What's gotten in to Christopher Hitchens?

Christopher Hitchens has always been a reliably-leftist writer whose prose is enjoyable even if his conclusions are often questionable. Lately, however, Hitchens seems to be engaging the left much more frequently, and it's upsetting the equilibrium of the scribal community.

In Bush's secularist triumph Hitchens upbraids the left for being AWOL in the war on terror.

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Robert Ingersoll* or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without.

I have to admire Hitchens' honesty and praise his acuity.

If only more on the left had his sagacity.