monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

It's not derailing anything, other than your wish to not hear anything about it. At some point, the Dems will have to try and reflect about what went wrong in the last elections. It's painful but it needs to be done.

He may look untidy but I wish all documentary makers were as precise and effective as he is. Edit: I also wish more would pay attention to what he says, as opposed to his look.

The Lies of Michael Moore: Unfairenheit 9/11

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery....

I ever quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible.

Hitchens as a young man was an ardent Trotskyist and a rabid anti-war crusader. He remained as such through his years as a writer at The New Statesman and when he moved to the States. He moved to the States as part of an editor-exchange between The New Statesman and The Nation.

At the leftist periodical, The Nation, he wrote scathingly against neo-con policies of then President Reagan, continuing to do such towards the George W. Bush administration -- he was adamantly opposed to the first Gulf War (Desert Storm).

With the election of Bill Clinton, who many considered liberal, Hitchens did not. He observed the neo-liberal policies of the Clinton administration as being pro-corporate business, and against the common citizen. He despised the welfare reform Clinton enacted and was beyond disgust with the Monica Lewinsky affair -- he claimed Clinton was a serial-rapist since his days as Governor of Arkansas.

But Hitchens pointed out the hypocrisy of the right-wing motive for prosecuting Clinton solely for political-gain. It is with the advent of the 9/11 terror attacks that the political views of Hitchens markedly change course. He remained liberal on social-issues, but at this time his views of foreign-policy changed. He was always a militant atheist. Feeling that the hypocrisy of fundamental-religion spawned nothing but ill for the world, 9/11 confirmed his convictions. Thus he wrote approvingly of the west's invasion of Afghanistan and cheered heartily for the eradication of the Islamic Taliban, and the terrorist group, Al Qaeda.

Hitchens' employment of the term "Islamofascist" and his support for the Iraq War caused his critics to label him a "neoconservative". Hitchens, however, refused to embrace this designation, insisting, "I'm not any kind of conservative." In the years after the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie in response to his novel The Satanic Verses, Hitchens became increasingly critical of what he called "excuse making" on the left. In 2005, Hitchens criticised the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Regardless, he was always a fool. I'm not too surprised you'd fall for him.