On Tim Russert, Hitchens said to Sullivan: "Oh, well don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it"

Summary: On MSNBC's Tim Russert, responding to Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan said, "And now you've made me forget my second point," to which Hitchens replied, "Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it."

On the April 5 edition of MSNBC's Tim Russert, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens debated the significance for Sen. Barack Obama of comments made by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright about a trip Wright took with Louis Farrakhan to Libya in 1984. When Sullivan said, "And now you've made me forget my second point," Hitchens interjected: "Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it."

As Media Matters for America noted, during a subsequent segment on the same show, Hitchens asserted of certain of Sen. Hillary Clinton's actions: "I just think that if she knew how it made her look, sort of alternately soppy and bitchy, she'd stop it. But she can't help herself, can she? She just can't."

From the April 5 edition of MSNBC's Tim Russert:

SULLIVAN: Two things. One, it's important to clear up that he [Wright] did not say "The Jews are going to get you" in some conspiratorial, classic anti-Semitic fashion. I think that's just --

HITCHENS: He [Wright] thinks only Jews are going to object to [Rev. Louis] Farrakhan and [Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi. Excuse me?

SULLIVAN: No, he didn't say "only."

HITCHENS: No, but --

SULLIVAN: Again, you keep playing with that quote. We're happy to have it on the record. And now you've made me forget my second point, which is --

HITCHENS: Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it.

SULLIVAN: I'm sorry, I've forgotten my second point. But I do think that's important. And I don't think Wright is Farrakhan. And I don't think Obama, in any conceivable way, represents anything but racial inclusion and integration. And anybody that looks at any part of his career and can be in any doubt about that is beyond me.

The reason he went to that church, clearly, if you read his biography, is he wanted to understand what it was to be black in America. He didn't understand. He's a very polyglot person. He grew up in Hawaii, he had some time in Indonesia.

—A.J.W.