Horizon

If you mean, "was Orwell ever capable of making cheap shots", then yes, he was. The difference I think between Orwell and Hitchens is that Orwell was embarrassed about this kind of behavior, even if he couldn't always prevent himself from doing it. Hitchens revels in it.

Yes, and you also have to keep in mind that Orwell routinely managed to avoid easy cheap shots and vitriol in general in situations where I would have had a hard time maintaining a sunny demeanor, that's for sure.

The most vicious thing I can recall offhand of Orwell's was his ill tempered (though I think understandable) rant about sandal-wearers and vegetarians in The Road to Wigan Pier. On the whole these outbursts seem to have been pretty limited, though.

And even this rant, though it is dismissive and full of frustration and righteous anger, is not sadistic the way CH usually is.

My impression is that this comparison to Orwell really came from CH himself; after all, he wrote a whole book about why he and Orwell matter.

Some of the exchanges Orwell had with his readers in magazine letter columns are uncomfortable reading. After he published The Rediscovery of Europe in (I think) The Listener, someone wrote in with a few quite reasonable criticisms of Orwell's argument, and his response was rather petty.

I recall one letter or column, from Tribune, I think, in which he publicly apologized to someone after a brief correspondence convinced him he had been unfair. Imagine that.

I'll see if I can look it up when I get home.

his response was rather petty

But did he exult in his pettiness? Despite enjoying Hitchens when he writes on smoking bans and the like, I'm still gobsmacked by his response to Martin Amis's Koba the Dread.

On the whole, he conceded Amis's point about the horrors of Stalin and the inappropriateness of making jokes about Communism. But his one point of active defence was when he taunted Amis for getting worked up over the Communist destruction of churches and persecution of priests. It was a sort of snarling, atavistic nastiness -- among kulaks, engineers, and wreckers, Amis had been weak or stupid enough to mention the religious, and Hitchens suddenly yowled "the Gulag's too good for 'em!"

Despite the voice of moral reason Hitchens provided against Chomsky after 9/11 and the good work he's doing with Galloway now, I suspect that he's still got an apocalyptic vision lurking somewhere a dark corner of his mind.

There are two things that bother me about Hitchens. First, he consistently makes claims that contradict what seems to be common knowledge and almost never offers any evidence of his own. It makes me wonder if he lives in his own fact-world, where the weight of his own outrage ought to be enough for everyone.

This is a good example of what I mean. The documents in question were widely concluded to be obvious forgeries, last I heard.

The other problem is also obvious in that article. After setting everything up he abandons the argument for a chance to bad mouth everyone he has reason to suspect might not agree with him, making it clear that his opponents are both incompetent and happy to see uranium handed over to the usual suspects because they are against regime change.

And then, what did this have to do with the constitutionality of this law in the first place? Nothing, but I suspect this was never Hitchen's primary reason for writing the article.

"Hitchens has no patience with a politics of difficult choices ... it’s the stance of a man whose passion outruns his reason. Hitchens knows there are many liberals and some radicals who cheered the fall of Saddam Hussein yet also cursed Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair for lying their way into Iraq and then doing more to cover their tracks than to rebuild that devastated nation. Such ambivalence is the main reason no mass antiwar movement exists today, despite widespread aversion to the administration’s conduct before and after the invasion. But the arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause. What defines Hitchens’s great talent also limits his political understanding. It is thrilling to read and argue with a gifted writer who evinces no doubt about which side is right and which wrong and who can bring a wealth of learning and experience to the fray. We judge public intellectuals partly on their performance, and few can hold an audience as well as he. Still, the most romantic position is not often the most intelligent one. It is unheroic but necessary to explain how the Bush administration threw Americans into a bloody morass and might now get them out. A lover of absolutes would label this task an act of bad faith; I would call it common sense. In a luminous recent essay about successive translations of Swann’s Way, Hitchens observed, “To be so perceptive and yet so innocent—that, in a phrase, is the achievement of Proust." The author might also have been speaking about himself.”

(Was Orwell this way too? Discuss.)

If you ask me Hitchens even at his best is a literary offspring of William Hazlitt out of Oscar Wilde. (No, don't ask me the logistics of same.) I have no doubt he uses Orwell's example as a spine-stiffener when following his commendable personal policy of visiting one of the world's dangerous places every year. But adopting Orwell as a schoolmaster, or maybe I mean a scoutmaster, is hardly the same as becoming like him.

I suspect that he's still got an apocalyptic vision lurking somewhere a dark corner of his mind.

Of course he has. The only way to defend current U.S. behavior in Iraq is to revive that old line about the omelet and the eggs.