Daniel has staked out his territory as the guy who engages low hanging fruit and that is precisely what Hitchens is. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read a lot of Hitchens and there is a good deal to admire in his prose and moral compass, but his material concerning religion can be some of the worst examples of his work. Hitchens is entertaining and occasionally insightful, as any good journalist ought to be, but there isn’t a terrible amount of depth to what he has to say when it comes to religion proper. Factor in the polemical nature of Hitchens and the deliberate manner in which he tries to provoke readers and you have something too good for Daniel to pass up.
I don’t really see it dancing on a man’s grave, rather it is Daniel going back to the same old talking point over and over again due to lack of content. Daniel has poor reading skills, he struggles with dense texts that demand a lot from readers and often makes rudimentary errors involving basic context or categories. To make matters even worse, Daniel spends next to no time actually thinking about any of the topics he blogs about and thereby accrues no genuine insight of his own; this is why Daniel will often quote a paragraph from a popular book and then spends another paragraph simply summarizing what he quoted in just slightly different terms.
Hitchens often relies on secondary and even tertiary sources when critiquing a particular religion, this makes his position incredibly vulnerable to people with the background and skills to access primary sources. That kind of rote work of tracking down sources and looking particular claims up is going to come naturally to Daniel; he can note whatever position Hitchens advocates and then spend a little time looking up what other people say on the subject and BOOM the blog post almost writes itself
Daniel isn’t beating a dead horse, he has embalmed it and put it on display in the den, so he can tell the same basic stories about beating the horse when it was a fresh carcass to anyone who comes into the room.
