I miss Christopher Hitchens dearly during this election season. He could see through the bullshit and he fearlessly and cleverly skewered everyone, Left and Right. Here are some of my favorites:
On George W. Bush:
“What did he do to be shorn at birth of his Herbert?”
“He is the least smart guy ever to have sought the office; a dingbat and a stumbler and a dyslexic and a former piss-artist who has the same chance of finding his own rear end with both hands as he once had of parking his car without scraping a wall.”
On Bill Clinton:
“If you want to put Clinton’s principles to the test, make sure to be the last person to have spoken to him. The man is like a big, fat cushion. He bears the impression of whoever last sat upon him.”
“It’s one thing to say, with reasonable confidence, that the Oval Office is currently occupied by a war criminal, a rapist, and a pathological liar. It’s another to ponder the full implications. If half of what one knows about Clinton’s business deals and date-rapes is half-true, then he has been going through political life for years, aware or quasi-aware that any or every telephone call might be the one he has been dreading. That’s more stress than most of us could take: Only a certain kind of personality could be expected to endure it. You can find this under the simpering liberal media description of ‘Comeback Kid,’ or you can check it in a taxonomy of an entirely different kind, where the key phrase is ‘Threat to self and others.'”
“I had become utterly convinced, as early as the 1992 campaign, that there was something in the Clinton makeup that was quite seriously nasty. The automatic lying, the glacial ruthlessness, the self-pity, the indifference to repeated exposure, the absence of any tincture of conscience or remorse, the awful piety – these were the symptoms of a psychopath.”
“He lies even when it won’t do him any good – a bad sign.”
On Clinton and Newt Gingrich:
“These two bloated, Southern-strategizing, God-bothering, pot-smoking, self-pitying, draft-dodging, wife-cheating, unreadable-book-writing, money-scrounging bigmouths and pseudo-intellectuals lean on each other like Pat and Mike, in a shame-free double-act where all the moves and gags are plotted in advance. Indeed, the last election campaign was explicitly ‘Clinton-Gingrich ’96.'”
On Newt Gingrich:
“He has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his office. He has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his skull…”
On George Galloway:
“Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.”
On Al Gore:
“…He actually does resemble a bronze condom stuffed with walnuts.”
On John Kerry:
“He has a choice of several houses he can live in, but I hope in each of these houses there is only one bathroom. Because if there were two, I wouldn’t back him to be able to make up his mind which one to use.”
“…There is the pleasure of seeing him take every side on abortion and gay marriage, while waving deer-rifles in swing states, and getting names of local teams and stadiums just that little bit wrong.”
On Mitt Romney:
“Entirely lacking in dignity or nobility (or average integrity) is the well-heeled son of a gold-plated church who wants to assume the pained look of martyrdom only when he is asked if he actually believes what he says. A long time ago, Romney took the decision to be a fool for Joseph Smith, a convicted fraud and serial practitioner of statutory rape who at times made war on the United States and whose cult has been made to amend itself several times in order to be considered American at all. We do not require pious lectures on the American founding from such a man, and we are still waiting for some straight answers from him.”
“The Mormons apparently believe that Jesus will return in Missouri rather than Armageddon: I wouldn’t care to bet on the likelihood of either. In the meanwhile, though, we are fully entitled to ask Mitt Romney about the forces that influenced his political formation and—since he comes from a dynasty of his church, and spent much of his boyhood and manhood first as a missionary and then as a senior lay official—it is safe to assume that the influence is not small. Unless he is to succeed in his dreary plan to borrow from the playbook of his pain-in-the-ass predecessor Michael Dukakis, and make this an election about competence not ideology, he should be asked to defend and explain himself, and his voluntary membership in one of the most egregious groups operating on American soil.”
On Barack Obama:
“Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama’s Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets…what? Not much.”
On Michael Moore:
“The laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.”
“I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible.”
On Princess Diana and Mother Theresa:
“By the way, what have we ‘chosen’ for our idols and icons? A simpering Bambi narcissist and a thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf. Nice going.”
On Ronald Reagan:
“To listen even very briefly to Ronald Reagan is to realize that here is a man upon whose synapses the termites have dined long and well.”
“Ronald Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.”
“…Every word he says is a lie, including the words ‘and’ and ‘but.'”
On Tip O’Neill:
“O’Neill seems to think that if you add the word ‘football’ to the word ‘political’ and if you use the phrase ‘the American people’ as often as seems bearable, you have disgraced dissent and made conformity into a patriotic virtue.”
On Richard Nixon:
“But, like almost anybody, he could imagine an exception where abortion might be excusable or even desirable. ‘There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.’ The association of ideas between the first mental picture and the second one is so clear as to be—if it were not so hideous—pathetically laughable in an individual, and really quite alarming in a president of the United States.”
“…The thought of the Nixon gang in the White House still infuses me with a pure and undiluted hatred and makes me consider throwing up things that I don’t even remember having eaten.”
On Sarah Palin:
“It is not snobbish to harbor grave doubts about somebody who seems uninterested in reading for pleasure or recreation and whose only interest in her local public library is sniffing round its shelves for books that ought to be removed for expressing impure ideas.”
“Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.”
“This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.”
