Requiem for a Sycophant: a devasting "obituary" of Mr. Samgrass, by a former protege. The money quote:

D.C. has finally gotten to him. That must be the main explanation. Yes, there are other factors to consider, but the D.C. Beast frames and distorts the thinking. Few on the Beltway's A List fret about crushing other countries. They enjoy it. They like the view from atop the growing pile of bodies. Always have. You can't live among these types for 20-plus years without some of their madness infecting your brain. And I'm afraid this madness, and the verbiage that covers it, is becoming more evident in Christopher.

I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch. And in addition to all this, he's now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war.

In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast against Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with "Just you wait!" and other taunts, fully confident that once the U.S. took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets--with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern, and that he'd always said so. It's amazing that he'd dare state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it, you can say pretty much anything and the People Who Matter won't care.

[link via Atrios]
More pathetic, though, is the fact that Hitchens doesn't seem to care that the quality of his work has slipped, even though it effects his credibility not only on what he writes now, but what he wrote in the past. Anyone who dowdifies (or is it sullivanates)Paul Begala, here, or, even more recently, is unable to distinguish between John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer calls into question whether he was as careless fact-checking when his subject was Henry Kissinger or Mother Theresa. Or maybe the booze caught up with him.