I do not read Andrew Sullivan’s blog very often but when I saw the Michael Totten (who is someone I do rate rather highly) was guest-blogging there, I took a peek and saw an article Sullivan wrote a few days ago about the plot to blow up aircraft heading from the UK to the US, which quickly reminded me why I rarely visit.
I wonder if Lieberman’s defeat, the resilience of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the emergence of a Hezbollah-style government in Iraq had any bearing on the decision by Bush and Blair to pre-empt the British police and order this alleged plot disabled. I wish I didn’t find these questions popping into my head. But the alternative is to trust the Bush administration.
Riiiight. It is totally sound policy to distrust what the authorities tell us and instead just look for the evidence as we have been lied to again and again, and until I hit the paragraph I quoted above, I was mostly in agreement with what was being written. Lord knows there are more than ample reasons to give the Bush administration a sound and repeated kicking and I am the last person to urge people to trust governments, but concocting weird conspiracy theories is a clear sign that the point of rational criticism has been past and we are entering Bush Derangement Syndrome territory.
Both Bush and Blair will not hesitate to use any plot by Al-Qaeda, even those of the more common Keystone Cops Terrorists variety, to abridge yet more of our civil liberties without in fact improving our security one iota. But the notion that the timing of such tactical moves by the police are being micro-managed by Blair, let alone Bush, for maximum PR value is stretching things, particularly given that the PR effect of such a bust is extremely uncertain given the recent propensity of London’s Metropolitan Police for arresting, not to mention shooting, the wrong people.
Moreover, the fiasco in Lebanon was an entirely domestic Israeli cock-up caused by the most idiotic leadership in the Jewish state’s history, so other than the ravings of the perpetually BDS infected Kos/Democratic Underground crowd (who are frankly an irrelevant lunatic fringe in any PR calculations likely to be made in either the White House or Downing Street), it is difficult to see why a military and political screw-up by Israel would have Bush or Blair desperately looking to finesse a diversion of attention away from the violence in Israel and Lebanon. It was really not their problem in any major way and it had largly pushed Iraq off the front pages of the world, which was unlikely to be causing many sleepless night in Downing Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. And I really, really doubt Tony Blair is more than dimly aware of who the hell Joe Lieberman is given that he is hardly a household name outside the USA. Methinks the idea such issues were driving the Metropolitan Police’s actions is frankly bonkers.
Still, I will probably be reading far more of Andrew Sullivan’s blog in the days to come now that someone else is actually writing for it.
Sullivan has always had a propensity for getting really worked up (many use the word “hysterical” to describe him, and that’s not really off the mark) over certain things. It always made him seem, at least to me, to be an unreliable source of opinion and analysis. He has, over the last few years, gotten worse. I think that he is taken far less seriously than he used to be, and I can only conclude that that is appropriate. We all allow our own personal issues to color our take on events, but Sullivan is absolutely dominated by his.
It seemed to me that Sullivan came down with a terminal case of BDS when Bush stated in 2004 that he supported a defence of marriage amendment to the Constitution. Sullivan somehow believed that Bush supported gay marriage and felt betrayed when Bush proved otherwise. Before this instance, Bush could do no wrong in Sullivan’s eyes, afterwards, Bush could do no right.
Why he would think a Republican president from Texas would ever be a supporter of gay marriage is anyone’s guess. John Kerry didn’t even come out (sic) and support gay marriage.
Yosemite Sam,
Perhaps Sullivan got the idea because Dick Cheney has an out lesbian daughter who helped run her Dad’s campaign?
What is even more deranged ,is that Lieberman is a Democrat,ousted in a Militant Tendency style deselection putsch by a more anti-war Democrat. Why should a Democratic President give a toss? Yes I know Lieberman suported the war in Iraq,but in political terms the leftist nonentity rich boy is a gift to the Republicans.Lieberman is going to run as an independent,which will probably split the Democrat’s vote.
damn…you euros are all over american politick…and so accurate.
On Andrew Sullivan, yes the gay marriage thing seems to be the point at which Sullivan really turned against Bush. Sullivan can be a great passionate writer but that passion ill serves him most of time. He’s really become rather batty.
As for the conspiracy theory and most of the Bush conspiracy theories or really any of the “government-did-it” conspiracy theories is that they assume a level of competence from the authorities that has really never been displayed.
Sullivan has furiously denied that the gay marriage issue turned him decisively against Bush, but I am afraid it won’t really wash. The sheer venom of his critiques, when one considers the remarkably chummy tone towards Dubya in the early years of Bush’s tenure, give the lie to that. I thought there was something creepy about Sullivan’s pro-Bush cheerleading and I find his constant attacks equally creepy now.
A case in point has been Sullivan’s treatment of the torture issue. He has been rightly critical on this point, but he then accuses other bloggers – most obviously, Glenn Reynolds – of shilling for Bush simply because Glenn tends not to write 24/7 about the subject. Sullivan has come close to libelling Reynolds on this issue. He has become something of a bully. I hope he calms down because Sullivan has been one of the better and more interesting commentators over the years.
Whereas once I read Sullivan’s blog for insight, now I read it for amusement.
Out has gone argument and debate, in has come an obsession with positioning himself in relation to other bloggers, notably Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin.
Pity, but I suspect there’s a cyclical trend governing individual blog quality as there is with everything else. I’ll stay tuned in hope.
Just right Willis. You really never know what personal issues are going on in the lives of people on the other side of the screen and sometimes those issues can cause either venting of generral frustration or overly rosey reporting. We are all just overly smart chimp cousins after all!
The evening before the arrests a junior minister resigned from the govt over TBs stand on Lebanon.
There were also reports as jack straw had agreed on principle to a recall of parliament to discuss the Leb affair.
When i wake up in the morning there wasn’t one line in the papers about these events
i think the govt had a lot they wanted people’s minds taking off.
And his name was what? Are you seriously suggesting anyone cares what some junior minister does?
There was a period where I rather enjoyed reading Andrew Sullivan’s site. But then there was a point where he went on vacation to Ptown, and came back with a boyfriend and serious behavioral changes.
Ordinarily, when a man experiences sudden behavioral changes after entering a relationship, people say he’s “whipped”, which is short for something. Well Andrew is whipped, but not in the usual way.
I simply can’t read his material anymore, even for amusement. It’s too pathetic.
At the time yes, there was deffinatly a bandwagon gaining momentum demanding the recall of parliament and TB from his hols.
Overnight it disapeared, im not saying that the threat wasn’t real just that the timing was convenient.
I like Sullivan’s blog. I can filter out what I think’s consider wrong and useful knowledge remains. His coveruage of the torture issue has been peerless within the c.liberal-ish blogosphere, IMO. He has always been over the top, so combine that with an easy target administration and content that’s offensive to some is inevitable. Motivations don’t matter, only arguments do, andI think most criticism of Sullivan falls flat because it’s more interested in him than what he says.
I thought the argument about the Gay Marriage Thing was that the Bush administration only started making a big deal of it after the wheels fell off their other policies. I doubt Sullivan would be as harsh if the Iraq situation was clearly positive and the federal budget was being cut and balanced.
Also, the GMT can be read as symbolic of a crude, clumsy, short term approach to matters he and othesr consider the administration to have taken. As I see it, the GMT is also agressively anti-libertarian, so why not be furiously outraged over it?
As for torture, it hasn’t been a particularly big issue on blogs libertarian-ish blogs. This is a surprise to the likes of me. As I see it, Sullivan is trying (and suceeding) to pick up the slack over a statist policy he sees as extremely immoral and pragmatically damaging, that others are too embarrassed, or too afraid of conceding ground to their political enemies, to talk about.
YMMS, of course.
I also quite like Sullivan’s blog from a (what’s the word?) methodological perspective.
He sticks his oar in bluntly to a field he might not know a lot about, and then adjusts his postion quite substantially as he acquires more information. So you can see things, build change and evolve.
I think the style of blog like Samizdata is more to hold a specific postion throughout, and then the new content comes from defending it from different sources of attack.
I think that is broadly correct, though I have no problem simply changing my position on an issue if I become convinced a previous theory of mine has not survived contact with reality.
“I thought the argument about the Gay Marriage Thing was that the Bush administration only started making a big deal of it after the wheels fell off their other policies”
You’re kidding, right? I thought Bush made an issue about gay marriage because it was an issue that his base cared about, that they pushed in their local jurisdictions and was initiated because the Massachusetts Supreme Court made gay marriage the law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Sullivan had created a fantasy land where Bush was a big supporter of gay rights and was let down by his advocacy of a anti gay marriage Constitutional Amendment. The change was stark on his blog. I remember before his change Sullivan would defend Bush’s mistakes by going on about how it must be all part of some big, grand strategy of Bush. Afterwards, it was all BDS and how Bush could do no right.
As far as torture is concerned, it seems that the definition changes daily. I suspect that what I was subjected to in basic training would qualify as torture in Sullivan world. Of course, I hear little outrage for the real torture that is perpetrated by our enemies.
Shall we dance? A red herring awaits us at every boby trapped corner. And camera lens peering at the irrational behavior of all the lab rats….tsk, tsk, the buddhist say nothing is real – yet Paul is not dead after all, just 64
Until the big fandango comes to a theatre nearest you, raining imtercontinental missiles longitudilally into everyone’s backyard….everything is speculation in the most specious manner.
we have a history of buggering everything up anyway so let them dance until the great unwashed grown weary of self -righteous men-child thinking they represent the bright lights of evil. We ignore them and the party is over and everyone goes home and finally gets a good night’s sleep. Amen!
Kit makes a very fair point. I have acknowledged Sullivan’s writing on this issue before. The trouble is though, that Sully is too fast on the trigger in accusing other folk of not being interested in the topic if they have not written about it as widely as he has. This is what pisses the likes of Glenn Reynolds off. Sullivan at times appears to want to lecture other bloggers on what they should be writing about, as if he was some sort of school head-prefect.
It is true that some supporters of the overthrow of Saddam/Taliban have been slow to pick up the torture issue. This blog has not. Sadly, though, when I did write about this a few months ago, 70-80 percent of the comments were in favour of the use of torture. However, I have no idea whether that is representative of the overall readership base of Samizdata. I hope not.