The Killing of Tony Blair

[Beanz]

Galloway is a despicable man who makes apologies for the murderers of innocent people and who was more than willing to coat his own hands with the blood of women and children by courting Saddam. Hitchens exposed him as an intellectual minow and moral coward.

And you want to use Hitchens as a contrast, a man who arguably has less empathy than me when making an argument about anything. Hitchens became a hypocritical fraud in the later years of his life. I suppose the pretty green card turned him into a charlatan.

Galloway stands up for all the right things. He makes no excuses for the hypocrisies of the West and spares none of the blood spilled in the Middle East. Galloway is our most courageous politician and stands up against the cowardice of the existing system.

Galloways next stand will be to become Mayor of London and if he were to run it would be backed by the funds of the public in an effort to clean up the city. So first this documentary, then the funds to get him in London and send shivers down parliament, the Queen, and the banksters over the Thames. In some ways Galloway is the final chance to make a stand as he is one of us, the millions that shook our heads in shame, whilst war criminal acts were commited in our name.

Shame on you Greenbeanz. Something is going wrong in your head these days.

Shame on me why? Because I dare not to formulate my opinion based on the thinking of the equivalent to the immature ramblings of an impressionable teenager ? Grow up and think for yourself. Whatever your opinion of the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War Galloway is a despicable man. One of us? You and Kirkland is what you mean. How dare you suggest something is going wrong in my head because I dare to suggest something that does not come to the same one dimensional conclusions that you do. Hitchens was a radical and a man of great moral bravery who though coming from the left stood against the tide of sheeple opinion that you so easily and without struggle continue to subscribe to and you then have the audacity to hold up a self serving caricature like Galloway as an example of virtue and empathy?

[Kirkland Laing]

It was minutes before Galloway's Senate performance in May when he had his now famous run-in with Christopher Hitchens on the street. Hitchens, the Vanity Fair columnist and renegade from the left with a new career defending the 2003 invasion of Iraq, berated Galloway for his anti-war stance and his past ties to Saddam Hussein, upon which the MP called him "a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay".
Such insults should not be left unattended, or so thought Hitchens, who subsequently challenged Galloway to join him in a public debate at a time and venue of his choosing...............



[...]


No one is more intrigued - or perhaps more appalled - by the event than the woman two seats to my left, Oona King. She, of course, is the former Labour candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow who knows first hand what it is like to go up against the barking Galloway. Some of us are imagining that Hitchens, a man of no small intellectual rigour, will surely get the better of the man from Dundee tonight. But perhaps Oona knows better. She whispers something to me about Galloway being "brilliant". Oh dear.


[..]


Hitchens begins in earnest, depicting the kind of world we would live in if the pacifists got their way. From the reactions around us, it seems he might have a good third of the hall in his pocket; he should do fine.It is still not quite clear to me at what point exactly Hitchens jumped the rails. Much later in the night, when Hitch and I and a few others have repaired to a friend's loft in SoHo, I attempt something of a post-mortem with him. Is there anything, I dare to wonder, that he perhaps wishes in hindsight he hadn't said to Galloway? Has he any regrets from the evening? Of course, he says flat-out no.



Hitchens vs Galloway: The big debate - World Politics - World - The Independent

[VictorCharlie]

"a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay"

I'll give the UK crowd some props. US politicians can't throw around insults with that level of creativity.

[Kirkland Laing]

"a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay"

I'll give the UK crowd some props. US politicians can't throw around insults with that level of creativity.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader.

That's got to be the best opening line of any US Senate testimony ever. He deserved the Medal of Honor for that one.

[Gandalf]

I don't understand it. Galloway is not a perfect man, but neither was Hitchens. Hitchens in his desire to be loved by a nation went from being a Trotskyite to a neo con, and in the words of Pilkington, that is 'bullshit'. A very smart man, but if it is consistency we want to attack it is Hitchens and not Galloway. Chris Hedges summed up Hitchens well when he described him as aggrandising and either this or that and no between.

[Kirkland Laing]

Hitchens burnt all his bridges with lefty liberal media for a variety of reasons, drinking, gerneral unpleasantness and so on. He got offered lots of dough to write for the other side and needed to cover his bar tabs some way.

Galloway I'm guessing has been backing the Assad regime recently but that's entirely consistent with old Arab nationalist view (which George and me both subscribe to). Assad may be a butcher but he's a sovereign butcher and the last thing the Arab world needs in western interference in another of their countries, so Arab nationaists reflexively back the guy not backed by America/west.

[Beanz]

So Miles and Kirkland hand in their cards and fold whilst pretending that there never was a poker game in the first place, and that good old George is at least, a consistent Cunt. The fact that he is and always will be inconsistent, a hypocrite and a supporter of butchers, bigots and barbarians is nothing compared to the fact that Hitchens liked a drink and smoked cigarettes. To top it all, the myopic view that a social conscience and the true Internationalist view taken by real Liberals like Hitchens is somehow a turn coat retreat to the Conservative right beggars belief. You turn your back as thousands are murdered and liberty is trodden underfoot and you have the gall to claim that you are standing in solidarity with your oppressed brothers ? It is you who are turning your back, You who think "I am alright Jack" You who both decide to side with a lecherous slug of a man, someone who blames victims of cruel and bloody violence for bringing it on themselves, someone who shakes the hands of Men who sanction the gassing and hanging and torture of those who seek the simple rights that you shit on with your namby pamby spoilt bratish versions of socialism. Socialism as an airy fairy construct where you never have to get your hands dirty, where you take photographs of protests without taking part, all the while amassing wealth for your self and lecturing the world on how your tiny narrow view on reality is the only one worth listening to.

And here was I thinking that George was alone in ascending the summit of embarrassment in such a public way. He may have had cream on his whiskers but you both seem to have something rather more unseemly on yours