Morten Jensen in Commonweal Magazine:
Like Saul Bellow’s Von Humboldt Fleisher, Hitchens was a “champion detractor,” a terrific hater, and always more fun to read when he was denouncing than when he was praising. Rare is the enemy or ideological foe who gets mentioned in these pages without incurring a quick swat of the pen. Thus, we are treated to “the sinister cretin Reagan,” “that recreational vulpicide Roger Scruton,” “Senator Karl Mundt, a dinosaur Republican and tireless witch-hunter,” “James Jesus Angleton, crazed and criminal head of the CIA,” and so on. Some critics have found such comments silly or bad-mannered. “He was always too ready with abuse,” George Scialabba wrote after Hitchens’s death. I agree, and no doubt being so amused by name-calling is a bad habit, but reading these essays I found it one I was more than happy to indulge.
Less silly and just as amusing are those instances when, simply by exposing them, Hitchens lets his targets do the (self-)ridiculing for him. When George Bush Sr. quotes Tom Paine (“These are the times that try men’s souls”) in a speech announcing the 1991 invasion of Iraq, Hitchens has only to point out that Bush was quoting from Paine’s pamphlet The American Crisis, which goes on to speak with scorn of “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots,” for the president to look a fool.
More here.
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