The best line I've seen about this: "That one's not a debate; it's a dwarf kicking contest.

"The outcome of this debate is going to be seen in ten years time. History will tell," said Pepe Lopez, an anti-war advertising executive. "Hitchens was wrong."

I'd say that instead Mr. Lopez will know how wrong he is ten years from now, if I wasn't quite certain that he will simply forget about all the apocalyptic stuff his kind have said about this conflict and move on to denouncing the next evil imperialistic war that benefits America.

OK, I've sat here indecisively for as long as I can bear: did you mean to say "ice axe", or are you trying to tweak Galloway about the size of his ... ?

One can easily make a perfectly rational argument for that it is worth a fair number of Brit and American lives to save Iraqis.

And faith-based arguments have been made otherwise.

Your point is?

Or, to get back to your wish that America had not gotten into a world War II and fought the Nazis:

There's a perfectly rational argument to be made that no number of dead Europeans (Russians, Germans, British, etc.) is worth a single American life, but it's nothing more than rational and, consequently, quite despicable.

Anon:

To the contrary, destroying Nazism and Bolshevism in the 30s/40s would have been worth many American lives. It was the rational calculus that one was better than the other that was despicable.

Jeff:

No, they haven't.

Who ever said one was better than the other?

We did--it was the premise of our participation in the war.

FDR sure seemed to think so.

And Churchill was quite blunt about being willing to help the Devil.

Mr. Paker;

Given that Hitchens is a former Trostkyite, I suspect the allusion is to this particular item.

One can listen to the debate here -
http://kpftx.org/#galloway
I suggest you also listen to the opening comments as they feature a quite hilarious collection of anti-war cranks and loonies all of whom sound like chronic drug abusers.

OJ:

Hard to see how the Soviet Union wasn't better from Churchill's point of view -- Hitler's Germany was an immediate threat to his nation's existence, the USSR wasn't.

Shelton:

Link doesn't work, at least for me. Please repost -- I want to hear this!

Not sure why the hl doesn't work - type the address into your browser and it should take you there -

http://kpftx.org/#galloway

Matt:

No it wasn't.

Shelton:

Thanks for the link. Listening to it makes me think perhaps a lucid guy like Hitchens never should've agreed to step into the ring with a demagogic reprobate like Galloway, whose style of delivery (loud, pounding declarations, etc.) strikes me as eerily similar to Hitler's.

OJ:

I too don't think the Nazis would've pulled off a cross-channel invasion -- neither did Churchill -- but I could be wrong and in any case Britain was directly at war with one of those nations and not with the other.

One more thing: It is absolutely...pick a word: disgusting, appalling, repulsive...that a guy who has explicitly supported barbaric terrorists and their enablers in the Arab world repeatedly received tumultuous applause on Wednesday night from the citizens of the city which took the greatest hit on 9/11.

Also freakishly amusing, in the sense that conservatives enjoy watching leftists loudly endorse policies which if implemented would bring down the darkness on everything they value.

AOG,

Yes, of course, but--is there anywhere in the US where that implement is called "ice pick" rather than "ice axe"? That's my question--perhaps OJ is just being to anglophilic.

Kirk: This is an ice pick. It is a tool for making small pieces of ice out of big blocks of ice in order to cool drinks. This is an ice axe. It is a tool for climbing ice.