MMM

Watch Mos Def slowly unravel with a few delicate jabs by Christopher Hitchens.

You know, the dumbest thing anyone said on that segment was Hitchens talking about how if there's another terrorist attack, it better not come from a released Guantanamo detainee. Because once you've swept up an innocent person and illegally imprisoned and tortured them for years, you'd better not let them go, ever, because then they might seek revenge against the United States for, you know, illegally imprisoning them and torturing them for years.

It's true that Mos Def believes some whack-ass conspiracy theories. But Christopher Hitchens is a loathsome, morally bankrupt sack of shit.

I kinda like that Hitchens is such a dick though. I mean, he was a massive dick leading up to the Iraq War and he's still a massive dick on Guantanamo (though he's come around on torture after his waterboarding stunt), but he's pretty honest and thorough about his opinions, in that they're intellectually - rather than politically - motivated. I have to respect that to some degree. He's also a massive dick about his atheism and to proponents of "intelligent design", and I dig that. He may be wrong on many accounts but he's still head-and-shoulders above most pundits. Btw, Alexander Cockburn also called Hitchens a "sack of shit"!

I don't care what motivates Hitchens. The bottom line is that he's intellectually and morally bankrupt. How he got that way makes no difference to me. Nor does the fact that he happens to be right about a handful of issues.

What's embarrassing and frustrating, though, was how unprepared Mos -- who, I should repeat, has embraced insane paranoid bullshit and definitely deserves to be called out on it -- was to deal with Hitchens' bluster. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a fascinating and moving take on the whole thing.