Christopher Hitchens wrote: Last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

We agree. However, this is the same Christopher Hitchens who once wrote such brillant anti-French prose “The rat that roared” – “There is of course another France—the France of Petain and Poujade and Vichy and of the filthy colonial tactics pursued in Algeria and Indochina.” – “French companies and the French state are owed immense sums of money by Saddam Hussein. We all very much hope that no private gifts to any French political figures have been made by the Iraqi Baath Party, even though such scruple on either side would be anomalous to say the very least.”  – “(Chirac) the vain and posturing and venal man who, attempting to act the part of a balding Joan of Arc, is making France into the abject procurer of Saddam. This is the case of the rat that tried to roar.”

How times have changed.

 

Comments on this website are the responsibility of their authors and are subject to the Blog Comment Rules.