Hitching A Ride To Hell

by digby

A friend sent me this interesting little tid-bit which reminds me that Christoher Hitchens must be face deep in the egg-nog right about now:

David Irving, the historian jailed for three years in Austria for denying the Holocaust, is free after a court reduced his prison sentence on appeal.

Irving, who was sentenced in February, was released after Vienna’s highest court ruled today that he should serve one year in prison and the remainder of his sentence on probation.

You’ll recall that old Hitchens was quite the staunch defender of Irving — and not just on free speech principle, mind you. He defended many of his conclusions as well:

It is best not to mince words…. What of your precious free speech, they say, when the Holocaust is immune from criticism on your own soil?…. Now may I mince a word or two? I have been writing in defense of Mr. Irving for several years. When St. Martin’s Press canceled its contract to print his edition of the Goebbels diaries, which it did out of fear of reprisal, I complained loudly and was rewarded by an honest statement from the relevant editor — Thomas Mallon — that his decision had been a “profile in prudence.” I will not take refuge in the claim that I was only defending Mr. Irving’s right to free speech. I was also defending his right to free inquiry. You may have to spend time on some grim and Gothic Web sites to find this out, but he is in fact not a “denier,” but a revisionist, and much-hated by the full-dress “denial” faction. The pages on Goebbels, as in his books on Dresden, Churchill and Hitler, contain some highly important and damning findings from his work in the archives of the Third Reich.

Irving’s so hated by the Holocaust deniers that he’s featured as an expert, along with Hitchens, on the Stormfront website.

One wonders what Hitchens feels about the Iranian Dark Lord, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s, little Holocaust denial confab the other day — the same Hitchens who called Juan Cole an apologist for the Iranian president simply because he correctly translated a speech. (Of course, Hitchens’ main beef with Ahmadinejad seems to be that he’s an “uncultured jerk” so perhaps it’s not a problem.)

But that’s got to be nothing compared to the this. (Hitchens, you’ll all recall, wrote a book claiming (rightfully, in this case) that Kissinger is a war criminal.):

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, one of the Republican Party’s most respected senior statesmen, says that the Bush administration may have to give up on democracy in Iraq to salvage the goal of stabilising the country.

Kissinger — who has frequently advised US President George Bush in the three years since the US invaded Iraq — told the Los Angeles Times that he believed democracy for now was out of reach for Iraq.

His comments, coming after the US electorate earlier this month dealt ruling Republicans a resounding defeat in congress, largely over the lack of progress in the war in Iraq, sharpened the criticism aimed at the White House even from within Bush’s own ranks.

Kissinger’s analysis also broadens the options being proposed for the war.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, a US senator who as a Navy pilot spent several years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, told ABC News US soldiers were “fighting and dying for a failed policy”.

He repeated his longstanding call for more US troops in Iraq, saying on Sunday that the 145000 soldiers already there needed reinforcements to ensure military victory.

McCain is exploring making a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

Kissinger, who supported the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, said it would have been better for the US to postpone democratic development and instead install a strong Iraqi leader.

“If we had done that right away, that might have been the best way to proceed.”

Yesterday it was revealed that Republican front runner and avowed Islamofascist fighter St John McCain just hired Kissinger for his campaign.

Hitchens is a man who must no longer have any bearings. He is open to the idea that the holocaust is a hoax, just like all those nasty islamofascists he believes are just like Hitler. And now the war criminal who Hitchens devoted a good portion of his life to bringing down has joined the anti-Islamofascist cause — and he’s bringing his old Pinochet tactics to the war. The war that Hitchens declared “A War To Be Proud Of.”

(For a thorough dismantling of that article see this post by Cave Shadows who writes: “Hitchens has coalesced his defense of the Iraq invasion almost entirely to the premise that the US needs to be conducting this occupation as a dry run for invasions to come.”)

Today Islamofascists and Holocaust deniers and war criminals are all mixed up in one big Hitchens stew of cross purposes. The cognitive dissonance must be getting dizzying.

Hide the cough syrup.

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