I hate to praise Chris Hitchens...

But this is a riveting five minutes of television that lays aside all of this pretension that we have in our society that we're supposed to venerate anyone who simply says they're a man of the cloth, regardless of their deeds. There are very few people in America today who would have the fortitude to say this publicly, at least not among the class of those who are regularly allowed to speak on television. Credit where due.

HITCHENS: The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?

People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup. The whole consideration of this -- of this horrible little person is offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality, and who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men [...]

HITCHENS: How dare he say, for example, that the Antichrist is already present among us and is an adult male Jew, while, all the time, fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping anti-Semitic innuendoes into American politics, along with his friends Robertson and Graham? ... encouraging -- encouraging -- encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of was holy land to the people who already live there, undercutting and ruining every democratic and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God?

(CROSSTALK)

HITCHENS: This is -- this is -- he's done us an enormous, enormous disservice by this sort of demagogy.

We are a nation that has a large segment with receptiveness to demagogues, sadly. It's why we are where we are in the White House. And the invisibility cloak of faith - this piece of fabric that you can place around yourself and make yourself supposedly immune to any criticism. It's out of courtesy, we're told. So the biggest monsters walking the Earth, who pervert the minds of Americans too blinded by faith to know the difference, who use the authoritarian nature of the church to line their pockets and get rich off of wholly imaginary enemies they construct, end up being treated as the second coming of Mother Teresa because they decided to be a thief with a pulpit instead of a thief with a gun.

HITCHENS: ...the fact is that the country suffers, to a considerable extent, from paying too much, by way of compliment, to anyone who can describe themselves as a person of faith, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Chaucerian frauds, people who are simply pickpockets, who -- and frauds -- who prey on the gullible and...

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Do you believe he believed what he spoke?

HITCHENS: Of course not. He woke up every morning, as I say, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking, I have got away with it again. [...] Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man, and because of the absurd way that we credit anyone who can say they're a person of faith.

Jerry Falwell was a charlatan, and despite the fear to call a spade a spade, at least there are some with the courage to do it. Look, I don't like what Hitchens has become on the war, and I think he distorts and takes things on faith as much as any preacher to justify his absurdities on Iraq and the war on terror. Yes, he has a shtick which relies on being a contrarian for contrarian's sake. But in a way, there IS some internal consistency to what he's saying, which comes forward in his new book God Is Not Great It comes from a belief that religion has been used as a tool to confuse clear-minded people, to set them upon enemies they didn't know they had, and to incite them to hatred and violence. This is behind the adversarial nature of Hitchens' rhetoric against Islamic fundamentalism, and it's behind his vivisection of carnival barkers like Falwell. And it informs this crucial point that just saying you're close to God doesn't make it so.

HITCHENS: Look, the president endangers us this way. He meets a KGB thug like Vladimir Putin, and, because he is wearing a crucifix around his neck, says, I'm dealing with a man of faith. He's a man of goodwill.

Look what Putin has done to American and European interests lately. What has the president said to take back this absurd remark? It's time to stop saying that, because someone preaches credulity and credulousness, and claims it as a matter of faith, that we should respect them.

If a man can be credited for one vital contribution to the discourse, I would wish Hitchens' would be this idea that liturgy does not automatically communicate respect, rather than his less factual pronouncements about how America is such a beacon of freedom in the Middle East.