Captain Hitchens' non mea culpa

I'm a pretty stubborn guy most of the time. Everybody who knows me well knows this. Sometimes it serves me fine.

Other times it's a pretty catastrophic flaw. In those circumstances, I almost pity myself. Almost. Because I know in the end that my stubbornness is my OWN personal quirk and not the result of whatever circumstance I happen to be resisting.

That's why I almost felt a twinge of sympathy when I read this. Almost. Because at this point Christopher Hitchens has to know that he's no longer throwing intellectual sucker punches for the sake of any moral cause he believes in, but that he's flailing blindly to avoid ceding any ground to the once-comrades who abandoned him during the heights of his hysteria. He'd still even like to best them. He's like Ahab. But without a whale. After all, nobody's listening anymore.

Update: Andrew Sullivan's listening. Sullivan--like Kevin Drum and Matt and Peter Beinart and on and on--has done just about the right thing to address his errors. But he's either too forgiving of his friends, or he's not reading carefully. For instance:

The real question is: if we knew then what we know now about the caliber, ethics, competence and integrity of the president and his aides, would we have entrusted them to wage this war? Would we have trusted their presentation of pre-war intelligence? And the answer to that, I venture to guess for my friend as well, is: no.

Well good for Sullivan, I guess. But I see he just didn't read the Hitchens-Slate article through to the end:

So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003?

That's exactly what I mean to say.

Update 2: I learned the other day that this New Yorker profile of Hitchens had been nominated for a National Magazine Award. It's a fine article, but I wondered what so distinguished it. I think I'm starting to understand.