Wednesday, February 24, 2010

This is the sort of gonzo eulogy which makes Hitchens so... Hitchens. But I tend (for the most part) to agree with him on Al Haig. I've been somewhat confused by the version of Haig that's appeared in the right blogsphere since his death, it bears no resemblance to the Haig I thought I knew. That Al Haig appeared in Sorley's A Better War as a sort of Renfield to Kissinger's Dracula, a Tyrell for Nixon's Richard III. The Haig I remember as a child during the Reagan adminstration is largely the one Hitchens describes; perhaps I was deluded by the mainstream media of the time, except Hitchens offers quotes from Reagan's journal which echoes the opinion of the journalists of the day. Haig was, as far as I can tell, a scary, unscrupulous General Ripper freshly escaped from the imagination of Stanley Kubrick, run amok on the American political stage.

h/t Mark Levin, who himself kind of scares me some days.

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