Christopher Hitchens on I.F. Stone

Finished reading Christopher Hitchens' piece on I.F. Stone in Vanity Fair. It's a review of Myra MacPherson's biography All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone.

Hitchens deserves praise for a balanced assessment of Stone, applauding the man for defying McCarthy and criticizing him for supporting Communism (among other transgressions). "But in point of fact and interpretation," Hitchens writes, "he was naïve about the Soviet Union for most of his life (dying just as it was about to do so itself, in 1989), mistaken about the Korean War, simplistic about both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and unable to see the diminishing returns of the New Deal tradition."

Hitchens finds broader significance in Stone's style. "Even the slightest piece written by Izzy was composed with a decent respect for the King's English and usually contained at least one apt allusion to the literature and poetry and history that undergirded it: an allusion that he would expect his readers to recognize," Hitchens writes.

Also, I've begun writing (and drawing) for the AOL Elections 2006 blog. Check it out!