Given all the commotion over the past week or so, some of it right here on CounterPunch, you’d think that “rogue” journalist Caitlin Johnstone was the reincarnation of Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens made his fateful pact with the neocons of the Bush administration. Johnstone is now offering a tentative hand of solidarity to white nationalists. Johnstone has her clique of admirers, but she’s not yet in Hitchens’ class, either as a writer or a professional heretic.

I suppose many of you are too young to remember the Iraq War, but let’s recall that back in those hazy days of yore the neocons packed cruise missiles in their pockets, while the white nationalists (those who weren’t moonlighting as members of your local police department) were goose-stepping around with flaming torches, when they could afford the matches.

Waterboard me! Give me the Ludovico Technique with the Atlas Shrugged Trilogy playing on an endless loop! Anything, anything at all would be better than having to write about Caitlin Johnstone and the ongoing back-and-forth about her so called “journalism.” And yet, here I am, doing precisely that because, quite frankly, some things have to be put in print, no matter how execrable the task.

What follows is not an attempt to perform a close reading of Johnstone’s couple months-old oeuvre because, to be perfectly honest, there’s not much to read other than repetitious anti-Democratic Party talking points which are perfectly fine, if a bit boring and easy. I don’t have any problem at all with endlessly bashing Democrats, I’ve been doing precisely that since before Johnstone was writing books on astrology.