Hitchens strikes back at McCain

Something about John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate has sparked quite a indignant fury within Christopher Hitchens. On the eve of Election Day, his anger seems to have finally reached a fever pitch.

I'm no big fan of Hitchens, who can be tremendously pompous about his antitheism, but his latest screed about McCain's unapologetic attack of Palestinian academic Rashid Kalidi is a must-read. Here's an important passage:

If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so. I would go further and say that if Barack Obama was looking for a Palestinian friend, he could not have chosen any better. But perhaps John McCain has decided that he doesn't need any Palestinian friends and neither do we. Perhaps he thinks it's all right to refer to refugees and victims of occupation, who have been promised self-determination and statehood at the podium of the United Nations and the U.S. Congress by George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, as if they were Hitlerites. How shameful. How disgusting. How ignorant.

I'll never quite understand how anyone thought foreign policy was one of McCain's strengths heading into this campaign. Apparently, Hitchens is right there with me.

(H/T First Lady.)

UPDATE: Speaking of Palin, the AJC's Cynthia Tucker offers up a name for the top of the GOP ticket in 2012: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. The only flaw I can find with this suggestion is that Obama might be a strong incumbent (if the polls are to be trusted and, honestly, who really knows?) and the Republicans might not want to waste a rising star in that election. That's why I think Romney, Huckabee and Palin will be the also-rans given a chance to knock B.O. off his throne four years from now. If they lose, no biggie. A Jindal defeat could be a crippling blow for the future.