Who cant love the

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Who can’t love the Brits? I do. I’m an Anglophile. I admit it. They’ve all got such polished educations, at least the ones they send over here. And they turn arguments on a dime. They get it from those debates they have at that big university over there. (What’s it called?) And, let’s admit it, their accents just sound cool. Even the working class cockney ones sound refined to us — that’s how pathetic we are. (Michael Caine, Duke of London.)

Anyway, Christopher Hitchens has a piece today in Slate lambasting John Kerry for saying that President Bush “misled every one of us.”

Hitchens says that this amounts to Kerry saying he’s easily duped. So how can he be a credible presidential candidate? And many on the left, says Hitchens, believe the president isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed so his campaign mantra amounts to “Kerry. Duped by a Dope.” Actually, it’s worse, says Hitchens, because the evidence that the president or his advisors were lying has been there for a long time! So he’s not only easily duped. But he can’t have been duped. Actually, no. He was twice duped! Because if he now believes there were no WMD then he’s signing on to the unlikely proposition “that the Saddam regime had no plan to preserve or restart its long-standing WMD scheme, though the evidence for this may involve some complex study and not take a ‘gotcha’ or ‘smoking gun’ form.” And why didn’t Kerry do his own investigation if the president was lying to him? Who is this John Kerry joker? You still following all of this? Good. What a mess Kerry has gotten himself in, what with being fooled and a fool and also a liar and then doubly a fool. “We have learned,” says Hitchens, “that Sen. Kerry considers himself to be gullible both ways, which ought to mean that he is ineligible for the nomination, let alone the presidency.” Hitch is just running circles around the guy. I’ve gotta tell you this reminds me of those late night chats Hitch and Dorothy Parker and I used to have at the Algonquin Table back in the day.

Actually, now that I think about it, that wasn’t me. Must have been a flashback from some under-the-influence moment back in college. But anyway, I think the whole spectacle, or rather the whole article, is an example of what we might call the diminishing importance of being earnest.

What exactly does any of this verbal rope-a-dope mean? If the folks at DOD or OVP knowingly passed on intell garbage, and Kerry accepted it as legit, is he really a rube? Isn’t that more a knock on the president? Or if the charge isn’t true, isn’t it a knock on Kerry for leveling a reckless and irresponsible charge for political gain?

Kerry, it would seem, would like to base part of his presidential bid on the integrity of the material the Bush administration used to lead the country into war. That angle stands or falls on its merits, I would imagine. That is to say, whether or not it’s true.

But Hitchens’ article, Slate’s front page story, seems less concerned with this point than spinning out so many logical conundrums and rhetorical culs-de-sac that the befuddled and presumably over-brained Mr. Kerry just scratches his head confusedly, decides mounting the charge is just too complicated, and gives up trying.

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