Judith, members of the local chapter of "muscular liberals" and I are planning to attend the Galloway-Hitchens debate tonight. It's the New York leg of Galloway's buy me a new Mercedes tour. Many of Galloway's anti-capitalist defenders will be there too. It should be fun.

I'm going to be one of the official Harry's Place leafletters handing out Gene's union-bug-produced selection of irredeemably appalling George Galloway quotes. If you're in the area, come and get a copy.

Hitch has a preview of the debate here:

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.

It's funny because its true.

Levity aside, from everything I've heard about Galloway, he sounds like a classic totalitarian. Given enough money encouragement from his "anti-war" brownshirts, I'm sure he could achieve his dreams. He's even got the moustache for the job.

During a discussion about Yehudit's post at Winds of Change, one of Galloway's anti-war fans said this about the choice between war and genocide:

I am not so much assessing the relative demerits of genocide v. war. I am contrasting the facts that whilst both Stalinism and Fascism created mass casualities, Stalinism at least did it primarily at home whereas Fascism exported.

This anti-war activist believed that the fact that Stalin slaughtered millions of his own people forgave or excused genocide. He accepted without question the idea that a dictator owns the lives of his people. I wonder how many other Galloway supporters feel the same way?

Of Galloway's supporters, Hitch says:

Thus, and thanks in part to Eve and Jane, 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.

Report coming soon - with pictures if I can manage to juggle the leaflets and my camera.