The Hitchens obit

I'm not very familiar with Christopher Hitchens. I know he's supposed to be someone who goes beyond "Slate contributor" to "public intellectual" but I'm not certain as to why. His books have tended towards the slim and one of them was titled "A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq", published in 2003, when the war was still short. Even its cover art (the Saddam statue-toppling) failed to withstand the test of time.

But I give him credit for carving out maybe the coolest niche in journalism: the guy who writes scathingly negative pieces about the recently deceased. Today Jesse Helms got served, and if ever there were an easier mark...