Live from New York
James Kirchick reports: "Live from New York: Hitchens v. Galloway, round II." This is a shrewd and appropriately biting summary. Kirchick quotes Hitchens landing a haymaker in response to Galloway's charge of inconsistency in American policy:
"I suppose we have to congratulate you on being absolutely, 100% consistent in your support for unmentionable thugs and criminals."He also quotes Hitchens landing a haymaker on his audience:
"There are probably some people among you here who fancy yourself as having leftist revolutionary credentials,” he said, in a discussion of Kurdish and Iraqi opponents of Saddam’s regime. "And, in fact, I can tell that you do by the zoo noises you make and the scars you can demonstrate from your long underground twilight struggle against Dick Cheney. But while you’re masturbating in that manner, the Iraqi secular left…[is] fighting for [its] lives against the most vicious and indiscriminate form of fascist violence that any country in the region has seen for a very long time."Kirchick concludes:
Despite Hitchens’ best effort, there was little discussion of the actual topic that made Galloway famous in the United States: his alleged taking of bribes from Saddam Hussein. Though Galloway has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, it is an issue, according to Hitchens, that is "going to haunt him on every stop of this tour and all the way back to England and everywhere he goes to raise the flag of Jihad in the Middle East." From the esteemed MP for Damascus, one should expect to hear little more than zoo noises in response.If I read him right, Kirchick scores the bout in favor of Hitchens on points. Or should we say that Gorgeous George was autmotcially disqualifed for jumping on Hitchens from the top turnbuckle?
Armavirumque has posted a good round-up here (with a video report from Britain's channel 4), and FrontPage has posted Roger Kimball's New York Sun report here.
UPDATE: George Gooding is the proprietor of Seixon. Gooding writes:
I've got a full transcript of the debate between Galloway vs. Hitchens over at my blog, I thought you might want to include that in your post about the subject. This is the only available transcript, since I spent hours making it. There were a few names and words I could not make out or figure out, so the blogosphere might be helpful in figuring that out.
