{"id":2245,"date":"2009-01-26T21:18:43","date_gmt":"2009-01-27T02:18:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anglicansamizdat.wordpress.com\/?p=2245"},"modified":"2009-01-26T21:18:43","modified_gmt":"2009-01-27T02:18:43","slug":"hitchens-goes-wobbly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/hitchens-goes-wobbly\/","title":{"rendered":"Hitchens goes wobbly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Even cynical sots are not immune to Obama adoration disorder: Christopher is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2209768\/?from=rss\" target=\"_blank\">weak at the knees<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;We will restore science to its rightful place,&#8221; is intended, I have some reason to believe, to reinforce or underline the president&#8217;s emphasis on religious pluralism and on the inclusion (with a few days to go before the Darwin-Lincoln bicentennial) of the fast-growing number of &#8220;nonbelievers.&#8221; That this has already drawn fire from the vastly overrated black churches is a good sign in itself.<\/p>\n<p>The president has a better grip on the English language than any of his living-memory predecessors, and it seems certain that he wrote at least 80 percent of this address himself. It&#8217;s nice to be able to hold people to claims that they have written rather than read, and I look forward to doing so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Hitchens also has a better grip on the English language than most journalists; that doesn&#8217;t make what he says &#8211; however well he says it &#8211; correct; although he does get some things right, most notably Iraq.<\/p>\n<p>Obama&#8217;s talk of &#8220;restoring science to its rightful place&#8221; would strike a religious chord in Hitchens even though science&#8217;s rightful place is really one of dependence on a metaphysic that Hitchens would deny.<\/p>\n<p>Although\u00a0 I had not pegged Hitchens as a nascent Obama apostle, it is a match made in Darwinian heaven: sterile, cringingly cool, conformist and devoid of significance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even cynical sots are not immune to Obama adoration disorder: Christopher is weak at the knees: &#8220;We will restore science to its rightful place,&#8221; is intended, I have some reason to believe, to reinforce or underline the president&#8217;s emphasis on &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/hitchens-goes-wobbly\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[256],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}