“There’s no escape
The big pricks are out
They’ll fuck everything in sight
Watch your back”

Recently wrote the following of the self-enamored Brian Leiter:

Leiter personifies, and thus throws into sharp relief, that loquacious, articulate, self-promoting and abstracted intelligence of the presumptive and sneering left. Capable within a limited range, he arrogates across a much broader range. To help bolster those arrogations he readily resorts to displays of contempt – which reflects but one weakness he manifests with his blowfish and big-bad-wolf tactics.

All this is not at all untypical from this intellectually stunted, yet resolutely self-admiring leftish quarter of academe.

Written of Leiter, but applicable to Leiter-esque, self-reverential self-referents herein – and transparently so.

But what more substantively tells the lie to the Left’s self-reverential qualities – and what simultaneously justifies Hitchens’s tone and contempt – is that even in the face of Rwanda or the Sudan the Left fails to muster an EU or coalition command force to repel the murder, mayhem and genocidal intent. Perhaps, as with Rwanda, Hollywood will produce an aesthetically pleasing film, allowing the Left their repose in theatres and waxing, never waning, with impotent, self-enamored, moralistic pretensions; solipcists all, their self-regard abundantly on display.

or perhaps hitchens is trying to slyly reference pinter’s plays [which have lots of long silences], and he sorta didn’t notice how his comment could be read as hoping for pinter’s death. or, perhaps hitchens is a dick. it’s wide open.

Just wanted to be clear.

Thank God, rumours of his demise were exaggerated: Mr Pooter lives! It’s the careful ‘as best as I could tell’ that gives him away- only Pooter could maintain his composure, albeit with a struggle, in the presence of such wickedness. Stumbling, Sir- stumbling!

The rhyme scheme? Terrible. The rhythm? Uninterestingly inconsistent. The propagandistic intent? Brazenly transparent. Combine aesthetic inaudicity with patent proselytical intent and what you have resembles neither art nor skillful propaganda so much as an adolescent discharge of undigested emotion. Does this constitute evaluative criticism? It certainly does. I find it interesting that the ear for language Pinter possessed in the ‘50s and ‘60s has turned tin since his retirement. I had always considered that particular skill permanently acquired. Pinter proved me wrong. Whatever it is about his political commitments that has caused his ear such atrophy interests me intellectually, but it doesn’t validate his latter-day ejecta aesthetically. It gives them the gravitas due all talent squandered, but it doesn’t compel me to read a whit more than I absolutely have to.

You can admire his politics (minus Milošević), but it’s difficult to defend that poetry on anything resembling aesthetic grounds. (More at that link up there.)

Well, maybe he’ll get some AEI prize some day, certainly they can spend a few mils for an award to the most useful idiot supporting the current war-to-end-all-wars effort.

In fairness to him, he used to be a very good prose stylist when he wanted to be – some of his reviewing is first rate. Always had the nasty streak though. I suspect that it’s not only the drink that’s crippling his writing, but the transparent lack of faith – he must realise that he’s argued himself into a corner that he shouldn’t be in. He came into a restaurant where I was eating yesterday evening; as best as I could tell, he looked to be stumbling a little.

Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.

He’s inciting us all to hope Pinter dies. There’s no hate speech- or anti-terrorism clause for transatlantic spats between white dudes; else Hitchens could be imprisoned for that.