Not a single Hitch

Seixon.com has posted the infamous debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway. Maybe I'm letting my biases show, but Hitchens comes off rather better than Galloway. While the latter resorts to increasingly shrill attempts at baiting ("Christopher's new best friends, Bechtel and Halliburton"), Hitchens manages to both maintain an Olympian detachment quite removed from his usual bellocosity while talking in crisp, measured sentences; his rhetorical abilities are indeed awesome. When he's wrong, he admits it; when he's accused of contradicting himself, he acknowledges it and explains why. A performance all the more impressive after his shambling essay in The Weekly Standard a few weeks ago. Look to the language, his idol George Orwell always said.