Category Archives: Media Criticism

A Terrible Week For Liberty Fighters

First Hitchens, and now Vaclev Havel has died. Here’s what Matt Welch had to say about him a few years ago.

Don’t expect the media to make a big deal of it. He was the wrong kind of dissenter, being too American for Europe. The fact that he never won a Peace Prize, while Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama did, says something very fundamental about the corruption and uselessness of that once-honorable achievement. I’d also note (to cite a tweet) that he’s an example of the ancient dictum (that I just made up) that a country can do a lot worse than having a dissident playwright as a president. Mamet, 2012!

[Monday morning update]

More thoughts (from a couple years ago) from Bruce Bawer. And here’s a roundup over at National Review Online.

A Hitchens Roundup

Thoughts from Nick Gillespie, Michelle Malkin, Wretchard, Rob Long, Lileks, Peter Robinson, Melissa Clouthier, John Podhoretz, James Fenton, Joy McCann, Jason Cowley, Doug Wilson, Simon Jenkins, and last but by no means least, his brother Peter.

I first recall being impressed with him in the nineties, in his fearless willingness to take on the lies of the Clintons. He was devastating, to anyone who paid attention.

[Update a while later]

The Atlantic remembers Hitchens, as does Michael Totten.

[Update late morning]

Here’s another from Pete Wehner.

[Almost noon]

And Ron Radosh weighs in.

[Early afternoon update]

David Corn: sharing an office with Hitch.

Willful Blindness

Thoughts on the idiocy at the Obama Defense department:

It reflects the Obama philosophy that we cannot even hint that an interpretation of Islam — drawn literally from Islamic scriptures — is the force motivating our enemies. Even though this is unquestionably true, to say so, to acknowledge it in any way, would mean, according to administration thinking, that we are at war with Islam itself — with all 1.4 billion Muslims, including the hundreds of millions who do not subscribe to this interpretation. Unwilling to entertain the possibility that the enemy has a coherent, knowable doctrine — which is a powerful catalyst precisely because it draws credibly (not inarguably but credibly) on scripture — we have forfeited the natural right to defend ourselves and the troops who make it possible for us to live freely.

This is criminal recklessness. It is idiocy beyond description, so I should just stop trying to describe it. Watch it in all its jaw-dropping ignominy.

You can’t win a war when you pretend that you’re not in one.