I’m not as besotted with Chris Hitchens as many of my friends are, but Chris Caldwell mounts the most compelling argument about his merits:

His writing calls to mind something the Australian literary critic Clive James once wrote about the correspondence of Evelyn Waugh: that Waugh’s were the last great collection of letters we would see “unless the telephone is uninvented.” Hitchens is the last great practitioner of a literary journalism that was still robust in our lifetimes — it lingered into the 1980s at the Spectator in London — but is vanishing in the Internet age.

Over at the Standard I’ve got a medium-sized piece on President Obama’s vanity. There’s nothing really new in–it’s mostly a compendium of stuff we’ve all seen for the last two years, but tied together and in one place. Mind you, it’s an incomplete list. And the catalogue keeps growing.

Mentioning the piece, Scott Johnson adds a few bits, my favorite being that Obama’s vanity “almost disposes of the speculation that Obama is a Muslim. The man can’t be a Muslim; he worships himself.” Scott also notes a line from Obama in India about the Mahatma, MLK, and, well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But here’s Scott: “Obama gives us history in the form of an arc bending inevitably toward himself.”

The Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez also adds a much more literate and philosophical riff, contrasting Obama’s sense of self with that of Churchill, who was never bashful about his own merits:

Both men saw themselves as agents of greatness. Where they differed was where they ascribed its source.  That and the fact that Lincoln and Churchill have already achieved that mantle of greatness which Obama so confidently believes is his. In the case of Lincoln and Churchill their presentiments are confirmed by the fact that they fulfilled them. They have already walked the walk. And now we see the talk was true. In the president’s case his claims have not yet been confirmed by events. . . .

It may be that his presentiment will prove true, though perhaps he  should have waited until those events actually took place before claiming the due. But that would have been for lesser men, for minds less certain of their powers. And the central point of Jonathan Last’s entire essay was that for Barack Obama, destiny shone so clearly before him that he could touch it and hold it in his hand.  And therein lies the danger. For if fate can promise, it can also betray.  The three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth knew that some things should only be reckoned in the end.

And the great Jennifer Rubin teases out some of the implications of Obama’s vanity-driven administration:

the colossal failure of his international endeavors, specifically his Muslim Outreach, is traceable to the faulty notion that one can construct a nation’s foreign policy based on the persona of its president. It sounds daft — why would the Israelis and Palestinian simply reach a deal because Obama has arrived on the scene? Why would the mullahs be enticed to curb their nuclear and hegemonic ambitions because he allegedly ”understands” the Muslim World? The Ego has made hash out of foreign policy because he believes, as the saying goes, that the world revolves around him. He can’t imagine that rivals, foes, and allies are immune to his charms.

Among the anecdotes I left out was a scene I witnessed at an Obama campaign rally before the Nevada caucus in 2008. Michelle Obama was introducing her husband to a crowded school cafetorium (?) and she said made a very concerted point of the following: “Barack is one of the smartest men we will see in our lifetime.”

Now look, many (most?) wives have idealized visions of their husbands. This is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s quite good. And perhaps even necessary for the survival of the species. But it’s one thing to think that your spouse is better looking, or more charming, or more intelligent than he really is. And it’s another to insist–to a room full of people–that he’s a Stephen Hawking-level genius. Even if we were to stipulate that Barack Obama is really, really, really smart–maybe the smartest guy ever in American politics (which, by the by, is almost certainly not true), you could walk into the cafeteria at MIT right now, swing a bat, and knock over three people who have 20 IQ points on him.

Exit question: The piece came out online Saturday morning. What’s the over-under on the “uppity” charge? Tuesday?

PS: I may update this thread through the day.

Update 7:02: A reader passes along this fantastic bit from a 2004 Ryan Lizza profile of Obama in the Atlantic:

I couldn’t help noticing, when we sat down to talk in the dilapidated storefront that houses his Springfield campaign headquarters, that the blue-pen drawing he’d doodled on his newspaper during fundraising calls was a portrait of himself.

His name was Col. Lewis Millett. You won’t believe how awesome he was.

There’s lots more military porn where that came from. Sample description of Maj. Brian Chontosh:

Serving as a platoon commander during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, his platoon became caught in the kill zone of an ambush. Without hesitation, he directed his Humvee directly at the enemy machine gun fire, then dismounted his vehicle and attacked the enemy trench, emptying his M16 and 9mm pistol of ammunition, then twice picking up discarded enemy AK-47s to continue his attack, then picking up an enemy rocket-propelled grenade launcher to finish his counter-assault. He singlehandedly killed 20 Iraqis and wounded several while clearing 200 meters of trench line.

It’s not often that something in our world looks like The Future. Via WWTDD, this is one of those times: Meet Hatsune Miku.

It’s like that bad S1m0ne movie. Only creepier. By a lot.

(Where are the tentacles? You know they’re coming.)

Zadie Smith threads the needle perfectly with this NYRB piece about Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network. Not to be missed.

How good is it? This good: Here’s Smith talking about trying to “delete” her Facebook profile,

When I finally decided to put a stop to it, once and for all, I was left with the question bothering everybody: Are you ever truly removed, once and for all? In an interview on The Today Show, Matt Lauer asked Zuckerberg the same question, but because Matt Lauer doesn’t listen to people when they talk, he accepted the following answer and moved on to the next question: “Yeah, so what’ll happen is that none of that information will be shared with anyone going forward.”

There are other deep thoughts:

It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

Remember the Ciroy program and “Have a Nice Death?”

Writing a regular op-ed column is hard. It’s there every week, waiting for you, unremitting. You can’t hide your bad stuff and even your best stuff disappears after 48 hours. More than any other kind of writing you have to cling to the dictum that they can’t all be home runs. (Though during his golden era, George Will had a slugging percentage of something like .863. He was ungodly.)

The only thing you can control completely is your effort. You shouldn’t mail it in. And if you are being lazy, you should at least make an effort to hide it.

Maureen Dowd has just written her second column in two months in which she basically gives the space over to one of her siblings.

My buddy Stephen Hayes undresses Mark Levin. Not for the faint of heart.

Levin responds! He says that it was just stomach cramps and that he’s as eager for a fight as ever.