Christopher Hitchens on the Clinton Administration & Foreign Policy - Part 1 (1993)

February 1, 1993 http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww....

Watch the full speech: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/08/christopher-hitchens-on-clinton.html

After emigrating to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation. While at The Nation he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America. He became a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair in 1992, writing ten columns a year. He left The Nation in 2002, after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow, in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, but others—including Hitchens—believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest.

Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. Through his work there he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he has two children, Alexander and Sophia. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, has worked as a researcher for London think tanks the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Hitchens has continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda and the Darfur region of Sudan. He has visited all three countries in the so-called "Axis of Evil": Iraq, Iran and North Korea. His work has taken him to over 60 different countries.

In 1989 he met Carol Blue, a Californian writer, whom he later married and had a daughter, Antonia, with. In 1991 he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Prior to, but not after, Hitchens' political shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "Dauphin" or "heir." In 2010 Hitchens attacked Vidal in a Vanity Fair piece headlined "Vidal Loco", calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories.

His strong advocacy of the war in Iraq had gained Hitchens a wider readership, and in September 2005, He was named as one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy Prospect magazines. An online poll ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazine noted that Hitchens' (#5), Chomsky's (#1), and Abdolkarim Soroush's (#15) rankings were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.

In 2007 Hitchens's work for Vanity Fair won him the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary." He was a finalist once more in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in Slate, but lost out to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.

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[rationalsalvation]

@CaseRed0605 Yeah, or that maybe that they've just run out of ideas. 

[CaseRed0605]

@rationalsalvation Seems to be a prevailing thought now in Western culture. The debate in America is what's the difference between the Democratic and Republican party. I see things aren't much different over the pond.

Perhaps the only logical conclusion to come to is we are all being used.

[rationalsalvation]

@chinahands100 Ah, the BNP. White supremacists and Christian fanatics, as tolerant as Al Qaeda, as intelligent as fecal matter and as fat as pigs. A group of impotent middle-aged farts who just don't like brown people. They made the mistake of thinking they were all Muslims and then blaming everyone with a slightly darker skin tone for terrorism. There must be a happy medium. Can't we just please throw out the Extremists on all sides? Apparently not. We're stuck.

[chinahands100]

@rationalsalvation vote BNP then..:D

[rationalsalvation]

@chinahands100 I left Liverpool when I was twelve. I voted Cameron, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. Seriously, WHAT is the difference between Labour and Conservative right now? I give up. There needs to be a final solution for the chav problem, we need to stop financing certain mosques that have been shown to be incubating terrorists and deport their members, and who the hell let the Polish in here just as the illegal immigrants from Asia were being put out of work??

[chinahands100]

@rationalsalvation well join the tory party and work for a better uk..and leave liverpool! hahah :P

[rationalsalvation]

@chinahands100 I knew that was coming. I can't just pick up and leave, I have family here. Life doesn't have to be "rosie" in another country to be better than this one, the worst kind of bureaucracy is one that thinks it's a democracy. We are the only country in the free world that has one of the largest crime rates WITHOUT freedom to carry firearms, that's why the elderly are terrorized in their own homes, that's why if you get held up with a KNIFE of all things, you're fucked!

[chinahands100]

@rationalsalvation well if you dont like the UK go to another country..but i think you will soon find out life isnt rosie in any country.

i dont mind people slagging UK off somtimes we deserve it,but hitchin is dragged onto USA tv as a expert on the uk..but he's a Yank with a plummy accent.

[rationalsalvation]

@chinahands100 I slag off the UK, and I'm still here. The British (and I exclude myself) spend all their time slagging off everyone including other Brits, but it's only when an external voice says something disparaging about the UK that the Brits get all upset. I'm even a scouser, and I couldn't help but bang my head against the wall when Liverpool demanded an apology from Boris Johnson for saying that scousers have a persecution complex. They just don't get the irony! Fuck the UK.

[chinahands100]

hahah hitchens and all the brit ex pat all slag off the uk..

its so sad..but there you go..

[jerryhello100]

@Vostoek Really? Even before you were born? Knicked!

[elfred1980]

@Ellesime89 Well i get that but its just that he makes other speakers sound boring and ridiculous. That and they prolly wanted to make sure as much Hitchens hitchens could fit in the video as possible

[Vostoek]

I've always loved the way he says "Balkans"

[Ellesime89]

Why is everything but Hitchens edited out of this discussion? That's rather irritating to listen to his responses to things without actually hearing the things he's responding to.