It’s not quite been a full year since Obama took office (that will happen next month), but it’s been close enough that Andrew Sullivan has decided to come up with a list of accomplishments the man has done, and why his first year has been a great success.

He also makes a good point that liberals like me, who are disappointed at the current level of progress, need to keep in mind:

Change of this magnitude is extremely hard. That it is also frustrating, inadequate, compromised, flawed, and beset with bribes and trade-offs does not, in my mind, undermine it. Obama told us it would be like this – and it is. And those who backed him last year would do better, to my mind, if they appreciated the difficulty of this task and the diligence and civility that Obama has displayed in executing it.

(This has been quite a week for natural law thought, what with Princeton philosopher Robert George featured in a New York Times Magazine spread and all. That excellent spread raised a lot of commentary, including a response by homosexual Catholic and erstwhile conservative Andrew Sullivan, excoriating George at his blog for The Atlantic. That commentary was sent to me by a leftist friend with the simple question, “thoughts?” in the subject header. It seemed only natural [pun intended] to put those first-reaction “thoughts” for my friend out there for the world to see.)

As you know from previous discussions, I prefer to let the adversary do the talking, so in response to Sullivan’s quotes:

“There does seem something intuitively right about seeing our ‘nature’ as some sort of guide to the way we should live our lives.”

OK, here’s where he goes wrong. Sullivan is a voluntarist at heart, much like most Western thinkers in recent centuries. He continually defines the “natural” based on what feels right, what occurs in the absence of coercion to the contrary, and what people want to do. When he asks…

“What do we mean by nature? How do emotion and reason interact? How precise and universal can we be in adducing morals from something as diverse and varied as the fruits of natural selection? How can we be sure we aren’t smuggling in all sorts of pre-existing views of what nature is and what morality is when we declare something “unnatural”? How does an argument that designates an entire sub-section of humankind as inherently immoral square with the goodness of God’s creation or the morally neutral power of Darwin’s theory?”

…he’s saying that we mean things that happen by “nature.” He’s implying that emotion and reason interact in such a way that an emotion is an a priori good, justified by instrumental reasoning after the fact (equally true whether it’s homosexuals who employ reasoning to justify their sex lives or heterosexuals who employ reasoning because they want to oppress “the other”). He’s saying that we start with the fruits of natural selection, then adduce morals from them based on what we want/what feels right to us/what empowers us/what we will to do. He’s saying that we do smuggle in “pre-existing views” of nature (he’s kind of correct on that one, and I’ll come back to this in a minute). And he’s saying that an entire sub-section of humankind who wants to do something should be condoned in doing so unless it infringes on someone else’s general liberty, either through God or Darwin.

The problem is that Sullivan’s argument starts with will as the basis for liberty, and looks for ways to justify what we want to do once we’ve determined what it is that we want. George (and I) are intellectual supremacists, arguing that reason has to be the king of the will a la Aristotle and most Western thinkers prior to the so-called Enlightenment. In a nutshell, just because someone wants to do something by nature does not mean that this desire is in accordance with human nature. I can want to have sex with a rock, or to kill my neighbor because of his skin color. But will does not determine morality. Reason does, because reason is at the apex of human nature. Many animal natures, ours included, contain will; only human nature contains reason. Reason looks for purposes and reasonable uses of things. A reasonable use of physical strength is material work or defense of innocent people, not arbitrary violence. A reasonable use of sex that takes into account its primary effect, which is procreation, cannot justify either homosexual or other non-procreative sex.

Sure, homosexual tendencies exist in the will by nature; as Sullivan says, “even” the Vatican recognizes that. But the Vatican isn’t just interested in keeping the gay man down (no sick pun intended). It is interested in preserving the primacy of reason and not the will as the basis for moral liberty. We have all kinds of tendencies that are unnatural. Look at the tendency held by so many towards greed and materialism of the sort you rightly rail against. You acknowledge that economic liberty ought to be oriented around the purpose of fulfilling human need, and I agree with you there despite our many disagreements about the best way to do so. Natural law thinkers extend the same kind of purpose-driven liberty discerned by reason to sexuality, politics, personal choices, etc.

Sullivan is wrong to say that “sexual orientation is the critical category here, not procreation or nature as it is actually found, and the result is to retain a stigma and legal discrimination against homosexuals – simply because they are what they are.” Again, he assumes a lack of reason behind the motives of his opponents (and I don’t doubt that he’s right as far as most on the American Right go). But he sees the entire debate over homosexuality as a clash of wills, not of reasonable positions. Intellectually speaking, that makes it very hard for him to justify his position over the alternative, much though a clash of wills is par for the course in current American politics. Stigmas are not always unreasonable, even if they do condemn something many people want to do.

Finally, Sullivan raises the point that, “You’d think that Christian scholars would be intrigued to figure out the questions – what are homosexuals for? why did God create them? why did natural selection favor their persistence?” An interesting question, to be sure, but not with the assumption that whatever a person desires is an a priori moral right. The question Christian theologians would file these points under is, “Why does sin seem so right and so appealing to a creature made in the image and likeness of God?”

Jerk. You’d think spilling about him being afraid of bugs would be more than enough. And I repeated the accusation. More than once.

But, fine. Fine. I’ll just sit over here not being nominated for anything, at least until the Weblog award nominations come out next week. You are clicking over there every day to support my nomination, right?

Right?

And since I haven’t got an Andrew Sullivan nomination, you might as well go vote for Stacy McCain, who has been. If anybody deserves to be honored in full Sullivan fashion, it’s Stacy. Often. And by someone who knows how.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to vote for the 2010 Grande Conservative Blogress Diva. I have a favorite, but I’m not saying who.

Personalized artwork made from your DNA — or, as in the photo accompanying this article, of your beagle’s DNA.

Bonus aside: don’t be fooled by the excesses of cute displayed by beagle – owners.  These are nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw critturs.  Make no mistake. Hug a beagle and you caress a killer:

Image:  Bruno Liljefors, ”Beagle and Fox,” 1885.

John Allen reflects on the lessons the Irish Church must learn following the abuse crisis.

Benedict XVI meditated on St Francis and the Christ Child at his general audience yesterday.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster will celebrate Midnight Mass live on BBC One tonight. The Beeb has a sneak preview of his homily.

Nicholas King SJ explains what we can truly know about the first Christmas.

The controversial theologian Edward
Schillebeeckx has died.

The new head of the Russian Orthodox Church has said gay people should not face unjust discrimination.

Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Mexico City has condemned the capital’s decision to recognise same-sex unions.

Umberto Eco deplores the lack of religious literacy in secular Europe.

As the Holy See responds to criticism of the Pius XII move, Hugh O’Shaughnessy considers the case against the Cause of the wartime pope. John Allen urges someone – anyone – to make the case in favour.

Andrew Sullivan says Robert George’s philosophy is “evil”.

Dr Samuel Gregg applauds Pope Benedict’s “stinging rebuke” to liberation theologians.

An adult stem-cell breakthrough has restored a man’s sight.

PETA encourages Pope Benedict to become a vegan.

Finally, I would like to thank you for reading this blog and wish you a very happy Christmas.

Delightful Fremantle Greens MP Adele Carles held her Christmas party at Kidogo Arthouse yesterday and what a turn-out it was. Fremantle mayor Brad Pettitt and many councilors took part, as did several Greens senators and members of the State Government, including  premier Colin Barnett and treasurer Troy Buswell. Federal Labor MP Melissa Parke was also at the very relaxed and well catered for party.

Mauritian neighbours of Adele and Francois Carles provided fantastic music end enticed many to have a dance.

Quote of the evening came from the Premier when he quipped during Adele’s speech that the Liberals were delighted to have her in Fremantle. I doubt that that sentiment is shared by the Labor party and Peter Tagliaferri.

PHOTOS COPYRIGHT ROEL LOOPERS. WWW.PROFILEPHOTO.COM.AU

I saw the above image at Andrew Sullivan’s blog today. Clever. And it’s working on a number of levels: as an ironic poke at creationists, of course. And as a substitute of one cultural star (Obama) for another cultural star (Darwin). But it can also be read as a curiously implicit endorsement of Obama-like gradualism and conservatism in politics.

Hmm.

Darwinian theory carrying conservative implications? Tell it to Nietzsche.

And it might also be read as questioning Obama-like gradualism. Perhaps the poster is suggesting that the only kind of slow change we should believe in is in nature, not necessarily in our politics.

In any case, it’s interesting that the evolution by natural selection “metaphor”—as the above image illustrates—can be read as justification for all sorts of politics (and has).

In a recent Washington Post article titled “A Good Time to be a Conservative”; Mr. Kristol made a bold assumption, claiming the “center of gravity” within the Republican Party would shift farther to the right, propelled in that direction by a collection of conservative personalities from beyond the Beltway. Indicating a lack of faith in the G.O.P.’s elected leadership, Kristol says: “Even if Republicans pick up the House in 2010, the party’s big ideas and themes for the 2012 presidential race will probably not emanate from Capitol Hill. The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this — but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots.” Kristol’s logic is derived from two polls. First, the Gallup Poll of October 26, 2009 that puts the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as conservatives at 40 percent, and an earlier Rasmussen Poll indicating that the only 2012 Republican presidential prospects polling double digits are Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. When one looks inside the numbers, it would appear that there are more than a few flaws in Mr. Kristol’s math and intuitive reasoning.

The Gallup results show that the net increase in the percentage of people identifying as conservatives had taken place within that subset of the electorate classified as independents. Quoting Gallup: “Changes among political independents appear to be the main reason the percentage of conservatives has increased nationally over the past year: the 35% of independents describing their views as conservative in 2009 is up from 29% in 2008. By contrast, among Republicans and Democrats, the percentage who are “conservative” has increased by one point each.” In spite of the shift in independents identifying as conservatives, the actual percentage of voters who identify with the G.O.P., which is the defacto conservative party, has fallen to historical lows. The latest political identification polling results available on Pollster.com reveals that just 25 percent of those polled identify themselves as Republicans. That percentage improves when registered and likely voters are polled, but the G.O.P. still trails the Democrats here as well. To date, had independents firmly embraced the principles of the conservative movement generally or the G.O.P. in particular, the percentage of voters identifying as Republicans would show a marked increase and so far that is not the case. I would argue that the shift to the right among independent voters is far from solid and is conditional, being subject to a set of factors that will likely change by the time of the 2012 election. In fact an even newer Gallup Poll reveals just how transient independent political attitudes actually are. That poll: “Race for 2010 Remains Close; Democrats Recover Slight Lead”, which came out on December 14 states: “The current generic-ballot results are similar to those Gallup found in July and October of this year, and indicate that the Republican gain observed just after the Nov. 3 elections was not sustained. Shifts in candidate preference for Congress typically occur primarily among independents, whose “unanchored” status makes them much more vulnerable to short-term events in the political environment than are those who claim allegiance to either major party.” I would go beyond the latest Gallup findings to suggest that the number of independents identifying as conservatives will decrease proportionately to the degree to which the G.O.P. moves to the right, especially if the Republican Party finds its public image welded to the personalities of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin or the Tea Party crowd.

In his reliance on the results of the above cited Rasmussen Poll, Mr. Kristol is in effect betting the house on a collection of would be candidates that, in spite of polling in the double digits, leave much to be desired when it actually comes to getting elected. Kristol is one of Sarah Palin’s most passionate cheerleaders, but in suggesting that the future of the conservative movement might lie in the fortunes of Ms. Palin, he seems to be gambling on a horse not worth the wager. Mid-December poll results from both Pollster.com and Polling Report.com show Palin registering an unfavorable rating of 48 percent. An ABC poll of November 15^th showed that 53 percent of respondents would not vote for Palin with 60 percent saying she was not qualified to be president. More damaging still is a CBS poll of November 15, which revealed that 62 percent of those Republicans polled felt that Palin lacked the ability to be an effective president. At the time of Palin’s resignation from elected office, Republican strategist Mike Murphy opined: “If the Sarah Palin we perceive today wins the nomination in 2012, the G.O.P. will lose. Most Americans don’t think Palin is ready to be President. The base loving you is not enough to get you elected.” Conservative columnist Michael Gerson, reflecting on Palin’s resignation said: “She really alienated women and the college educated on both coasts and that is not how you rebuild the Republican Party.” The reality is that the Republican Party cannot hope to win without the support of independent voters, whom Palin clearly alienates and whose ranks are, according to Pew Research, now at a seventy-year high.  Recently, two Republican heavyweights: Haley Barbour, former Chairman of the RNC, and Congressman Eric Cantor (R-VA) both declined to endorse a 2012 Palin presidential bid when they appeared on MSNBC and Fox News.

In spite of the fact that Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have double-digit support among Republicans, none of them breaks a 40 percent favorability rating among voters generally, except Huckabee. However, Huckabee’s 40 percent approval rating was registered before Maurice Clemmons, an inmate pardoned by Huckabee, gunned down four police officers in late November. That said, we might see a decline in Huckabee’s overall standing in the polls.  Poll numbers aside, in the 2008 Republican primaries, Huckabee was only able to win in the south and thus his viability as a national candidate is questionable. Furthermore, Huckabee’s past equivocation on the topic of evolution works to his detriment when it comes to appealing to that large segment of the population that believes in science as well as religion. Mitt Romney, as a result of his Mormon faith, had problems with the evangelical base of the G.O.P., which plays a crucial role in the early primary states of Iowa and South Carolina. Moreover, Romney may well run into formidable headwinds from the far right as a result of his relatively moderate approach to politics and policy positions. Newt Gingrich, who’s favorable ratings are the lowest, at 14 percent, has a closet full of skeletons of his own which led in 1998 to his stepping down as the Speaker of the House and his departure from Congress altogether.  Needless to say these issues will surely be resurrected and they will be in the forefront of the debate in the event that Gingrich becomes a serious presidential contender.

It is in his rather absurd suggestion that the G.O.P.’s center of gravity might travel further to the right as a function of the influence of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or the Tea Party Movement, that Kristol, having slipped his moorings to reality, has embarked on what can only be considered a voyage of political fantasy. Neither Limbaugh nor Beck are particularly compelling personalities beyond the realm of their audience. Both traffic in the sensational, often blurring the lines between fact and fiction with their primary purpose being incendiary commentary rather than legitimate hard news analysis. The media watchdog, Media Matters for America has compiled fifty-three pages of citations detailing Limbaugh’s distortion of facts or their deliberate misrepresentation for political purposes. For Glenn Beck there are forty-two pages. The latest NBC/WSJ poll (June 2009), which I was able to find on Limbaugh’s popularity, showed that 50 percent of those responding viewed him in a negative light. A similar poll in September showed Glenn Beck registering a positive rating of just 25 percent. In spite of the fact that both Limbaugh and Beck have a committed following, accurately measuring the true size and composition of their respective audiences and the extent to which they actually reflect more than a thin slice of this country’s political spectrum is almost impossible. Paul Farhi of the Washington Post attempted to plumb the length and breadth of Limbaugh’s audience and therefore his influence, in a March 2009 article: “Limbaugh’s Audience Size? It’s Largely Up in the Air.” Relying on interviews with media industry sources, Farhi claims that Limbaugh’s audience fluctuates between 14 to 30 million, depending on the issues of the day. Quoting Michael Harrison of “Talkers Magazine”, Farhi puts Limbaugh’s average audience at 14.25 million listeners per week, which is just under 5 percent of the population. Glenn Beck’s audience is far smaller and his largest audience to date was roughly 3.4 million viewers on September 15, 2009, which amounts to just 1.1 percent of the population. 

When it comes to the Tea Party Movement, it is equally difficult in coming to an agreement as to just how many people are involved here and to what extent they really reflect more than a microcosm of American political life. According to the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, a pro-Tea Party group, just 578,000 people participated in the 2009 April Tax Day Protests. Their website does not display figures for the July 4^th protests nor does FreedomWorks.com or any other pro-Tea Party website that I came across. The largest number I remember seeing is in the neighborhood of 215,000 protestors. Regarding the September 12^th Washington D.C. protest rally, Talking Points Memo described the turnout as follows: “FreedomWorks, the main organizers of the Tea Party event in Washington this past weekend, has dramatically lowered its estimate for the size of the crowd at the event from 1.5 million, a number the group now concedes was a mistake, to between 600,000 and 800,000 people — though this is still substantially more than the tens of thousands that most mainstream media outlets have estimated, and which FreedomWorks wholeheartedly rejects.” Thus if we add up the total attendence at all three Tea Parties, using the higher estimates, we come up with a gross attendence of roughly 1.6 million or just one half of one percent of the population.

What the math reveals is that the actual number of people who either participate in Tea Parties or who listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, presumably many do both, is a rather small percentage of the overall population, even considering that portion that would identify as conservative. That said, its a bit of a strectch to assume that such a statistically insignificant number of people is either enough to move the Republican Party further to the right or that it is likely to do so.

There is one final flaw in Kristol’s analysis and that is his ignoring the rising tide of moderates within the party that are opposing any suggestion that the G.O.P. needs to be purified of any moderate tendencies via litmus tests that even Ronald Reagan would fail, that political orthodoxy should be the face of the G.O.P. or that Republicans can only win elections when they embrace ultra conservative ideas. The now formidable array of moderates seeking to stem any drift to the far right encompasses a spectrum of Republican notables from sitting Senators to strategists and political commentators including: Olympia Snowe, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Bob Inglis, Mickey Edwards,  Christie Todd Whitman, Newt Gingrich, Tom Ridge, Colin Powell, David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, Kathleen Parker and a host of Republican strategists. Gingrich, appearing on Meet the Press (5/24/09) stated that the G.O.P. has to be “broad enough to incorporate divergent views and can’t be purged to the smallest conservative base.” Tom Ridge stated that the G.O.P. “needs to be less shrill and less condeming of those who don’t hew to a far right view.” Following the departure of Arlen Specter from the Republican Party, Olympia Snowe, in a New York Times editorial opined: “There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and contiuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of  governing majorities.” At an April debate over the future of the G.O.P. Lindsey Graham made the following observation: “We are not losing blue states and shrinking as a party because we are not conservative enough. If we pursue a party that has no place for someone who agrees with me 70 percent of the time, that is based on an ideological purity test rather than a coalition test, then we are going to keep losing.” I could go on, but anyone who has been paying any attention to the civil war within the Republican Party knows that there are more than enough voices and intelligent arguments being made to more than call into question the logic and wisdom of people like Bill Kristol and their fanciful notions that the redemption of the G.O.P. lies in the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or the rank and file Tea Party participant. All one has to do is examine the results of the 2009 off-year elections and what is evident is that where Republicans won elections, in the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, they did so by running moderate campaigns that played to the centrist voter. In contrast, the great and financially costly effort by the far right in trying to influence the congressional election in New York’s 23^rd Electoral District resulted in a conservative failure with a Democrat capturing a seat held by the G.O.P. since as far back as the Civil War.

Over the course of his career, William Kristol is a man who has backed more political losers and also-rans than winners and it would be nothing less than disastrous for the Republican Party to heed his advice or put any stock in his predictions. Kristol worked for former Secretary of Education William Bennet, the voice of personal responsibility during the Reagan Administration, who subsequently lost much of his credibility when he admitted to losing over a million dollars in Las Vegas slot machines. He was Vice President Qualye’s Chief of Staff.  Kristol managed the failed Senatorial campaign of Alan Keyes in 1988 and Keyes would go on to fail twice more in seeking a seat in the Senate and then two more times when running for president. Kristol championed the pardon of Scooter Libby and the nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate, a decision that McCain’s staffers would later admit to be his single biggest mistake. But it is in an examination of Kristol’s unabashed cheerleading for the War in Iraq that his predictive abilities are revealed to be so totally lacking. It was Kristol who predicted that the removal of Saddam Hussein from power would unleash a chain reaction of democratic reform across the Middle East that to date has failed to materialize.

Bill Kristol represents that desperate sort of conservative that can’t abide the dynamics of political change wrought by the election of Barack Obama. Likewise, the relatively rapid decline in the influence of Neoconservatives since the 2004 election can’t bring him much joy either. To my mind, Bill Kristol falls into that category within the Conservative Movement that is firmly wedded to the notion that their orthodox ideology is the only one acceptable for America and that anything else is either politically irrelevant or treasonous.  Kristol’s faulty logic gives rise to the notion that he is engaged more in wishful thinking than objective political analysis. His prediction as to future direction of the G.O.P. amounts to nothing more than a political “Hail Mary pass” in hoping beyond hope, that somehow or other the Republican Party can be moved to embrace the orthodoxy of the far right.  In my opinion, having watched him over the past decade and read his articles, he seems to be increasingly assuming the role of a shill for ultra conservative ideas, becoming as a result less objective in his political analysis. Republicans would be well advised to part company with Mr. Kristol, least they find themselves facing a future of continued electoral defeat and a decline in the party’s appeal among that now indispensable factor in American politics, the unaligned independent voter.

Steven J. Gulitti

New York City

12/19/2009

For those of you that don’t know, Andrew Sullivan is a pseudo-conservative blogger for The Atlantic magazine.  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Sully was a rah-rah supporter of George Bush and the War on Terror.  Starting right around 2003/2004, he’s basically been the John Kerry of douchetastic writers-Sully was gung ho for the Iraq War before he was gung ho against it.  Since then Sullivan has drifted rapidly to the left.  Nowadays, his blog has devolved into thinly-veiled anti-semitism, amateur ob-gyn opinions regarding Sarah Palin’s genitalia, sniping at any  and all conservatives not named Andrew Sullivan and Barack Obama fan girl missives (“I <3 U Barry, do u <3 me 2? Plz say yes!”).  Homeboy is lost in the Daily Kos/Democratic Underground weeds and he ain’t coming back.

Even better, it’s been discovered that Andrew Sullivan’s supposedly ‘one-man’ blog actually employs two ’sub-bloggers’ that actually write about half of every day’s posts.  Until very recently-like within the last week-Sullivan never acknowledged the fact that he had uncredited unnamed ghost-bloggers posting material in his name.  His readers didn’t seem to know and nobody outside of a small coterie of people at The Atlantic seemed to know this either.

So the dude is not only a faux-conservative and a bitchy little whiner, he’s a fraud that’s been playing a nasty unethical trick on his readers for several years.  Well, Ace calls Andrew Sullivan on it, with pummeling results.  I’m taking a big chunk out, but it’s worth the read.

I do not think Sullivan adds much to any dialogue he’s in. He does not clarify, he does not reason. He just throws in a lots of super-heated emotive language and makes up cute new put downs (I’m a “foaming Casarist,” by the way, which is cute enough, but it’s simply a novel way to call someone a fascist).

And I thought this about his advocacy for the War in Iraq, too. After 9/11, we were all pretty emotional (myself included, of course), and we all wanted a bit of hot-blooded emotional venting, and Sullivan was good for these purposes, and I think that’s what attracted so many people to him. (Myself included — I read him, of course.)

But at some point, even when he was still “on our side,” I just became tired of his schtick. Yes, he was arguing passionately for War in Iraq, and so in fact was I (privately — I hadn’t started the blog yet), but everything about it was, in fact, passion. Everything was how horrible a tyrant Saddam was, and what a perfect and noble goal it was to free the Kurds and so on, and while that certainly is true, I just didn’t get the hyperbolic language all this was expressed in, and thought then, as I think now, that wars are fought on the basis of enlightened self-interest, not on passion or doing something nice for the Kurds. The Kurds are a fine people, Christopher Hitchens assures me, and sure, it’s nice to free them, but surely this cannot be the reason we send over 150,000 troops to fight in Iraq.

Without doubt, emotion plays into these decisions. And also without doubt, Sullivan also mentioned the rational case for war — Jeffrey Goldberg (IIRC) discussing Saddam’s WMDs, etc.

But a lot of people did that. People came to Sullivan not for that, but for the hyperventilating and the hysterics. Sometimes you want that sort of thing. Again, I admit, after 9/11, that’s exactly what I wanted, because that’s exactly what I felt. But at some point I just grew to despise Sullivan because he seemed a one-trick pony whose claim to fame was that he could lose his shit at the drop of a hat. On this last point, I didn’t resent him so much that he was expressing what I felt, but that he was getting famous basically for having public crying jags on a daily basis.

And also, I thought: This guy is unstable. Anyone who is this emotional about everyfrickingthing is not a reliable ally. Because, what happens when he gets into a righteous snit about us?

…Fair is Fair: Some Context. Little Miss Attila passed along this partial defense of Sullivan, where, around two months ago, he sorta tipped his hand about ghost-blogging:

That is part of what we’ve been trying to do here. Since coming to the Atlantic, I’ve had the chance to get the input of interns to bring their generation’s perspective to the Dish. Two of them have gone on to become under-bloggers who, with the active insistence of readers, have helped expand dramatically the number of posts and the variety of subjects. The Dish, I think, is now very different than the one-man blog it started out as.

Is that adequate disclosure? Well, let me note his readers, many of them at least, don’t consider it adequate notice that he had his “under-bloggers” writing half of his posts. His “disclosure” here is of the most limited sort — one could very well read into this that these “underbloggers” are only researchers and tip-screeners, which is, I think, the exact implication Sullivan intended.

Certainly he did not say “‘under-bloggers are now writing half of ‘my’ posts for me.”

This doesn’t seem anything like disclosure to me — this seems like a cover-your-ass false disclosure you can later point to and say “I told you all this,” even though you really didn’t — but you can decide for yourself.

Bingo.

Full disclosure:  I have loathed Sullivan for a while now, but I could never figure out exactly why.  It wasn’t because he was a turncoat against conservatism or anything like that.  People are allowed to change their minds after all.  While I might not be happy with their change in opinions, it’s still not grounds for me to despise them.

No, what I think I hate about him is the constant melodrama.  That and the fact that he duped so many readers into coming to his blog thinking they were getting his thoughts and words and instead were getting the blogging equivalent of two graduate assistants filling in for the lazy professor. 

The funny thing is, if anything in the world is personality-driven, it’s blogging.  The good to great bloggers have a distinctive tone that is very hard to match.  Andrew Sullivan, who constantly pats himself on the groin about what an innovator he is with his blog, has done something profoundly stupid.  By letting the cat out of the bag, he’s basically told his audience that his personality is interchangeable with two lackeys he snatched from The Atlantic’s bitch-boy cupboard.  I know I never saw a difference in tone in any of “Andrew Sullivan’s ” posts.  Any post I read at Sully’s website always read the same as any other post that was supposedly written by Excitable Andy. 

So here we have a drama addict with a RINO/faux conservative facade and a dewey-eyed man-crush on Barack Obama …and on top of that he can’t even be bothered to write his own hysterical ramblings or give credit to the people who actually did post under his name.  Ace is right:  If that’s what you choose to read, you’re a freaking dipshit who deserves to be swindled by Andrew Sullivan.

Andrew Sullivan from The Daily Dish had this article today.  Its references contain many more compliments about the Buffalo region.  Funny how often I sense more optimism for this city from sources that live outside the area, than those who live within its boundaries.

Thank you, Andrew, for a great article.

One of my new favorite ‘news’ shows, The Joy Behar Show has been doing pretty good lately and reports are saying that her numbers are sky rocketing day by day.  In November she ended up 4th in the ratings with a little over 417,000 total viewers.

The Huffington Post says, “Last Thursday, when Behar hosted Martin Short and held a discussion on Tiger Woods, the show averaged 786,000 total viewers for its highest total viewer delivery since her show launched in September.  Then Monday, when Levi Johnston and Andrew Sullivan appeared on the show, Behar set a new high, averaging 824,000 total viewers. The following night, when she hosted Roseanne Barr, Behar set a new record, averaging 990,000 total viewers.” Way to go Joy Behar!!!

[via perezhilton]

So props to Rick Warren, who is speaking out against the incredibly evil anti-gay legislation being proposed in that flower of African civilization, Uganda.

Warren, writer of such tripe as The Purpose Driven Life, a made-of-glurge, pro-God, self-help book that from all accounts gives the advice of “accept that you are God’s slave and all will be well”, had apparently inspired the legislation in Uganda. To his credit, he seemed somewhat aghast and moved quickly away from it, calling it, among other things, “un-Christian”.

Andrew Sullivan agrees with this and says:

It is absolutely and unequivocally unchristian to demonize a whole group of people and to threaten them with execution simply because of their sexual orientation and their need for love and sex and intimacy and companionship like every other human being. And for Warren to deploy Christian arguments in defense of the dignity of homosexual persons is a big step forward in this debate. I am grateful to him for staying true to the Gospels.

While I appreciate the sentiment and the constant efforts at being an apologist, Sullivan is completely off the mark here. Yes, under most mainstream modern Christian philosophy, homosexuality is not an evil that must be destroyed. But most modern Christian sects, including all the ones I can think of, continue to include Paul’s various works in their cannon.Paul had some very unkind things to say about homosexuals, and of course we can’t forget the loving joy that the Bible gives to the gays in Leviticus.

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. – Leviticus 18:22

I already had my say on that stupid little quote.

So Sullivan is correct: modern Christians don’t usually have any problems with homosexuality and those that do don’t usually want the gays murdered by the state (there are exceptions). But Christianity is quite anti-gay in its origins and certainly up until, oh, about 200 years ago, most mainstream Christians would have agreed with the idea of rounding up and imprisoning gays, if not just going ahead and killing them.

Sarah Palin once again using darling Trig Palin, a child with special needs, as a "Going Rogue" book tour prop before large crowds during the height of the H1N1 flu season. And BTW, where is his jacket, a hat and some pants long enough to cover his little legs?

In some ways, this is an addendum to this post asking again for any actual evidence that Trig is Sarah Palin’s biological son. In her interview with far right radio host, Rusty Humphries, she said:

Hey, you know, that’s a great point, in that weird conspiracy-theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son. And a lot of people say, “Well you need to produce his birth certificate! You need to prove that he’s your kid!” Which we have done.

I noted that this is a lie. The Palins have never released Trig’s birth certificate or proved that he is Palin’s kid. If she had, I would have posted it on this blog. In fact, we all begged for it in the campaign. And yet she simply said so outright on a radio show. The Dish appears to be the only high-traffic blog to point this out. No one in the MSM has noted that her statement is a lie. And when you examine the blogosphere’s response to this, you find the same glaring avoidance of “what is in front of our nose”, as this Alaskan blog notes:

Robert Stacy McCain, dissing Sullivan, fails to mention Palin’s Thursday lie.

David Horowitz, excoriating Sullivan, fails to mention Palin’s lie.

Mark Milian, in the Los Angeles Times, while more critical of Palin over the first part of her Humphries statement, neglects to question the veracity of her own birth certificate claim.

Gottalaff, at the Political Carnival, while quoting Sullivan on his Palin birth certificate question, fails to really get into questioning Palin’s veracity.

Riehl World View and the blog’s commenters wander off to the tea party, blithely predicting Palin as next president, while dissing Sullivan.

Maria Newman, writing an abridged summation of blog posts for the New York Times, on Palin’s Humphries appearance, totally neglects quoting Palin’s lie.

Rick Moran, blogging for Pajamas Media, writes:

And no, not “a lot of people say” that we need to see Trig’s birth certificate. What planet is she on? Who, besides Andrew Sullivan and the same kind of fringe kooks on the left who mirror the righty loons wondering if Obama is eligible to be president, is concerned one whit about Trig’s parentage?

but neglects to observe that Palin’s claim is false.

If Obama had not released his birth certficate but went on the radio and point-blank said he had, do you think the press would simply ignore it and let it go?

Why will they not do so with Palin? What are they afraid of? How long do we have to put up with a press corps unable to do its basic job?

Andrew Sullivan
The Atlantic