Even cynical sots are not immune to Obama adoration disorder: Christopher is weak at the knees:

“We will restore science to its rightful place,” is intended, I have some reason to believe, to reinforce or underline the president’s emphasis on religious pluralism and on the inclusion (with a few days to go before the Darwin-Lincoln bicentennial) of the fast-growing number of “nonbelievers.” That this has already drawn fire from the vastly overrated black churches is a good sign in itself.

The president has a better grip on the English language than any of his living-memory predecessors, and it seems certain that he wrote at least 80 percent of this address himself. It’s nice to be able to hold people to claims that they have written rather than read, and I look forward to doing so.

Hitchens also has a better grip on the English language than most journalists; that doesn’t make what he says – however well he says it – correct; although he does get some things right, most notably Iraq.

Obama’s talk of “restoring science to its rightful place” would strike a religious chord in Hitchens even though science’s rightful place is really one of dependence on a metaphysic that Hitchens would deny.

Although  I had not pegged Hitchens as a nascent Obama apostle, it is a match made in Darwinian heaven: sterile, cringingly cool, conformist and devoid of significance.