Little to add tonight, other than thanks to anyone that's reading. I know that last night's post was a bit scattershot, but I was trying to do two books in two hours. To review: these two guys, Hitchens and Amis, are good buddies, two of Britain's most influential political cultural minds, and they're getting pissy with each other. Despite this supposed polarization though, these guys are shoulder to shoulder on their approach to war on terror. This week's pudding of proof:

Amis quoted in today's New York Times:

This week another British novelist, Martin Amis, was quoted as telling The Times of London that "it seems to me that the key to radical Islam is that it is quivering with male insecurity." And he added, "There's a huge injection of sexuality — men's sexuality — in radical Islam."

Hitch in Sunday's Washington Post:

In the Balkans, those on the Left and Right who favored intervention could not live with the idea that Europe would permit the extermination of its oldest Muslim minority. At that point, the sensibilities of Islam did not seem to matter to the Ramsey Clarks and Noam Chomskys, who thought and wrote of national-socialist and Orthodox Serbia as if it were mounting a gallant resistance to globalization. (Saddam, of course, took Milosevic's side even though the Serb leader was destroying mosques and murdering Muslims.)

Now, however, the same people are all frenzied about an American-led "attack on the Muslim world." Are the Kurds not Muslims? Is the new Afghan government not Muslim? Will not the next Iraqi government be Muslim also?

My point, for tonight, is that people are acting as if these men's argument matters, when in fact these guys are two right-of-center peas in a pod on this, this, and this: the only issues that matter today. And these are our one-time contrarians.

Much as I feel strange siding with an anti-war protester, this guy's quote from NYT story about upcoming protests is something Hitch and Amis (and all the men and women that have moved in the same direction as them) can't answer:

``The Vietnam War was started on a lie, and we contend the Bush administration is lying when it says Iraq presents a threat to the world, and to this country,'' he said. ``We will show in numbers that (President) George (W.) Bush is not speaking for the vast majority of people when he goes to war in Iraq.''

More to come, hopefully better written.