"Any Fight You're Going To Have Eventually, Have Now"

That’s the advice that Christopher Hitchens gives the Obama administration regarding Iran in the second part of his conversation with Michael Totten, but of course, it also neatly sums up Hitchens’ own pugilistic writing style.

And speaking of which, in Vanity Fair, Hitchens performs a must-read demolition job on the sclerotic Gore Vidal. But then, Vidal is but one of numerous elderly or rapidly aging reactionary leftwing figures whose worldviews were demonstrated to be remarkably distanced from reality, and concurrently and not coincidentally, lost their formerly deft touch with prose by their reaction to President Bush’s administration and the events of 9/11 and its aftermath.

The late Kurt Vonnegut also comes immediately to mind; there are no doubt numerous other examples, including Garrison Keillor, who’s of a younger generation than Vonnegut and Vidal, but whose hatred for former President Bush and the half of the country who voted him completly overwhelms his skills, not to mention empathy, as a humorist. (See also: Letterman, David.)