Hitchens update on the Galloway debate...

I don't know if you watched or listened to the Hitchens-Galloway debate...but I thought Hitchens destroyed Galloway. Here's an update to the debate from Hitchen.

Thanks to all who wrote to take my side after the debate last Wednesday. I wasn't actually on very good form and was feeling a bit hot and, after awhile, a bit sick. For example, when told I was a butterfly who had metamorphosed back into a slug, I ought to have been able to summon lepidopteral correctness and reply that butterflies pupate from sturdy, furry caterpillars. But others did notice this for me—and a man who can't tell a slug from a caterpillar is liable to miss the difference between an Iraqi dictatorship and an Iraqi democracy.

I don't know how Galloway felt, but he failed to show up two nights later when we were billed to appear on Canadian television, and he has since had Jane Fonda cancel her two promised appearances with him in Madison and Chicago this week. She claims to be recovering from hip surgery, and I hope she feels better soon, but I know she didn't have hip surgery between the time the debate was transmitted and the time she bailed.

On Galloway's oil-for-food arrangements, I shall be offering updates on www.hitchensweb.com.

There was some question of security in the hall on Wednesday, with the audience being subjected to metal detectors, but my advance complaint to the organizers was about someone who was already safely inside the premises. George Galloway has a press officer named Ron McKay, who is just about as fastidious as his boss. Here is what he said, as transmitted by the BBC current affairs program Newsnight, when another of Galloway's business ventures was being investigated by a reporter named Richard Watson. Watson received the following telephone call, broadcast to BBC viewers on June 25, 1998:

McKay: "Turn on your tape-recorder because he's having a hard time from ***** like you and, really, enough is enough. I'll come and see you after you do your *****"

Watson: "What do you mean by that?"

McKay: "I think you know what I mean."

Watson: "Well, what do you mean?"

McKay: "I'll fill you in."

Watson: "Come off it.

McKay: "Oh no. I'm serious. Absolutely serious. Check my record, check my record."

In British slang, to "fill you in" means to give you a hard beating. McKay, in any case, was obviously not offering to fill gaps in Watson's knowledge. And yes, I have checked McKay's record, and I quite see what he must have meant. It's not only in Iraq and Syria that Galloway gravitates to the company of thugs.