RIP

Christopher Hitchens has died at 62 at the result of esophageal cancer.

There are, of course, the usual accolades, the tributes to his wit and his skill with the acerbic phrase, the "humanizing" anecdotes of kindness, and all the rest.

However, I have to say I lost interest in Hitchens some time back, even before his endorsement of the invasion of Iraq and subsequently of Shrub; those events merely put an exclamation point on the judgement I had previously rendered that he had become "increasingly incapable of stringing two coherent sentences together without someone or something to hate." The attacks of 9/11 just allowed him the opportunity to combine all his individual political and religious hates into one package of "Islamofascism."

There are those who will miss him; while I regret his death as I do that of anyone (as "any man's death diminishes me"), I confess I will not be among them.

For a couple of reasonable but less laudatory looks at Hitchens, try here and here.