padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
personally I'll never be able to get past that video of him being waterboarded for 15 seconds while a trip hop version of O Fortuna inexplicably plays in the background.
always found his Norman Mailer-lite bad boy persona tiresome/ridiculous and thought his supposed intellectual honesty vastly overrated, as if he were the first dude ever to move to the right as he aged. his latter year empire apologetics were/are pretty appalling. OTOH he was quite a lot more interesting than most of his pundit peers, and his embrace of the role of public intellectual (whether or not he actually was one) was admirable in a society that is highly, and as the years go by increasingly, anti-intellectual. plus he gets bonus points for things like being willing to publicly call bullshit on Mother Theresa. and for sticking to his guns about God, or lack thereof, until the bitter end.
reckon his punishment for his sins will to be remembered primarily as a neocon mouthpiece for Iraq, which I'm sure he would hate.
always found his Norman Mailer-lite bad boy persona tiresome/ridiculous and thought his supposed intellectual honesty vastly overrated, as if he were the first dude ever to move to the right as he aged. his latter year empire apologetics were/are pretty appalling. OTOH he was quite a lot more interesting than most of his pundit peers, and his embrace of the role of public intellectual (whether or not he actually was one) was admirable in a society that is highly, and as the years go by increasingly, anti-intellectual. plus he gets bonus points for things like being willing to publicly call bullshit on Mother Theresa. and for sticking to his guns about God, or lack thereof, until the bitter end.
reckon his punishment for his sins will to be remembered primarily as a neocon mouthpiece for Iraq, which I'm sure he would hate.