Hitchens Endorses Obama

Maybe he’ll want to revive his column for The Nation again! Is this Hitchens endorsement a shocker? Not really when you consider the man’s distaste for lies, propaganda, stupidity, and so on. He writes best when putting McCain in his place (saying what so many are at least thinking):

“But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week’s so-called townhall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.”

I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign’s choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it’s only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—”My friends”—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven’t felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot’s running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America’s most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn’t qualify him then and it doesn’t qualify McCain now.

Ouch.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 11:56 am and is filed under Angst, Customer Service, Freedom, John McCain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.