After twenty-odd years at the liberal weekly, his first gig in the states, Hitch departed acrimoniously in 2002, after contentious disagreements with editor Katha Pollitt and others over the war in Iraq (he was for it, as you may recall). In his last column, he wrote that the magazine "is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."