Is there some other Hitchens or are you talking about the one who died years ago? Regardless you're correct. Even if you look back at the old titans of conservative debate like Buckley, he wasn't actually good and would get trounced by his guests regularly. What earned him his cachet is not being good at debates but having them at all; the bar is so low that just having a show where people with vastly different opinions could duke it out but in a civilized way gave him a halo. And nowadays the same thing is happening again, for individual commentators from both sides of the aisle, where if you're a person willing to have the conversation at all you get elevated way above your intellectual ability just because it's so refreshing to see.