HITCHENS ON BILLY GRAHAM: I like Christopher Hitchens. He's a wonderful writer, and one of the few leftists who has been absolutely right about the threat of Islamic terrorism. But his latest "Nation" column, in which he uses nasty attacks on Billy Graham as a springboard to discuss the separation of church and state, is a bit overblown. To Hitchens, Graham is nothing but "a gaping and mendacious anti-Jewish peasant" who is an "avid bigot" and a "cheap liar" because of anti-Semitic comments he made in a private conversation with President Nixon 30 years ago. And then there's this incredibly nasty bit:

After all, in the National Cathedral after September 11 he was allowed in the presence of our country's elite to assert that all the murder victims were in paradise and happy to be there--a wild outburst of evil and stupidity that implicitly copies the fantasies of bin Laden.

You don't have to be an overly religious person to realize that there's a world of difference between comforting words uttered to ease the grief of those who lost loved ones in the most horrendous manner imaginable and a theology that sees murder and suicide as the highest religious calling. The former is a triumph of the human moral instinct; the latter is a debasement of it. I don't know what to make of this piece. It could be an outburst of Hitchens' well-known atheism, or it could be some shameless trawling for hits for "The Nation." The faith-based bloggers out there should have a field day with it.