Kamm on Hitchens on Galloway:
Christopher Hitchens gets the measure of George Galloway in today's Independent (link requires fee):
[H]e looks so much like what he is: a thug and a demagogue, the type of working-class-wideboy-and-proud-of-it who is too used to the expenses account, the cars and the hotels - all cigars and back-slapping. He is a very cheap character and a short-arse like a lot of them are, puffed up like a turkey. He has managed to fuse being a Baathist with being a Muslim sectarian and a carpet bagger in the East End - as well as a front for a creepy sub-Leninist sect, the Socialist Workers' Party. He's got the venomous riff-raff at one end and your one-God fanatics on the other. Wonderful. Just what we need.
Uncanny. This was exactly what I was thinking, and in exactly the same words.
Exactly the same words, Ollie Boy? I doubt it. Hitchens may well be, as Galloway sort of said, a booze raddled fat twat, but that would be a booze raddled fat twat who has a way with words. For Kamm to claim he thought exactly the self same words featured at the outset of this missive is to stretch the credulity of the reader to a veritable approximation of breaking point. Where, Oliver, are the passages of high minded circumlocution so beloved of your good self? Where can we find the gratuitous usage of words of the lengthier nature put in the piece to remind the reader of the massive intellect behind the work, and, one suspects, to reinforce and bolster the scribe's own high opinion of himself...
You know what I'm saying?