Great Moments in Snark.

I-steve on Christopher Hitchens:

The widespread notion in America that Christopher Hitchens is a Major Thinker is a puzzling one. I have to imagine that much of the reception he gets on this side of the pond is due to the naiveté of us Colonials about British journalists. Hitchens has the Fleet Street knack for being able to churn out publishable prose fast and fluently despite spending a lot of time in fashionable watering holes getting well-watered, in which condition he conducts publicized feuds with other well-watered British personalities. Few American hacks can long function like that. But an ability to type while nursing a hangover does not make Hitchens the second coming of John Stuart Mill.

The post that motivated this observation is from Tom Piatek's blistering essay on Hitchens' "God is Not Great".

Incidently, I like Piatek's response to the conventional atheist cliche about discrepancies between the Gospels:

Hitchens makes much of the fact that there are differences among the four Gospels. Hitchens overstates these differences: the four Gospels are in substantial agreement on the central facts of Jesus’ public ministry. And the differences that do exist are understandable and scarcely suggest that the portrait of Jesus that emerges from the Gospels is unreliable. If four of Hitchens’ friends each set about writing a brief biography of him decades after his death, based on their own memories or the memories of others who had known Hitchens, there would no doubt be differences between their accounts, reflecting the different perspectives and memories of the authors. These differences would not show that Hitchens did not exist, or that the biographies were fabrications or unreliable.

As they say, read the whole thing.