Hitchens on Reagan

Over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens, who very graciously wrote an introduction for Choice: The Best of Reason Magazine (due out in September), takes a feel-good whiz on Reagan's casket, detailing a long list of particulars and concluding, "He was as dumb as a stump."

Then comes this interesting bit:

Many of [my old] friends had twice my IQ, or let's say six times that of the then-chief executive. These friends had all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be, presumably successively, the president instead of Reagan. They would go on to put Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen bumper stickers on their vehicles. No doubt they wish that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.

Whole thing here.

Hitchens had good things to say about Reagan prototype Margaret Thatcher back when we interviewed him just before the 9/11 attacks. "By subtracting my vote from the Labour Party, I was effectively voting for Thatcher to win [in 1979]. That?s how I discovered that that?s what I secretly hoped would happen. And I?m very glad I did. I wouldn?t have been able to say the same about Reagan, I must say. But I don?t think he had her intellectual or moral courage."

Whole Q&A here.