Andrew Sullivan was probably the original political blogger I discovered after 9/11 in 2001.
I read him all the time in 2001-03.
He used to be on my list of
Writers on politics that I like.
But then he turned against the war.
Gradually almost everything he believed switched to the opposite.
He became exactly the kind of guy he would have attacked in 2001-03.
Now I never read him.
Andrew Sullivan
I read all the time in 2001-03.
But then he turned against the war.
It seems
Bush's anti-gay marriage policy drove him mad.
I had some sympathy for Sullivan.
I had problems with Bush too.
But Gay Marriage is simply not as important
an issue as the War on Islamist Terror.
Sullivan just can't swallow his pride and accept this.
He abandoned Bush because of this issue,
and spent years trying to justify it.
In 2004 he became obsessed with the Abu Ghraib scandal,
and endlessly wrote as if it was important,
and as if the WMD intelligence scandal was important,
and so on.
In the 2004 election, he supported Kerry,
and wrote
as if the
Swift Boat Veterans For Truth
were Republican dirty tricks, rather than what it was
- 200 people who hated Kerry for 30 years
and this was their moment.
He has switched sides and is now trying desperately to pretend that the Democrats
are strong on defence.
The old Andrew Sullivan
- the one who realised we are in a war to the death
with people who want to exterminate homosexuals
and lots of other groups
- is gone, sadly.
"From the very beginning, of course, the Bush administration's left-wing enemies in the U.S. and Europe
were hysterically opposed to the push for Middle Eastern democracy.
A significant number of right-wing pundits
also proved themselves to be sunshine patriots ...
bailing out of the hard, dirty work of war and cultural transformation as soon as the predictable resistance arose.
But that's politics.
In Washington, if you're looking for a brave and steadfast ally, you need to buy a dog.
Fortunately our warriors battling away in Najaf and Samarra and Anbar province didn't surrender to the Beltway gloom
that defeated most of our media and political elites."
The "conservative" who votes Democrat:
Sullivan supported Kerry (Democrat) for President in 2004.
Sullivan supported Obama (Democrat) for President in 2008.
Sullivan supported Obama (Democrat) for President in 2012.
And yet he still claims to be a "conservative".
If only there were more conservatives like him,
the Democrats would never be out of office!
Sullivan is demolished by Hitchens,
as he (Sullivan)
struggles to defend
the dodgy, evasive Obama and
his mentor Rev. Wright.
I haven't read Sullivan in years, but I am still shocked.
How far he has fallen.
He has become Simon Jenkins
or Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a hopeless confused muddle,
all because he is driven by another agenda.
Survey of Andrew Sullivan's readers, Feb 2008.
Despite him claiming to be a "conservative", only affluent left wingers read him now.
"2.5 percent of you describe yourselves as very conservative; 9.6 percent as conservative; 33.3 percent as moderate; 38.1 percent as liberal; and 16.5 percent as very liberal.""Only 22 percent of you earn $50K or less. Another fifth earn between $50K and $75K. Well over half have household income of over $100K a year."
I haven't paid attention to Andrew Sullivan for years, so I am always shocked when
someone points out what he is saying these days.
He writes as if Israel's nuclear supremacy is something sleazy,
rather than something that every sane person must hope lasts:
"Apparently, a lobby for a foreign government is useless if it cannot instantly get the US to launch World War III to maintain said foreign government's regional nuclear monopoly for a few more years."
When did Sullivan become just another anti-Israel freak?
In response to the encouraging news from Wikileaks that the Arab dictators want to stop Iran,
he points out that the Arab street are Israel-hating maniacs who think Iran is great.
Instead of just stating the facts - that for once the dictators make more sense than the people
- he attacks the "neo-cons" for siding with the dictators not the people.
He doesn't seem to care about Iran getting nuclear weapons.
He only cares about attacking "neo-cons".
He describes the Arab rulers as
"corrupt, gutless, torturing autocrats".
Fair enough.
But oddly he does not then describe the Arab street as
"blind, ignorant, conspiracy-theory driven, anti-semitic, west-hating Islamist lovers".
He does not criticise the Arab street at all.
Andrew Sullivan, Jan 2011, does not seem to know that JFK was killed by a communist.
Andrew Sullivan, Mar 2011, thinks that the accidental killing of civilians in a war zone in Afghanistan
"makes one reassess the justness of this long, long war".
Did he not know what war was
when he was promoting it in 2001-03?
Ron Paul
is the kind of creepy amoral libertarian that
says (Jan 2012) that the killing of an Iranian nuclear weapons scientist is "an act of terrorism and we should empathize with them"
[with Iran].
This is a hilarious read:
The super partisan Sullivan live blogs the first 2012 debate, 3 Oct 2012, where his hero Obama gets completely spanked by Mitt Romney.
Even Sullivan realises it by the end. He is gutted:
"Obama looked tired, even bored
... The person with authority on that stage was Romney ... This was Romney the salesman. And my gut tells me he sold a few voters on a change tonight. It's beyond depressing."
Hilarious stuff!
That's not the question that comes to my mind,
when I see Andrew Sullivan and Newsweek
gushing about Obama
in Jan 2012.
Childless, bald, bearded, gay man
Andrew Sullivan
becomes obsessed with
Sarah Palin's obstetrics.
You know, the optics on this one aren't great.
The right
laughs at him, and
calls him
"Chief Forensic Gynecologist Andrew Sullivan".
Andrew Sullivan and Charles Johnson
Two converts to the left, who went mad at different times, and so said some awful things about each other.
Charles Johnson on Andrew Sullivan, 5 Apr 2008:
"Not a shred of the post-9/11 Sullivan remains; all that's left is a rhetoric-spewing empty shill for "progressive" causes."
Today, that's how a lot of people feel about Charles Johnson.
Hi
Diary of Daedalus
readers!
Since 1995.
