Galloway-Hitchens: This time its personal

Well tonight's the big night. No, really it is. I'm sure of it.

George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens will be debating Iraq tonight at Baruch College, and your intrepid reporter will be there in one of the front rows. Which means I'll be taking a trash bag, because I expect the intellectual pugilism to be something akin to sitting in the front rows at a Gallagher performance (I've been waiting for months to make a Gallagher reference).

In any case, Hitchens stokes the pre-debate fires in Slate. Here are a couple of snippets to give you a sense as to where this might be headed.

Thus, and thanks in part to Eve and Jane[Fonda], the "anti-war" movement has as its new star a man who is openly pro-war, but openly on the other side. A man who supported the previous oppressors of the region—the Soviet army in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq—who supports its current oppressors—Bashar Assad and his Lebanese proxies—and who still has time to endorse its potential future tyrants in the shape of the jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere. Galloway began his political life as a fifth-rate apologist for the Soviet Union, but he has now diversified into being an apologist for Stalinism, for fascism, and for jihadism all at once! All this, and Jane, too. One's cup runs over.

But it's not just on the issues where one finds the enmity. It's personal. Hitchens continues

Galloway's preferred style is that of vulgar ad hominem insult, usually uttered while a rather gaunt crew of minders stands around him. I have a thick skin and a broad back and no bodyguards. He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a "popinjay" (true enough, since its original Webster's definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest). In a recent interview he made opprobrious remarks about the state of my midriff, which I will confess has—as P.G. Wodehouse himself once phrased it—"slipped down to the mezzanine floor." In reply I do not wish to stoop. Those of us who revere the vagina are committed to defend it against the very idea that it is a mouth or has teeth. Study the photographs of Galloway from Syrian state television, however, and you will see how unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks. Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.

Yeah, this is going to be brutal. You can listen tonight at 7PM EDT here.