Hitchens is well read (especially by the standards of journalism) and there is almost a mania for quotation and learned allusion. I don't know whether this is simply his temperament or whether he's trying to play the sophisticated Brit for the folks in Kansas, but if you do the scholar strut, you've got to get it right. 

The phrase pecunia non olet doesn't come from Juvenal, but from Vespasian. That an old Trot doesn't know where the term permanent revolution comes from is sad (no, it's not Parvus). Hitchens, in his enthusiasm for Portugal, writes: "In Portuguese bullfights, the bull is not tortured or killed." It's funny, but in the Portuguese bullfight I watched, the bull had these javelin-like objects stuck into him (perhaps they had slipped the bull a powerful anaesthetic beforehand). I could go on.

Hitchens's career has been largely based on his tendency to fire his ire at targets of unrighteousness, to be a writer of wrongs. He does offer one or two mea culpas in regard to his judgment (he really has no choice in the matter: who is this dashing, secular go-getter called Saddam Hussein?). So Hitchens brings in a line from Keynes, that when facts change maybe your opinion should too. But in Hitchens's track record, it's not that surprising new facts have emerged; he was simply wrong. 

Hitchens still refers to the American involvement in Vietnam as "imperialist". Condemn the war all you want as stupid, brutal, unjust or even evil, but it's just idiotic to suggest that the Americans lost 50,000 lives and billions of dollars because they wanted a captive market for Coca-Cola and to get their hands on some cut-price bamboo. Similarly the Viet Cong are characterised as "valiant', a strange epithet for a group who gleefully liquidated anyone who disagreed with them, much in the way that the religious fanatics of whom Hitchens so disapproves do. But then, God bless them, the Viet Cong were secular.

This is, finally, the great boon of being a media gadfly, you have all the joy of condemnation, without any of the tiresome business of responsibility. Hitchens might have occasionally left his armchair and incommoded himself in some godforsaken dumps and risked his neck in hazardous regions, but it was for the purpose of getting copy and not distributing medical supplies.

It's like being a critic, you can poke fun and carp, without the labour of creation. Indignation is the best business to be in because you look so good, so pumped up on ethics, garlanded with fragrant morality as you slate others for the paucity of their principles or their low behaviour. And then if some of those you sympathised with, say Saddam or Mugabe and his cronies, let you down, you can always turn the indignation on them and earn some more money.