Christopher Hitchens, a serious man of letters, has debased himself with a cheap stunt best left to the nobodies of YouTube and CNN. He submits himself for a little waterboarding vid. Watch the video for yourself and you will gag. Why must this towering intellectual fall for this sweeps-week-Fear-Factor trick. I hope he got some extra dough or nice bottle of booze for this.

I get his point. But his point has been made long before he decided to put on the black hood and get the sensation of drowning. A roll call on YouTube suggests this is old news. Are we to believe that the middle-aged-Lexus-driving readership of Vanity Fair is still on the fence about waterboarding? Are they the last to understand what happens during this procedure?