Right Back At You, Hitchens! (old post...)

I just finished watching about half of the season premiere of "Real Time With Bill Maher," and I'm so angry that I have to post about it now (to anyone who may be reading this, thanks for indulging me).

The panelists were former Sen. Max Cleland, author/scholar Vali Nasr, and writer and egotistical blowhard with a veddy, veddy British accent named Christopher Hitchens. I had seen Hitchens last year on "Real Time" on the same panel with British MP George Galloway, and Hitchens seemed to be on his best behavior.

To a point, I can deal with the usual bilious propaganda about Iraq in particular from Hitchens, since the war is the issue where he puts Dubya on a pedestal where no one else belongs in his mind. However, Hitchens was openly combative with the audience all night long, making gestures with his hands like "come here" when people jeered him, and also saying, among other things, that people who questioned Bush's stupidity were stupid themselves.

Though galling, I realize that all of this is "in play." However, Hitchens also extended the "middle digit raised on high" at everyone shortly before he defended Bush's stupidity (and before he insulted people who questioned whether or not Dubya had a brain, he made a smart remark along those lines himself, showing his total hypocrisy). And he did so without a word of rebuke from Bill Maher (who, though supposedly so well read about current events, was caught absolutely flatfooted by Hitchens' propagandistic non sequiturs all night long...when mentioning Iraq, somehow Ramsey Clark was brought into the discussion...and offered virtually no response to what Hitchens said).

Giving everyone the finger is what did it for me, enough so that I turned off the program (though I did manage to hear some of the good things Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos said later).

In the next day or so, I plan to contact HBO and demand one of the following, for what it's worth:

1) An apology from Hitchens for the "F.U." gesture.
2) Absent that, an apology from Maher and/or a promise not to invite Hitchens back as a guest.

There were other good moments in the show - I thought Elvis Costello, speaking remotely from Vancouver, B.C. about Katrina and the aftermath affecting New Orleans, was best of all. Max was great and sincere as always, but though he made good points, I thought he was "preaching to the choir" through absolutely no fault of his own.

Update: Crooks and Liars (via Atrios) is all over this also, of course.

Update 10/12: You never know...