Hitchens Take Down.

I watched with total disbelief the video of Christopher Hitchens on Hardball the other day. My disbelief wasn’t that Hitchens was out of control, but that HE WAS ON HARDBALL! WTF is with that? Has Matthews gone so far over the edge that he doesn’t know what is going on and in his desire to have right-wing hacks on his show he will stoop to anyone?

Hitchens has repeatedly, to be polite, acted up on the show and been even more inappropriate than Matthews. Okay, so maybe they are in a contest to prove who is more divorced from reality.

Well, in this contest Hitchens won. And Counterpunch has a great takedown And quite a snarky takedown it is!

I can’t help myself, so here is the whole thing and copyright infringement be damned:

A disheveled Christopher Hitchens caused a flurry last night on MSNBC's Hardball program, compered by Chris Matthews, by describing Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's long-term aide at the Pentagon and State Department as "his bitch". In homosexual argot, "bitch" is a somewhat contemptuous term for the "female" partner in a gay relationship. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang defines this usage briskly as "a male homosexual who plays the female role in copulation".

Viewers on Wednesday night first saw Matthews talking about Powell's reservations about the war in Iraq, in the context of the possibility of an attack on Iran. Then the camera shifts to a trim-looking Evan Thomas:

Thomas: "He (Powell) wasn't against the war. He was against doing the war right then. If you talk to Richard Armitage -- his aide, they were ready to go to war -- they just didn't want to do it that year..."

From off camera came a slurred voice:

Hitchens: "his aid? (garbled) ... his bitch you mean."

The camera then turns to a seedy, corpulent figure with a five-day shadow and a shirt that had seen extended service. This heap of bohemian flotsam , it emerged, was Hitchens.

Matthews (startled): "His what?"

Hitchens (still slurred): "His bitch, why aren't you, why are you calling Colin Powell a good soldier ..."

In subsequent replays Matthews edited out Hitchens' description.

It seems likely there will be a hiatus in MSNBC's relationship with Hitchens. His description of Armitage's role, as Powell's assistant, had some metaphorical resonance, but even in these days of robust public name-calling the networks don't care to have a former deputy secretary of state publicly identified as a catamite.

Of course it takes one to know one. Hitchens' journalistic role these days is to act as Dick Cheney's bitch with an energetic fervor that Armitage could only envy.

He probably does not dwell too lengthily on these aspects of his past in briefings with Cheney's aides, but Hitchens in former times would dwell in detail on his own personal services to Tom Driberg, a British Labor MP of notoriously gay preferences, of whom Winston Churchill once said, "Driberg, Driberg, isn't he the man bringing sodomy into disrepute?"

Thomas is “trim,” Hitchens on the other hand is “disheveled,” “seedy,” and a “corpulent figure with a five day shadow and a shirt that had seen extended service.” Okay, I am not too crazy about the slandering of bohemians, but the flotsam remark is right on.

So, that said, this is a ”hiatus” that is so long overdue. Hitchens is an embarrassment to the Nation (pun intended.) Hopefully, others will take note and Hitchens will be persona non grata finally in the MSM.

Can Ann Coulter be far behind? A girl’s got to dream.

Oh, and while you are at it hang around Counterpunch for a while and find many good voices.