Crazy Chris Hitchens -- hysterical noncombatant

Hitchens has a manly little screed against big, bad Cindy Sheehan and makes the following observation.

What dreary sentimental nonsense this all is, and how much space has been wasted on it. Most irritating is the snide idea that the president is "on vacation" and thus idly ignoring his suffering subjects, when the truth is that the members of the media—not known for their immunity to the charm of Martha's Vineyard or Cape Cod in the month of August—are themselves lazing away the season with a soft-centered nonstory that practically, as we like to say in the trade, "writes itself."

I'm not sure which idea is snide, that Dear Wartime Leader is "on vacation" (you can almost see Hitchens drunkenly gestering with air quotes even as he typed), or that the media is hypocritically taking Bush to task for going on vacation when they themselves are fond of August vacations.

But if it's the former, um Hitch, he is "on vacation." Said so himself.

Ah, yes. Such dreary sentimental nonsense. A mother grieving her son and wanting to know for what "noble cause" he died. The great mind of Christopher Hitchens can't be bothered with such misgivings. He knows the cause is right and just, and one of these days he'll explain how the cause to save the Iraqi people became a slaughterhouse for the Iraqi people, and what any of this has to do with his Great War Against Islamofascism. And why, indeed, should so much time and space be spent on people protesting the war? Christ, I knew that Clinton's failure to turn the U.S. into a socialist paradise had unhinged Hitchens, but who knew he'd become such an apologist for the Bush administration and its incompetence and vainglory.

And then there's this from the "drink soaked former Trotskyist popinjay,"

I distrust anyone who claims to speak for the fallen, and I distrust even more the hysterical noncombatants who exploit the grief of those who have to bury them.

I've heard Cindy Sheehan speak, and I can say with absolute authority that the hysterical noncombatant here is Hitchens himself.

And by the way, Hitchens. Fuck you. You and your toady friends in the White House have been exloiting the grief of 9-11 victims and Saddam Husseins victims in Iraq (but not those Iraqis killed as a result of the war, for some reason) for years now.

Cindy Sheehan is not speaking for her son, she's speaking as a mother who's lost a son. And she's not alone in her camp in Texas. It's those mothers' quiet grief that enrages Hitchens and those like him who cheerlead from the sidelines for Bush's dream of empire. And piss on anyone who dares, publicly, to disagree. She is brave. They who attack her are cowards.

Christopher Hitchens is an intellectually hollow coward.