Hitchens:

Yet to the chief of the British defense staff, the marvelously named Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, it was somehow self-evident that the lad had to be evacuated from the scene—and with all speed at that—just as soon as Matt Drudge revealed not his whereabouts but his mere presence.

Well, at least his mother didn’t name him that.

If you don’t feel like reading a ton of Balkan history, Christopher Hitchens distills what you need to know about Kosovo and delivers it in his inimitable polemic style:

In fact, Kosovo has never been recognized internationally as part of Serbia. It was only ever recognized as part of Yugoslavia, and with the liquidation of that state Serbian claims upon its territory became null and void. A little history here is necessary.

During the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, the then-distinct kingdom of Serbia, with some regional allies, did manage to invade and annex a formerly Ottoman territory that had been the scene of a Serbian military defeat in—wait for it—1389. (In that year, England was laying emotional claims to large and beautiful areas of France.)

As most things Hitchens, the essay’s worth reading in its entirety. If you’re hungry for more Balkanalia after you’re done, whip out your wallet and pay Noel Malcolm. Though it’s a short history, don’t go expecting it to be particularly “lite”—it’s a solid, well sourced book written by an academic (not a sloppy prejudiced screed scribbled by some hack journalist).

I’m a fan of Obama and am pleased he’s doing well. If nothing else, it’s pleasing to finally have a candidate in the race who’s thoughtful and intelligent. If the nation could elect Bush twice because they felt they could comfortably watch NASCAR with him, I’m glad that there’s a possibility that we might elect a president with whom I could watch The Wire.

That said, I loved Hitchens’ latest deflation of the national craze. The final sentence of the essay summarizes exquisitely:

The Iowa caucuses of 2008 were not the end of our long national nightmare about race, but another stage in our protracted national nightmare of piety, “uplift,” and deceptive optimistic windbaggery.

Ouch. It hurts because it’s true. Read the whole thing.

Hitchens is in his obituary best. Apparently, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is a bad novel. That sounds about right.

I do want to look up this 12 page “heroic struggle to bring a stubborn woman to orgasm.” Nice bedtime read. If it’s online somewhere, I’ll link to it here.

EDIT: Here’s one description:

What is one to make, for instance, of the shocking story ”The Time of Her Time”? It recounts a sexual encounter between the narrator (Mailer in the guise of an Irishman named Sergius O’Shaugnessy) and Denise Gondelman, a middle-class ”Jewish girl” in her third year at New York University. Denise, though sexually experienced, has never reached orgasm, never lost her ”final virginity.” It takes three sexual encounters, an act of sodomy and a touch of Jewish self-hatred (Denise’s and perhaps Mailer’s as well) before she finally arrives at ”her time.”

Sounds promising.

EDIT 2: It gets better and better:

He constructed absurd melodramas of sexual conquest and then cast himself as their inevitable hero. His ubiquitous descriptions of sex are wince-makingly embarrassing. In “The Time of Her Time,” for example—a fictional sketch that concludes *Advertisements for Myself* and of which Mailer was particularly proud—the hero refers to his penis as “the avenger” and is taken to saying things like “For her, getting it from me, it must have been impressive.”

Off I go to Borders. This stuff is comedy gold.