

Hitchens -- who possessed a keen, combustive intellect -- became deranged after 9/11 and thereafter used his keen, combustive intellect to support the Neocon's Iraqi abomination and thus allowed the smirking dregs of American Conservatism the use of the phrase "But even the Liberal Christoper Hitchens..." as an ideological sledgehammer whenever remorseless reality threatened to close in on them.

He held on a long time against a very aggressive form of cancer, and died because that is almost always what happens with very aggressive forms of cancer.

Here is Mr. Hitchens in fine form, letting the air out of the ideology of Ayn Rand

And deforesting the lazy, leafy kudzu of bullshit that had begun to immediately grow over the real and dreadful legacy of Ronald Reagan.