Hitchens the Glib

Christopher Hitchens, has a column in yesterday's Slate Magazine, titled

WORDS MATTER.

Cliché, not plagiarism, is the problem with today's pallid political discourse.

Here is the last paragraph.

How well I remember Sidney Blumenthal waking me up all those years ago to read me the speech by Sen. Biden, which, by borrowing the biography as well as the words of another candidate's campaign, put an end to Biden's own. The same glee didn't work this time when he (it must have been he) came up with "Change You Can Xerox" as a riposte to Sen. Obama's hand-me-down words from Gov. Deval Patrick. All that Obama had lifted from Patrick was the old-fashioned idea that "words matter," and all that one can say, reviewing the present empty landscape of slogan and cliché, is that one only wishes that this could once again be true.

Here is the comment I posted.

As usual, Hitchens does a great job of putting down nearly every politician in sight. What he chooses to ignore about Obama is that there is substance to him, in his team of advisers, at his website, and, yes, even in some of his speeches - those which are devoted to policy issues. And anyway, what is the matter with political slogans, as long as they are backed up by substance? I would love it if Hitchens chose to run for office (ignoring the fact that he is a Brit). To borrow from Al Franken, an appropriate slogan would be "Vote for me because I'm smarter than you, I'm wittier than you, and (no) God, hardly anybody likes me."