Friday, February 19, 1999 -- St. Paul, Minnesota -- While hitting the message boards of Brill's Content the other day, I ran across the link to the website of Christopher "Linda Tripp is My Ethics Advisor" Hitchens: http://www.enteract.com/~peterk/.

Being inflamed with the sort of morbid curiosity that creates gawkers' slowdowns at car accident scenes, I figured I'd take a look.

As expected, articles defending Hitchens were given pride of place - including Hitchens' own February 9th piece for the Washington Post, wherein he tries really, really, really hard to put the blame for Everything Bad That Happened onto Bill Clinton, while simultaneously weeping copiously maudlin crocodile tears for Sidney and crafting a nickel-plated dime-store martyr's halo for his own head. Spare me.

I was fascinated by the recent site updates. Two days ago, one of the notices on the site mentioned that Hitchens and fellow neo-Socialist Alexander Cockburn were planning to tour together to promote their respective new books. Today, when I read the notices, Cockburn's name was absent from the book tour notice. Hmmmm.... wouldn't have anything to do with Cockburn ripping the besotted Hitchens a new anus in his CounterPunch column, would it?

But the Guestbook was where the real action was. It had some notes from, you guessed it, Free Republic disciples, who have taken a shine to Hitch ever since they found out he did a Friend of Bill dirt. It reminded me of how they used to adore black writer Stanley Crouch, until he started attacking closet racists like Lott and Barr and Kirk Fordice.

Of course, I had to leave my own comments - the first set of which are as follows:

Record 94 Name: Tamara Baker Website: The Pledge for Free Inquiry Referred by: From a Friend From: St. Paul, Minnesota Time: 1999-02-11 17:37:50 Comments:

Dear Mr. Hitchens:

There are several questions I have for you, and they all begin with "Why?"... except for the last one, which is an "Is" question:

Why weren't you smart enough to realize - assuming that your friendship with Sid really meant anything to your martini-sodden brain - that when the House managers were trying to get you to vomit forth an affidavit (thank goodness that the three they got from you, wifey and your non-journalist buddy all contradict each other enough to make them useless), you could have just told them truthfully "sorry, I don't remember it clearly"? You obviously didn't, to judge from the wild inconsistency of even the dates given for the alleged March luncheon.

Why didn't you tell the House managers that this alleged conversation, since it allegedly took place long after the first 'stalker' tales went public, would not have helped their cause one iota?

Why, if you have claimed that the saddest thing about Monicagate was what was being done to your friend Sidney, did you aid the very folks who have been attacking him?

Is your hatred of Bill Clinton so irrationally strong that you would cold-bloodedly set your friend in harm's way?

I wonder if I'll get a response. And whether or not it'll be a Freeper that responds.