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Worst Week inWashington
The Fix’s
By Chris Cillizza
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SUNDAY,MAY 30, 2010
A man at work on his own mythology
hitchens from B1
used condoms. (Reader: I lived there. Three very, very long years.) He was the son of a failed midranking officer in the Royal Navy and a far-too-chic Mummy, ex- otically named Yvonne. He adored Yvonne, and she him. She hid her family’s Jewishness from him and his brother, and even from her husband, the commander. And she issued two memorable edicts: “The one unforgivable sin is to be boring,” was the one that took. The other, touch- ingly, was, “If there’s going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.” To that end, the Hitch- enses scrimped to send their blue-eyed boy to a “public” school — actually a stolid Methodist outpost unheard of by the smart “Brideshead Revisited” set. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Methodists sing the very best hymns, and perhaps helped inflect the author’s rolling prose.)
CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY IMAGES
I
t’s an unofficial rule of official Washington: When something goes wrong with an arm of the government, someone you have never heard of must be sacrificed to show the press corps that
Action Is Being Taken. Meet Elizabeth Birnbaum. Until Thursday, she was the little-known director of a little-known bureau within the Interior Department known as the Minerals Man- agement Service. The MMS is tasked with overseeing “the nation’s natural gas, oil and other mineral resources on the outer continental shelf,” according to its mission statement. By dint of that role, Birnbaum was the government’s top oil regula-
tor, and given the environmental disaster surrounding the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, hers was the head that had to roll. In typical Washington fashion, however, it wasn’t clear whether she jumped or was pushed. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar —whose own job, President Obama said at a news conference Thursday, is safe— praised Birnbaum as a “strong and effective person and lead- er” and said she resigned on her own. Or not. White House officials were quick to note that she had been forced out of the post — although she was given the option to work somewhere else in the administration and turned it down. Regardless, Birnbaum became the first sacrificial lamb for an ad-
ministration desperately working to regain control of the political narrative of the oil spill.
Compared with Birnbaum, Worst Week contenders such as D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray (he cut funds for the city’s planned streetcar program, then put them back following a public outcry) and Redskins defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth (he was slapped with a $10 million paternity suit) pale in comparison. Elizabeth Birnbaum, because Obama was having a bad week, you had to have the Worst Week in Washington. Congrats, or something.
Have a candidate for the Worst Week in Washington? E-mail
chris.cillizza@
wpost.com with your nominees.
But then came Oxford. There, he was so busy inciting to riot that he scraped through with a third-class degree. Why does he hate Bill Clinton so much, consid- ering they barely brushed elbows? Mostly, he suspects that the former prez was the CIA’s snitch on American hell-raisers there. “Hitch-22” (ghastly title) is a fat and
juicy memoir of a fat and juicy life, top- ping 400 pages. As you plunge in for your Zelig-like wallow in the past century’s zeit- geist, you begin to shiver: My God, didn’t this guy leave anything out? Here’s the ter- rible and tragic 1973 suicide of his beloved Mummy, via pills, in an Athens hotel room with her dreary defrocked-vicar lover, vio- lently dead by his own hand. Here’s a cud- dle with a beau at boarding school. Here’s a dab of introspection on what some call his “bromance” with Amis. (Of course, he began to hate Martin’s father, the great au- thor Kingsley Amis, when Kingsley got old and boring. Good thing that won’t happen to him!) Here’s his charmless admission that he prefers American girls to English ones because they put out without a lot of upfront argle-bargle. Here are the sopho- moric word games played with his very highest-brow cronies, such as substituting the f-word for “love” in song titles. His artless self-revelations convey a cer- tain careless elan: “I find now that I can more or less acquit myself on any charge of having desired Martin [Amis] carnally. (My looks by then had in any case declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.)”
But the truth is, for the memoir of a
Trotskyite George Orwell worshiper, “Hitch-22” (ugh) has a humongous memo-
LOIS RAIMONDO/THE WASHINGTON POST
His mother told him that “the one unforgivable sin is to be boring,” and author Christopher Hitchens, right, has taken that to heart. His memoir dishes the dirt.
ry hole. Where’s his wife of eight years, Eleni Meleagrou? He dumped her in 1989, when she was pregnant with their second child, for the elegant Carol Blue, whom he’d met at an airport. Where’s his old Washington soulmate, former New Yorker writer and Clinton confidante “Cousin” Sidney Blumenthal, whom he accused of lying during the Clinton impeachment trial? It’s been said by unkind people that an honest politician is one who, once bought, stays bought. So is an honest journalist one who, once bamboozled, stays bamboo- zled? Call me naive — please! — but I’m floored that the great dirt-digger still clings to the certainty, peddled by Paul Wolfowitz and Ahmed Chalabi and long since discredited, that the late Saddam Hussein was unseated for his tyranny and his possession of weapons of mass de-
struction. Tyranny? Has Hitchens seen what we’re still sucking up to? Most ty- rants, of course, aren’t squatting atop a quarter of the world’s known oil reserves. Even Alan Greenspan wrote in his 2007 memoir that it was “politically inconven- ient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.” Maybe now that Hitchens is 60-some- thing and says he drinks “relatively care- fully,” he’ll run this one through his little gray cells one more time. By the way, “rela- tively carefully” to him is terribly spartan: just a Scotch and Perrier at lunchtime, fol- lowed by half a bottle of wine, and then the same again every evening. “Alcohol makes other people less te-
dious,” he observes. It does. Pour yourself a stiff one, fasten your seat belt and enjoy this bumpy but never boring ride.
bookworld@washpost.com
One solution for cleaner, abundant domestic energy is staring us in the face.
We know we need more reliable, domestic sources of energy.
And we have one.
Today, the U.S. has more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil, giving us generations of this clean, domestic energy source.
And a stable supply means stable markets. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the price of electricity from natural gas will remain stable for consumers over the next 25 years.
As Congress and the Administration look for ways toward a cleaner tomorrow, the answer is right here: America’s natural gas.
It’s the Natural Choice…now, and in the future.
www.anga.us
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