Larry King - McClellan, Holt, Larson, and Hitchens discuss Palin's attack on science.

[The Night Owl]

Run time: 07:12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sle-eWZVUMw   Posted on YouTube: October 26, 2008 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: October 27, 2008 By DU Member: The Night Owl Views on DU: 2184

 

[galadrium]

1. I don't think its fair to characterize Hitchens as a conservative. n/t.

[The Night Owl]

2. Agreed. I used the title of the YouTube video as the title of this thread because...

...I'm lazy but I guess I should, in the interest of fairness, change it.

[Supply Side Jesus]

3. "wasn't the surge a response to a failure"

Holy shit! Larry about knocked me off my chair with that

[EnviroBat]

4. Never thought I'd be in agreement with Scott McClellan

but the world is a funny place. The other two republican asshats that are strongly supporting McCain/Palin just look like fools.

[southpaw]

5. I disgree with Hitchens on many things

But I love to hear him calling out stupidity for what it is.

[The Night Owl]

6. In addition to point out that Palin is stupid, Hitchens also pointed out that...

...she is a religious fanatic. I loved that. {EOM}

[heliarc]

12. I think you might find you agree with him

more often than not...

His original call for the ouster of Saddam was when Reagan and others were buddy buddy with the Iraqi regime. He wanted Kurdish independence and criticized the first Bush sharply for throwing the Kurds to the dogs...

He has called for a criminal trial for Henry Kissinger for his participation in the assassination of General Prats, and his interference with negotiations to end the Vietnam war.

He is a big fan of George Orwell, whose brand of socialism is the father at least philosophically of the modern universalized health care programs in Great Britain.

He was a contributor to the Nation Magazine before having a falling out with friends there over the Iraq war. And what about the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts? He has been highly critical of the strategy employed there, and his initial support of the war was to rout the Taliban who you will recall raided people's homes to destroy their musical instruments, and enforced a kind of brutal dictatorship of religion against women's rights and freedoms. (The Taliban that Bush originally loved to death) He has criticized Islamic fundamentalism for what it is -brutal, and discriminatory, and unlike his racist bedfellows of the last few years, he has the same sort of vigorous disdain for Christian fundamentalism for the same reasons.

One thing to be said for Hitchens. He hates fascism without apology. That is an ally of mine any day.

[southpaw]

13. You are probably right...

I am aware of Hitchens' anti-theistic position, and agree with that to a large extent.

I felt that he leapt to the right on the Iraq war issue and seemed supportive of the Bush doctrine as well. I would not consider him a neo-conservative, but his foreign policy seems to line up with the standard neo-con FP in some respects.

I guess the main issue is that Hitch shifted from being a leftist to being a bet right of center for my tastes... but he seems to have moderated slightly.

Still, I love his distaste for stupidity and his inability to resist commenting on it.

[heliarc]

14. I don't like to generalize...

Hitchens wanted specific things from a conflict in the Middle east. He wanted independence for the Kurds and their Marxist leaning PKK... (That's right... he supports the Marxists)

And he wanted the Taliban to be defeated, because they are the most repressive and violent fascist group imaginable. And he hates ideologues for religious causes of all stripes.

Count me in.

He pictured the campaign into Iraq as a sort of Churchill-esque necessity, which I think was a mistake, and I count Obama as the smarter in that regard in voting against the war, but to say he isn't left any more is reductive in the extreme. Mark my words... we are supporting a candidate who will increase conflict with the Taliban and shift the theater of operations to Afghanistan. We are in for a bigger fight than we think even though Obama is going to draw down troop strength in Iraq...

Most people don't know that, and operate on a more superficial level, but Obama isn't quite the dove people think he is. With Biden as a running mate it gets even more interesting.

The Taliban grow stronger every day, and so do their repressive and discriminatory religious mandates.

[southpaw]

15. For all my peace-sign wearing hippiness

I have wanted to kick the asses of the Taliban since they blew up those giant Buddha statues.

My loathing for religious idiocy is probably right up there with that of Hitchens.

[The Night Owl]

17. For whatever it is worth, Christopher Hitchens himself has stated that...

...he has no ideological affilations whatsoever.

[heliarc]

18. While he wrote a whole book...

About how great Orwell's brand of Socialism was... Make no mistake. Hitchens is an opportunist and a tactician, but he is vociferously in support of justice and reason as a guide. He's not about to corner himself if it isn't necessary... You'll find the same sort of maneuvering from Huffington who somehow became our darling on "the left." She is not quite Hitchens equal where witty repartee is concerned but they have similar turncoat pasts.

[Quantess]

7. A lot of interesting things brought up.

Did you notice that nobody talked about John McCain positively? The discussion was dominated by pro-Obama or anti-Obama, and pro-Palin or anti-Palin. Not much excitement about McCain.

[BeyondGeography]

8. Gotta hand it to Hitch on the science front...there's no budging him; he gets right in their face

Few people are so ardently for reason when it comes to that particular discussion.

[pretzel4gore]

16. too bad Chris never recognised what he was doing years ago

For some reason, the liberal element which Hitchens belonged to, the 'white male' demographic which felt put upon by efforts to improve life for poor/outcast/marginalised etc, suddenly switched over to ronald reagan in late 70's and then cheered on the 'big lie' reagan etc was telling. "Babbitt' was published in the 1920's, and Sinclair Lewis etc tried to warn society not to give too much power to the reactionary rightwing; as it saw what it wanted to and nothing else. Yet, the 'neocons' or the new conservatives like william kristol, horowitz, grover norquist, victor hansen and virtually every loudmouth in the world allied themselves to a movement that would eagerly execute them given power, as they were provably untrustworthy! I read this bit 20 years ago- and it was then more then 20 years in circulation! Fascism has always lurked in the shadows. Chris hitchens is a smart guy...This from the 1961 Penguin edition of Babbitt, with Mark Shorer's afterword
...
" 'The drift of our commercial culture in the forty years since ‘Babbitt’ appeared suggests that Sinclair Lewis did little to alter it, perhaps, but he was the first novelist to tell us explicitly into what stupid, and finally devastating social damnation we were drifting. Have we landed?'
Mark Schorer, University of California 1961, Afterword to ‘Babbitt’ "

[heliarc]

19. I think that you misunderstand Hitchens

The issues that really drive his perspective since 2003 have been the rise of Islamo-fascism, and as a parallel the preponderance of religion in the US political arena. I think that if you cornered him in a room and talked economy with him you might find that he is a socialist in stark contrast with the neo-cons on the subjects you address in your post. I mean ... come on... he was a contributing writer with a biweekly column for the Nation magazine from 1982 through 2002. Claiming that he had anything to do with the Reagan "revolution" is ridiculous at best... even after his support of the war he was writing about Reagan's "stupidity" http://www.slate.com/id/2101842/

Hitchens wanted the war in Afghanistan because the Taliban are fascist. They are probably one of the most repressive groups on the planet, and he wanted them out. He felt the same way about the Kurds and wanted independence for them in the Iraqi theater... The PKK are Marxists and have never been friends of the Bush Administration. He is a sworn enemy of Henry Kissinger and Clinton both, but mostly because the two of them showed little care in their bombing campaigns of Africa and Asia. In that regard he is an advocate for people's movements against oppression everywhere and an advocate for stopping the illegitimate and indiscriminate killing of civillian lives even if he thought the Iraqi war was justified to remove Saddam and to counter Islamic fundamentalism. I think history proves he was wrong about that... but he may yet be right about whatever positions he's raised about Kissinger, about fundamentalist religious groups gone wild, and about Socialism. Something tells me he will shift left again very soon.

[pretzel4gore]

20. back during reagan years, i recall the mass murders

of innocent people by radical islamic nitwits- they once murdered a bus full of women/kids in Algeria because the people were listening to rock music. But the story was a column inch 2/3rds down the page of local paper, and hohum....i recall thinking if our news focused att'n on these horrors, way back then, maybe the crazies could be hunted down (there aren't that many crazies, even in a max security jail, though they are obviously very nasty, and often powerful ...) the situation in N Africa regarding the extremists was caught up in all sorts of sneaky two timing bs 'geopolitics' which saw innocent people murdered all over the place, by all sides. Maybe Chris isn't so cynically an asshole as i suggest, but he sure helped bush during several critical months back in '02, '03, which we now know the truth of, or some of it anyway. The idiot Taliban still strike me as being gopig agents, or cia agents, or MI6 agents, or oil corporation agents, or what have you...the liars media, including Hitchens, lie so much i simply do not believe their sincere explanations - in the end, bush won, and that's all i know

[Hulk]

9. lars larson is a Pacific Northwest PIG!!

I really hate to see this sack of human waste get air time nationally. I have suffered having that jack off spew his hate and neocon/fascist view in Portland for way too long. I was hoping he would dry up and go away, but there are too many hate filled right wingers to ever deny him his audience.

He is a worthless sack of shit. I could care less what he has to say about anything.

All these right wing neocons seem to forget that the PURPOSE of the surge was to allow for political reconcilliation....which NEVER occurred, as Obama and so many others predicted.

YES....the fighting has been somewhat reduced today. The problem is, it had less to do with "the surge" than it did with the militias uniting and the ethnic cleansing reducing the targets for murder and mayhem.

Give me a break...the surge DID NOT do it by itself...you gullible dumb shits.

[Mrhyde719]

11. Larry: "Not funny Lars!"

HA! that was great.:toast:

[JimboBillyBubbaBob]

10. Fruit Fly Mockery

King noted Palin's mocking of fruit fly research. One would think that in her tour of all those colleges she attended that she would remember the basic genetic tenets offered up in freshman biology relative to the fruit fly and their usefullness as a research tool. Hitchins was correct, palin is stupid.