Christopher Hitchens …

. . . picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been. / Lives in a dream, / wearing a face that he keeps just for Vanity Fair.

Ah, me. Christopher is an old acquaintance, and the most fluid writer around today, but some years ago he oddly decided to take the hackneyed pose of the journaliste maudit , a Robert G. Ingersoll for our time, bashing, like most everyone else in his world, the great juggernaut of God.

His latest seems to be a rant on the Dennis Miller show :

Mother Teresa spent her whole life saying [that what Calcutta needs] is a huge campaign against family planning. I mean, who comes to that conclusion who isn’t a complete fanatic? She took—and I would directly say stole . . . millions and millions of dollars and spent all the money not on the poor, but on the building of nearly 200 convents in her own name around the world to glorify herself and to continue to spread the doctrine that, as she put it—when she got her absurd Nobel Peace Prize—that the main threat to world peace is abortion and contraception. The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your [w]itch to go to.

He’s attacked Mother Teresa before, of course, but this is so over the top—so bizarre and self-righteous, so offensively phrased and incoherently thought—that it’s hard to know quite how to take it.

As a plea for help, is my first guess.