| | Hitchens first came to my attention as something more than just a talking head when he commented on the CBS "document" regarding GWB's discharge from the air national guard.
From austinbay.net/blog/:
"UPDATE: A reader says: Christopher Hitchens addressed the forge vs. fake issue by noting that a person making a false 100 dollar bill is guilty of creating a forgery. A person trying to pass a 99 dollar bill, on the other hand, is attempting to pass a fabrication. The CBS documents are fabrications, created not as copies of genuine documents but as entirely new documents based on nothing.
MY NOTE: Thanks. There is indeed a semantic difference. CBS defenders, such as they are, may be leveraging the difference between forgery and fake, as commenters have suggested. The forgery argument reinforces the fake but authentic pitch suggesting genuine documents with similar information once existed (though they cannot prove this). The comments of the Air Guard unit secretary who told CBS that the information in the faked memos was in line (paraphrase) with what she remembered about Bush's service would be first-person evidence that such documents could have existed. But that's a weak case even at a DNC cocktail party."
Hitchens' point is a very subtle and astute bit of epistemology. Had someone handed Dan Rather a $100 bill, one might assume that Rather was honestly duped. But the document handed him was so blatantly unreal, that only wishful thinking and intentional blindness to an impossibility could have led him to accept it. Only someone who wants to be fooled accepts a $99 bill. At the time, very few people understood the point that Hitchens was trying to make, but to me it was like a bucket of cold water. I immediately went out and bought his books, and I am not aware of any sharper political commentator (no offense to any on this forum!) alive today.
Ted Keer
John, he was a Trotskyite, but no longer so describes himself so far as I am aware.
(Edited by Ted Keer on 8/06, 3:19pm)
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