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Pointing out an inconvenient fact Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit does not lose his temper, or at least not much. He favours a fairly dry, laconic style. So dry, in fact, that the duller sorts can miss it. So when he does come out with something unusually sharp, I tend to sit up and take particular notice.
“Ah, but remember when you now-disappointed Obama supporters were lecturing us about the fierce moral urgency of change? With such overweening self-righteousness? Even as you resolutely failed to look at what was going on, or to inquire into what Obama was actually like? So pardon me, now-disappointed Obama voters, if I point out that you’re rubes.”
By the way, does anyone bother to read Andrew Sullivan these days?
Update: I see that Matt Welch, at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, has become unusually sharp about Sullivan these days. The latter’s blind devotion to TARP and the rest is driving even some people who are generally nice to Sully increasingly to distraction.
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Why would anyone read Andrew “gay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage” Sullivan?
The most interesting thing about Sullivan is, he used to have great clarity of thought and exposition … then it all drained away, sopped up by the soggy mop of gay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage. If he were writing about the building trade or the timber industry in Indonesia, he would find a way to work “gay marriage” into it.
A most peculiar affliction.
Verity, go easy on poor old Andrew. If you were on a cocktail of powerful pharmaceutiicals to stay alive you too might have morphed from coherent to mush. Or if you went through life with a form of Andrew’s affliction wishing you were your daddy just as Andrew regrets that he’s not the second coming of his mommy.
Verity:
You forgot Sully’s other, er, preoccupations: “proving” the thesis that Sarah Palin Is The Worst American Of All Time, and “just asking questions” about her disabled infant son’s parentage. Which is apparently not in any way analogous to 9/11 Trutherism, or Birtherism. Definitely not. No sirree Bob.
I check in on Sully now and again because he often links to interesting material. But as far as political insight or analysis is confirmed, he is a busted flush.
Millie Woods, well, I don’t know about a “cocktail of powerful pharmaceuticals”. Does he have AIDS, and even if he does, would he need “a cocktail of powerful pharmaceuticals” to combat it?
I know someone who’s had AIDS for, I’m guessing, around 20 years, and certainly he takes several pills, but he also runs a successful business in a very competitive industry, exercises and looks good.
Yes, Verity he does have AIDS. I also have a nephew by marriage now deceased who was a haemophiliac and a victim like huge numbers of Canadian haemophiliacs of the tainted (with AIDS) blood scandal. He was aware that the disease can be fairly dormant and also extremely aggressive. Unfortunately he belonged to the latter category. He was a gifted paedtrician with a world wide reputation in immunological diseases. So yes I’m fairly cognizant of AIDS and its ravages.
I don’t really know, nor care, about whether Sullivan’s extraordinarily rapid change of mind about Bush in late 2003/04 was because he feared that Bush would stop him marrying his boyfriend, or whether he genuinely suddenly decided that Bush was a spendthrift, warmongering nitwit, having previously thought of him as a cross between Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and James Madison.
What I do know is this: Sullivan has relentless touted Obama on the grounds of Obama being a man who would, say, shut down Gitmo; repeal various Bush-era legal changes on civil liberties, ameliorate various tensions and bring the US together; observe a smarter, more “nuanced” foreign policy, and so on. In each and every respect, Obama has done the opposite, and in the case of issues such as indefinite detention of terror suspects, he has continued the Bush policy. He has accelerated things such as the drone attacks on various targets in Afghanistan.
There is no evidence whatever that any of the things people hoped for would have actually been delivered by Obama. Had they bothered to study his brief senatorial voting record, and consider the sort of intellectual influences, then they would have seen what was coming. But then again, remember that Sullivan, and others, also had an understandable – and justified – loathing of Hilary Clinton and the various groups around her, and so took the view that anything was better.
Could do without the patronising “cocktail of powerful pharmaceuticals” nonsense, thanks.
I suspect Reynolds is right, but not sure what a “rube” is.
Indeed not only has Obama continued many of the bush era policies regarding the war on terror, but has ramped up things such as targeted killings.
Of course Obama could declare war on Iran tomorrow and he would still be an anti-western appeaser of Islamism and a modern day chamberlain to the Melanie Phillips contingent.
Poor Andrew.
His was the first blog I ever started to read, and I branched out from there. But now? I gave up on him six years ago.
Exactly my case, CC. I found him through Slate, I think. I came upon Slate because I was looking for an alternative to the MSM – a term I wasn’t even familiar with at the time…
That phrase “cocktail of powerful pharmaceuticals” is so dated. As from the 1980s.
I don’t really see the chemical issue as relevant in the case of AS, although I suppose I should not be surprised since my original post was a bit snarky. But he has been so snarky himself that a certain amount of payback is understandable.
In the absence of exact medical evidence, I’d rather not make such an assumption. And Verity is right that other people with HIV who take medication are fine in other respects.
Mind you, Sullivan has lost a lot of my respect for his appalling and unsourced attacks on Palin and his general spinning for the Obama side. But perhaps we should be honest and admit that he was just as bad when he was glossing over some of the weaknesses of Dubya back in the early Noughties. The trouble with Andy is he is a fanboy; whoever comes along who promises lots of hopeychange gets a lot of gush from him. (Is that a gay thing? I honestly don’t know).
Very sad. There are old essays of AS on issues such as the Bill of Rights, modern conservatism, etc, which are wonderful and worth reading.
Well, the Tale of Sullivan and Reynolds is an old, storied (and in Reynolds’ case, almost unprecedented) one, and largely stems from exchanges over the legitimacy and definition of ‘torture’ and the ‘ticking bomb scenario’, specifically with respect to Gitmo detentions and extraordinary rendition.
There seem to be very few people Glenn singles out for such a level of disdain, but having read Instapundit for many years, there have been some quite spirited (and short) exchanges. Inevitably, I feel I have to apply the word ‘hysterical’ (in the traditional, and for that matter pseudo-medical sense) to some of Sullivan’s responses.
But as Johnathan points out, Sullivan’s fanboyism has been plain to see for a while – he’s like a cushion whose impressions are formed by the latest and most massive set of opinions to which he’s been exposed.
If there’s one person Reynolds seems to like to beat up upon more than Sullivan, it’s Glenn Greenwald, who appears to me to be very similar to Sullivan, except that he’s never made a compelling argument for anything.
And a ‘rube’ is pretty universal US slang for a credulous fool.
Barack Obama has never had a problem with violence, or with intimidation. Even leaving aside his life long Marxist connections (which are so incredibly difficult to discover – it takes whole minutes to do the reasearch) he is (as Mr Reynolds points out) a leading member of the Chicago Machine.
You do may not have to break legs yourself in the Chicago political Machine – but if you have a moral problem with such things you will not get very far.
Of course (as the Chicago Machine has no problem with Marxists these days – unlike back in 1968) Barack Obama continued to be trainer for organizations such as ACORN teaching them to use intimidation to get banks to make crazy longs (to people who could never pay them back – and most likely never intended to pay them back).
The Democratic Party candidate for Governor of New York used the courts to have the same effect – boasting of how he had made the banks make loans “they would never have made” otherwise (loan that he actually admitted would have a “higher default rate” and so they did, about a 100% default rate). Somehow no one holds this against him – indeed even Fox News (at least the news reports – which are so full of the supposed bad words of the Republican candidate for Governor of New York State) does not report the Democrats “legal” antics and how much money they cost the banks (i.e. the taxpayers).
As for Andrew Sullivan – what sums him up for me is not “gay marriage” or even his hero worship of Obama (which is also, most likely, a sexual thing).
What defines his mind (to me) is his support for “cash for clunkers”.
This is a classic example of unlimted government – if government can take money from taxpayers and spend it taking cars and destroying them (not even selling the parts, let alone the cars themselves to those too poor to buy a new car) and getting people to buy new cars -well then government can do ANYTHING.
Yet Mr Andrew Sullivan described the insane scheme as a example of “limited” (not unlimited) government, that “conservatives” should support.
No amount of anti AIDS drugs can explain away such “thought” – the man is just a fool.
“…his hero worship of Obama (which is also, most likely, a sexual thing).”
I always thought his initial support for GWB was also sexual. The guy just has a lot of daddy issues.
Paul Marks, very interesting post … because Sullivan’s columns in The Times used to be compellingly argued and eloquent. His clarity of thought was one of the pleasures of reading him.
It was the “gay marriage” thing that made him suddenly so alien. First, it was an issue that around 94% of the population didn’t give a rat’s arse about one way or another. Second, he couldn’t leave it alone. I recall reading a column somewhere, before I realised that I was going to skip over his name henceforth, which was a treatise on men with beards and how attractive they were … I can’t remember the premise of the piece, but I read it in startled fascination …
I wouldn’t like to see anyone’s living reduced, but it is baffling that he is still published in the expectation of there being an audience.