mud v slime

last week at baruch college in nyc, george galloway and christopher hitchens debated the war in iraq.

at least that was supposed to be the subject.

saturday, when i tuned in late to the pre-recorded 2-hour broadcast on book tv, i heard almost nothing but both men throwing ad hominems at each other. they didn't stop short of guilt by association, of course. galloway lumped hitchens together with bush and cheney, while hitchens invoked the names of michael moore, jane fonda, and the oil-for-food program.

fortunately it got rerun and i saw the beginning. hitchens made the first remarks and actually stayed on-topic for most of his time, but a couple minutes before the end of his opening statement he unloaded his first personal attack on galloway.

he took on the wrong guy. galloway reversed the sequence and lit into hitchens with a devastating series of body blows before he moved on to the war. he knew hitchens' record surprisingly well, and in his hands it became an exposé of hypocrisy and of hitchens' migration during the last decade or so from the trotskyist left to the neocon right.

if you want to watch, go to c-span's website.