I finally found the audio for the debate between Christopher Hitchens and Scott Ritter. Enjoy.
BACKGROUND: Does anyone think anymore? and Hitchens v. Galloway
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Dear extremist,
Thank you for digging up and posting this audio clip. I had no idea such a debate occurred. After listening to both men’s opening remarks, it surprises me how much hyperbole Scott Ritter used to salt his words. Colin Powell was “100 percent” wrong at the UN? Is that possible? Can anyone ever be 100 percent wrong? Was Powell wrong when he stated that Iraq stood in violation of UN resolutions? To Ritter the answer must be yes.
I will attend to the rest of the debate when I can. I am sure that it will be enlightening. Christopher Hitchens is an engaging thinker and smooth-tongued speaker, but I do find myself disagreeing with him an awful lot, too. I respect him, of course, and would love to know him, but at times he can be, and this may shock him, wrong. But I could be wrong about that.
Thanks again.
BG
Yes Bill, Hitchens is frequently wrong. Naturally, he’s a leftist. He can be spectacularly wrong, such as in this debate when he shares Scott Ritter’s fetish for procedure. He called it a shame that we didn’t first indict Hussein in a court of law. The supposed reason we didn’t? Because he could have defended himself by pointing to everything the U.S. did to prop him up.
But, knowing the left as intimately as he does, he is a devastating critic of its hypocrisies.
By the way, I found the moderator unbelievably tedious.
Hitchens is obviously relying on debating tactics rather than moral consistency to define his position. He often resorts to generalizations that beg-the-question at hand as a way of bolstering his own weak spots or undermining his opponents positions. His style can only be described as ’slimy’. He quickly abandons digressions that shove him into a corner and aligns himself with the oppostion in attempts to reverse the significance of their own points against them. He lacks a moral core, which is evident from the overly deccadent verbage of his own self-righteousness. It seems that his reliance on morally-vacuous sophistry and elusive self-obfuscation has become his hallmark rather than sincere ethical integrity. Also, his attempts at sounding tough have become intensely comical ( ala W. F. Buckley ) when most of the time he sounds like an upper-class english snob that would like to slap you if only it didn’t risk dirtying his gloves. To end on a positive note, you can learn alot about debating tactics from him that are useful when you find yourself defending a position that you don’t believe in.
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