'Welcome to the Party, Pal'

There's a rather unpleasant public spat going on between two fine wordsmiths, Christopher Hitchens and Juan Cole. The disagreement began over their respective views on the relative toxicity of Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who has made Israel bashing a cottage industry while determinedly building a nuclear program.

As Tigerhawk notes here, the disagreement degenerated into a no-holds-barred slugfest, with Hitchens accusing Cole of being soft on terrorism and intellectually dishonest (ouch!) and Cole accusing Hitchens of being a blathering idiot who hits the sauce (double ouch!).

This prompted the following comment by a reader of Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish:

It's alleged that Hitchens has a drinking problem. If so, perhaps you'd be kind enough to pass on specifics regarding his daily intake, so I can emulate. Though I don't always agree with him, I have nothing but admiration for someone who can knock out a weekly Slate column, an erudite review for the Atlantic each month, a longer, bimonthly piece for Vanity Fair and a book a year. I'm a journalist, and I just spent a week laboring over a relatively straightforward 1,200-word essay (on wine, coincidentally.) But I'm obviously not drinking the right stuff.

Me too. The last time I spoke with Hitchens, I tossed him one of those dreaded three-part questions (about Iraq), which he parried adeptly and answered in detail and at great length.

And, I should add, soberly.

Wretchard at the Belmont Club takes the long view:

When I used to write anonymously only my arguments mattered. If they were persuasive they persuaded; if they were ridiculous they were held up to contempt. But there were no hard feelings because it was the arguments themselves that bore the weight of both praise and opprobrium. There was no ego to puff up or to be bruised. If an argument achieved fame it did so on its own terms and took wing of its own into the wide world. Nor was there much incentive, even among the ideologically hostile, in heaping abuse upon a pseudonym. It was too faceless to hate.

All that changes with bylined blogging. All of a sudden Cole has a vision of Hitchens -- the actual Hitchens -- swilling liquor from a bottle when he defends himself. And Hitchens, with or without the bottle, has a vision of Professor Cole's face before him, and all it represents, as he crafts his reply. And there is something feral in the resulting spectacle. It were better they were X and Y arguing over whether [Iraqi PM] Ahmadinejad actually threatened to wipe Israel off the map. But it's too late now. The innocent days of blogging are over. With popularity comes talk of ad revenues, syndication, appearances and reputation. It used to be that no one on the Internet knew if you were a dog. Sadly, no longer. And now, as the Bruce Willis character said in Die Hard, "welcome to the party pal."

Now I'll drink to that.