The Hitchens I Knew!

At the end of swatting David Corn's puffballs out of the park in Slate, Christopher Hitchens explains why he left that dreary little agitprop rag.

This difference among others led me to separate myself from The Nation, where neither my prose nor my socializing were as stellar as Corn recalls. Incidentally, I begin to tire of this sickly idea that I used to be a great guy until I became fed up with excuses for dictators and psychopathic murderers (let alone for mediocre CIA fantasists). Alexander Cockburn is surely nearer the mark when he says that I was a complete shit and traitor all along.

Actually, Chris was great until he passed a blood-alcohol limit of around 0.3, I'd guess, at which point he would become a misogynist and mean-spirited towards certain persons [often female] who were not in the room. As I recall, he was always a gentleman more or less to their face, but if they were in another room or otherwise absent, they were fair game.

But his friends knew that he could be easily deflected in this state into other less personal passions, and would bring up Reagan and his administration to throw Chris off the scent of personal pique. And even in the bluest funks [we had Xmas dinners at a Greek friend's house for several years running and Hitch was blue at the Feast of Christ's birth among believers], the verbal pyrotechnics would proceed to amuse and amaze the small party of four onlookers as he found new ways to express his disdain for our Cowboy Prez.

He could be a shit, but never a complete shit. And he was never a traitor to the far-left, until the scales dropped from his eyes.