Boozy Hitchens embarrasses Slate

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 6:58 PM on May 3, 2006.

In a passionate and spectacular rebuttal to an unethical smear from Slate/Vanity Fair trainwreck Christopher Hitchens, Juan Cole takes the gloves off and wipes the floor with him and his warmonger ilk.

The post begins by chastising Hitchens for a recent column he penned for Slate (who may want to, yet likely won't, think about losing the Pickled Pundit) cherry-picking from private, confidential emails and seeking no quotes for clarification. Both are journalistic no-nos that surprised few in light of Hitchens' downward spiral into pro-war doggerel over the past 3-4 years since his dramatic departure from the Nation.

Hitchens somehow got a hold of Cole's private emails in an attempt to paint a picture of Cole as dismissive of Iranian enmity toward Israel based on a translation issue. The greater point is that Hitchens is helping build a case for attacking Iran, using smear tactics to discredit those with rational and compelling arguments against it.

But Cole neither makes a point by point rebuttal of Hitchens' characterization of his positions, nor does he engage in ad hominem attack, though he does speculate on widely-circulated stories that, "he was deep in his cups when he wrote, or had some far Rightwing think tank write, his current piece of yellow journalism," and that, "I am sorry to witness the ruin of a once-fine journalistic mind."

Rather, Cole takes the opportunity to rationally dissect both the popular rhetoric on Iran's president Ahmadinejad, whom he calls a "little shit," and the blueprint for rallying Americans for war "against toothless third rate powers."

One, two, three, four. We don't want your stinking war! he writes.

Another cartoon villain -- the impotent Ahmadinejad (who has NO POWER TO DECLARE WAR) -- is being used to frighten America into another war but Cole believes it can be stopped. Americans won't do it, he writes to warmongers, "So sit down and shut up."

When a prodigious and level-headed intellect like Cole whips out the chants and calls to arms, it's a powerful sight. He writes, in a sort of anti-war Whitman meets Ginsberg (the following is accompanied by some gruesome photos in the original HERE)...

We are not going to see any more US troops come home in body bags at Dover for the sake of some Cheney affiliate grabbing the petroleum in Iran's Ahvaz fields.

We are not going to have another 15,000 wounded vets flood onto our streets with spine damange and brain damage.

We are not going to put Yazd behind barbed wire to liberate it, as a millenarian Christian general did to Habbaniyah in Iraq.

We are not going to imprison and torture thousands of Iranians at Evin Penitentiary in Tehran, as worthy successors to the bloodthirsty Shah and Khomeini.

We are not going to kill 200,000 Iranians with aerial bombardments of Tabriz, Isfahan, Qom, Kerman, Shiraz and Mashahd.

We are not going to let dozens of US corporations loot the American people and the Iranian people alike with no-bid "contracts", embezzlement, corruption, and graft.

We are not going to let you have a war against Iran.

So sit down and shut up, American Enterprise Institute, and Hudson Institute, and Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and American Heritage Institute, and this institute and that institute, and cable "news", and government "spokesmen", and all the pundit-ferrets you pay millions to make business for the American military-industrial complex and Big Oil.

We don't give a rat's ass what Ahmadinejad thinks about European history or what pissant speech the little shit gives.

I call on university students across America to begin holding antiwar rallies. The only way you can have a war on Iran is to draft the young people. It is you who are on the line. Demonstrate! Demonstrate against the very hint of war! Demonstrate in front of the warmongering "institutes" in Washington, DC! Demonstrate to end the one we've already got!

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.