Christopher Hitchens on the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales (1/4) (1997)

September 5, 1997 http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.... Watch the full program: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/11/christopher-hitchens-and-wesley-p...

Wesley Pruden is an American journalist and author. He was the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times from 1992 until his retirement in 2008.

His first job in the newspaper business was in 1951 when, as a 10th grade student at Little Rock Central High School, he worked nights as a copyboy at the Arkansas Gazette, where he later became a sportswriter and an assistant state editor. After high school, he attended Little Rock Junior College, now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

In 1956, he began working at the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1963, he joined the National Observer, a national weekly published by Dow Jones & Co., where he covered national politics and the civil rights movement. In 1965, he was assigned to cover the Vietnam War. For the next decade, he was a foreign correspondent, based in Saigon, Hong Kong, Beirut, and London. The National Observer ceased publication in 1976.

Between 1976 and 1982, Pruden worked on a novel, a satire for which he could not find a publisher. In 1982, he joined the Washington Times, four months after the paper began, as chief political correspondent. He became assistant managing editor in 1983, managing editor in 1985, and editor-in-chief in 1992. He retired in January 2008, and became editor in chief emeritus. His twice-weekly column on politics and national affairs, which has appeared in The Times since 1983, continues.

In 1991, he won the H.L. Mencken Prize.

Every Saturday, the Times ran a full page of stories on the American Civil War, the only daily newspaper in the United States to do so. Pruden called it "probably our single most popular feature", and noted that "There are more books published on the Civil War than on any other American topic." Pruden said that "the Civil War page has just as many stories about glorifying the Union as it does the Confederacy." Soon after Pruden retired as editor-in-chief, the Times announced that the Civil War page would be expanded to include coverage of all America's wars and would be renamed "America at War."

On November 17, 2009 Pruden published an opinion piece in the Washington Times titled "Obama bows, the nation cringes," where he set forth his thoughts on what he considered President Obama's breaches of etiquette committed on his tour of Asia, such as bowing to Emperor Akihito of Japan. In the article, he expressed the opinion that since President Obama was "sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii," he "has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what [America] is about." A number of liberal commentators criticized the column as racist.

On 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, died as a result of injuries sustained in a car collision in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris, France. Her companion, Dodi Fayed, and the driver of the Mercedes-Benz W140, Henri Paul, were pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. Fayed's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was the only survivor. Although early on the media pinned the blame on the paparazzi, the crash was ultimately found to be caused by the reckless actions of the chauffeur, who was the head of security at the Ritz and had earlier goaded the paparazzi waiting outside the hotel. An eighteen-month French judicial investigation concluded in 1999 that the crash was caused by Henri Paul, who lost control of the car at high speed while under the influence of alcohol, which may have been made worse by the simultaneous presence of an antidepressant and traces of a tranquilizer in his body.

From February 1998, Dodi's father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (the owner of the Hôtel Ritz, for which Paul worked) claimed that the crash was a result of a conspiracy, and later contended that the crash was orchestrated by MI6 on the instructions of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. His claims that the crash was a result of a conspiracy were dismissed by a French judicial investigation and by Operation Paget, a Metropolitan police inquiry that concluded in 2006.

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[ElectricUte666]

I'm going to miss hearing that voice. :(

[movement26]

"The international whitetrash jet set into which she hoped to marry".........LOL Only Hitch.

[dalektaliban]

diana seemed to be what micheal jacksons death was to america

[JoeyMacaroniPenguin]

I was 2 when this aired :/ Wish I'd been alive to appreciate alot of the shit that was goingon whilst I was obsessed with digimon.

[EasingDifficulties]

How might you build a house for 10 thousand dollars? First: hire several $5-per-hour niggers, spics or greasers to handle the nigger-work. After the place is finished call immigration; that way you won't have to pay them.

[MrOceanPenguin]

@MinotawrTV Actually ... we're both wrong. His brother (Peter Hitchens) wrote:

"Some people have asked me when and where my brother’s funeral took place. In fact, as Christopher donated his body to medical science, there has not been and will not be any funeral."

[MinotawrTV]

@MrOceanPenguin He was cremated.

[MrOceanPenguin]

@MinotawrTV Or rather in the grave ... amongst the maggots.

[33rdPatriot]

Princeton Univ has been running a program to globally track global consciousness. They track mega-events, and their graphs correlate attention to mega-events with increased measurements in the dispersed receptors. FASCINATING

noosphere . princeton . edu / rdnelson / diana . html