Not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, Hitchens is a pompous prat, who believes his own legend and has lost the run of himself, as my Irish mammy used to say.
On the other, he does have this to say of McCain:
Last week’s so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. A surprisingly tactful way to say that he’s barking mad.
And this, of Palin:
I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.
He is also the only commentator I have seen, so far, point out that the fact that McCain distinguished himself in Vietnam is not, of itself, a qualification for high office, as so many seem to think. Indeed, I can’t help thinking that his prison experience may well be the cause of McCain’s fairly obvious dementia.