http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P2367UPDATE: Galloway is up. He's "thanking" Hitchens for standing up for the Palestinians, 5 years ago. And for his opposition to the first Gulf war. Recalls a very funny anecdote on TV with Hitchens debating Charleton Heston. Hitchens asked Heston if he could name four countries bordering the country he wanted to invade. Heston, of course, could not.
Hitchens is standing there, apparently talking (mumbling) to himself.
So what are we witnessing? Galloway: "The metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug. I mention a slug purpose, because the one thing a slug leaves behind it is a trail of slime." Ouch!
He's ripping into Hitchens, now. He slimed "more gentle people than me." Like Cindy Sheehan: he lists the libels hurled at her by the Hitch. Then: "People like Hitchens are willing to fight to the last drop of other people's blood."
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Galloway: It doesn't look like the Americans are leaving. They have a puppet government in there. Bechtel. Halliburton. Christopher's new robber baron friends, who're stealing the money of the people of Iraq and the United States -- do you think they're going anywhere?
You slander the Iraqi resistance as being "foreign fighters." Which part of Iraq is Gen. Myers from? The most foreign fighters in Iraq are wearing British and American uniforms! This idea that the resistance is "Islamist" is being abandoned by the American military itself: only 6 percent are "foreigners," if people from neighboring Arab states could be called "foreigners" by Americans. This is the same line used during the cold war: during Vietnam, it was the Red Chinese who were supposed to be about to invade.
This whole line is self-deluding, says Galloway, which borders on racism. The vast majority of the people in Iraq oppose the occupation, they want it to end. The vast majority of the resistance is Iraqi -- get used to it, get over it.
UPDATE: Hitchens takes the low road. I am glad, he says, that Galloway now supports terrorism. The audience boos. Hitchens reminds them "You're on telly." Oh yeah? So what? He then continues not to answer the question put to him -- which is, how long should the U.S. stay? But Hitchens has forgotten all about that. He's too busy hailing the "heroic peshmerga" thugs. He's going on about how wonderful the elections were -- the same elections that installed a theocracy in Iraq.
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Galloway's attack, on the other hand -- and, it seems to me that Galloway was on the attack all evening, while poor old Hitch was playing defense -- was also centrally concerned with this issue of consistency, of trying to prove that he was the better, more faithful, more consistent man of the left.
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