Sunday, January 27, 2008

Fighting words

Christopher Hitchens is so smart and mean that sometimes I get the queasy feeling that he might somehow ram his arm through the computer screen and grab me by the throat for even thinking about disagreeing with him. No such danger here; his attack on Mike Huckabee's cynical defense of the Confederate battle flag is perfectly on target.

My own argument about the Confederate flag has boiled down over the years to a single sentence: The side that wins the war gets to choose the flag. But you can't get a thousand words out of that, and they wouldn't be as forceful as Hitchens' if you could.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

But, if in, say, 10 years, the South rises, and the Confederate flag becomes de rigeur again, there's the risk that Hitchens will change his position. In that case, it'll be retrospective damnation for you, as Hitchens writes his weekly column for the National Review in January 2018...

David said...

By then, I may not have much of a throat left to grab.

Anonymous said...

That's okay: neither will I. Neither will Hitchens.

Hitchens can go after the cockroaches for their masochistic fascist impulses.

(Enjoyed your post.)