McDonald’s had better sign me up for an advertising campaign, because I am loving it. Newsweek, having mysteriously overlooked my previous work, has just reviewed Unhitched. Newsweek is massive; therefore I am massive. Fuck Bono. Fuck Bob Geldoff. The next Live 8 is hosted by me. And what a review. It is the most deliciously splenetic fanboy tribute to unreasoning hysteria that it has ever been my pleasure to gloat about. I wasn’t prepared for an opportunity like this, but I won’t pass it up all the same.

This reviewer, like every reviewer of Unhitched in the liberal media thus far, outs himself as a votary of the Hitchens personality cult. “Hitchens was a friend, mentor and neighbor of mine,” he writes, as if to reassure the reader of his objectivity in this matter. He is also, in the interests of fuller disclosure, a neoconservative writer for the Weekly Standard — just the sort of bargain basement intellectual company that Hitchens kept in his last decade. If Unhitched is written in the style of a “prosecution,” this review is an indictment.

What am I charged with? In a series of increasingly shrill non-sequiturs, I am condemned for every seditious affront to empire ever confected: anti-Americanism, apologia for the bad guys, sympathy for the devil, etc. For example, I have placed myself “on the side of the late and unlamented Argentine military junta,” because I deemed the British war an imperialist one. Oh, well. Sorry about that. For no obvious reason, I am also deemed to believe that “a noble anti-imperialism inevitably arises out of anti-Americanism,” whatever the latter term means. Again, duly chastened.