Sad confirmation of Christopher Hitchens' mental illness

In what could be the nadir of his writing since moving to the US - although you feel that he can outdo himself in rhetorical incoherence time and time again - Christopher Hitchens' column this week for Slate is a posturing, puffed up piece of armchair-warrior bravado and wishful historical reimagining that proves the lie of the arch-polemicist's supposed "concern" for the world's "decency" (his own, much abused, word).

Hitchens Watch and The Poor Man Institute offer decent enough dissections of his hooch-addled hoardings, but in essence the slipperiness of Hitchens' grip on both his sanity and his inner demons can be gleaned by the final line:

We could have been living in a different world, and so could the people of Iraq, and I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.

In a word: wow.

I truly hope that Hitch gets the best medical treatment available. Too many times in my visits to America, I have seen poor, crazed souls in piss-drenched rags scrounging through garbage cans or barking at passers-by. Mental illness is a horrible thing, especially in one whose mind was once so sharp, yet I fear our man in Washington has slipped into an abyss of paranoid delusion and violent fantasy. I genuinely fear for the audience at his next hack-rant "debate".