Hitchens

Gotta love the guy. He calls out politicians for their feigned small town folkiness.

Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview. But still it goes on. Hence one's glee at the resulting helpings of custard.

and this priceless one:

Had John Edwards, who made John Mellencamp's song "Small Town" into his annoying campaign anthem, spent more quality time in the bright lights and the big city, he might not have fallen so abjectly for the first pickup line—"You are so hot"—tried on him by a desperate siren who was growing familiar when Jay McInerney was young.

Man, gonna miss this guy when the cancer takes him. There isn't another who thinks or writes like him.