Hitch Has a Few Too Many

I used to think Chris Hitchens was smart. Incoherent, at times intoxicated, but smart. Chris Bertram quotes a column showing that either Hitch downed a gallon of Everclear before writing it, or that he's as stupid as he sometimes sounds:

…the mass murder of people on aeroplanes is a leading cause of poverty.

At some level, I'm glad he writes things so self-evidently ridiculous. If this column gets spread around widely enough, perhaps the public will realize how completely silly it is to fret about airplane hijackings, of all things.

Comments

[ME]

That is hilarious. But could we see the first part of that sentence? For all we know, the first part was "Only an idiot would argue that ".

[Minipundit]

The complete sentence, in context, is "One sometimes hears weak people argue that terrorism is caused by poverty. On the contrary, the mass murder of people on aeroplanes is a leading cause of poverty." So, yes, Virginia, he really is that stupid.

[gil]

It is a known fact that excessive drinking, or alcoholism destroys neurons in our brain.

Mr. Hitchens can be the poster boy for that known problem.

I can picture him now in a commercial: " This is your brain (Pointing to an empty cooking pan) This is my brain on Scotch pointing to a jelly-like mass on the cooking pan. Then moving on to "I used to be smart, and look at me now" , and then the commercial shifts to a Chris Mathews show with Hitchens slurring incoherence's in his heavy British-Pub- Drunk accent.