Can you remember if Hitchens EVER wrote an obit that reflected its target in a positive light? He basically spit on the graves of Mother Theresa and Bob Hope, so what he wrote about Reagan is not too surprising. Frankly, when Hitchens goes, we should commission Ann Coulter to write his obit. That is, if he is even a large enough figure that deserves somewone writing any type of obit about him - which is up for debate at this point.

What an ugly piece, typical of Hitchens. What bothers me about this piece is what usually bothers me about Hitchens. He's the intellectual equivalent of Kitty Kelly. He takes nasty rumors and speaks them as fact. And he uses a "I'm so very smart" tone that those of the Left, who desperately want to to be seen as having higher IQs than any one else, eat it up. It's the same trick Gore Vidal uses. All these people do is write. Let's see them make the kind of difficult decisions a president has to make and then we'll know how brilliant they truly are.

I agree about Hitchens' tone. I'm not so sure, though, that he writes for "those of the Left" anymore.

When writing about Bill Clinton or Al Gore he could easily be confused for David Bossie or Sean Hannity. "The Left" came to despise Hitchens long ago. He's worse than a right-winger, he's a turncoat and has been for many years now.

For a number of years now he has been a darling of "The Right", not "The Left". I have a feeling that honeymoon may be over.

Indeed, RR is the most over-rated president in history.

He's the GOP's stand-in for Roosevelt and they maintain that he won the Cold War. It's an absurd claim and an insult to every person who served in the U.S. military or paid taxes. The fact is, the U.S. didn't win the Cold War so much as the Communists and doctrinaire incompetence lost it. It was the same doctrinaire incompetence that resulted in Chernobyl, where the Soviets actually 'nuked' themselves. That was the beginning of the end, when the Soviet people realized that the greatest danger of nuclear attack wasn't from the West, but from their own third-rate nuclear technology and the retrograde political system that produced it. The Soviet Union was never in danger of a first strike nuclear attack from the U.S. They did, however, succeed in bombing themselves. The Soviet Union collapsed from pressure within, not any external threat. Their economy was a shambles and they couldn't even feed their people. Ronald Reagan's Star-Wars program had nothing to do with it.

The best appraisal of Reagan's legacy I've read is at http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/060704A.shtml