Hitchens sticks the boot into George Galloway with stylish aplomb and justified glee.
what has been established is breathtaking enough. A member of the British Parliament was in receipt of serious money originating from a homicidal dictatorship. That money was supposed to have been used to ameliorate the suffering of Iraqis living under sanctions. It was instead diverted to the purposes of enriching Saddam’s toadies and of helping them propagandize in favor of the regime whose crimes and aggressions had necessitated the sanctions and created the suffering in the first place. This is something more than mere “corruption.” It is the cynical theft of food and medicine from the desperate to pay for the palaces of a psychopath.
…
Yet this is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.
No wonder the Galloway-excusing Stopposphere has collectively discovered an urgent need to blog about television advertisements instead of current affairs.
H/T Inna in the comments.
Harry adds: Just a thought but would natural justice not be served better if it were to be the courts of the newly endorsed federal and democratic republic in Iraq that dealt with all those accused of colluding with the fascist regime in stealing money intended to help the poor and hungry of Iraq?
Update: Google searches show a lot of people coming here looking for the George Galloway-Norman Coleman-Christopher Hitchens mp3 track. Its not showing up in Google yet but you can find the track here in streaming or downloadable mp3 version.
MORE: Another Hitchens piece out today is this in The Mirror.
And this is good – David Blair the Telegraph reporter who discovered the first documents linking Galloway to the Oil for Cronies Scam responds to some of GG’s recent bluster:
As for the discovery of the documents, Mr Galloway tried to undermine my account of finding them. He claimed that I “stumbled” on them “in a burning, destroyed, looted building”. In fact, there were no fires in the foreign ministry when I went there and the description of the building as “destroyed” is patently absurd. Television crews filmed this tower block on the day the Telegraph stories appeared. The foreign ministry still stands in the heart of Baghdad.
My Iraqi translator provided a witness statement detailing how he had accompanied me to the ministry and found the documents alongside me. Mr Galloway’s lawyers accepted his evidence and chose not to cross-examine him. Nor did they challenge me directly on my account of finding them.
