Tag: Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan — Once and Future Nutcase

Nothing gives me more smug self-satisfaction than the sudden change of heart a lot of conservative bloggers are having about nutcase Andrew Sullivan (and no, the nutcase is not just an ad hominem — I’ll back it up in a second). After blogging really caught on after 9/11, Sullivan was one of its rising starts in part because of the mix of his pro-gay and pro-war views. Sullivan also found himself persona non grata at the New York Times due to his flagging liberal credentials.

I have always had an intense dislike of Sullivan for a number of reasons, not the least of which was his claim — backed up by practice — that bloggers such as he didn’t need to worry about being accurate. Just emoting in reverse chronological order was enough. Sullivan even attacked the generally fair minded SpinSanity as a ideological hit machine, citing as proof the fact that Sullivan received lots of hits to his blog. That’s right, in Sullivan’s world, traffic — not might — makes right.

Despite this, a lot of conservative bloggers remained enamored of Sullivan until a strange thing happened. Sullivan apparently decided that his gay rights position was more important than his support for the war-on-terror, and almost overnight his blog has gone from being Instapundit-lite to being MoveOn.Org-lite. It’s not that I necessarily agree or disagree with the change — in fact he makes a number of excellent points. Rather, that Sullivan’s only real devotion is to self-aggrandizement rather than truth or any sort of consistent position.

And, as I said in the opening paragraph, he is a certifiable nutcase. On his blog he rightly flogs Zell Miller for a racist comment Miller made 40 years ago, but has since reputed. Referring to Lyndon Johnson’s support of the civil rights movement, Miller said Johnson was “a Southerner who sold his birthright for a mess of dark pottage.” Racist and vile, but Miller doesn’t have anything on Sullivan who actually posted this on his website yesterday (emphasis added),

A fascinating (as usual) despatch from Zeyad in Iraq. He quotes one Mohammed Bashar Al-Faidhy, spokesman of the Association of Muslim Scholars. If you want to see how attuned these maniacs are to divisions in the West, read on:

[Long quote from Muslim scholar urging terrorists not to kill French hostages because they want the West divided rather than unified against terrorism.]

This is a fascinating and potentially important moment in the war on terror. If the Jihadists take the war to France now, we may get the Western unity that has so far eluded us. And that can only be a good thing.

Now I am no fan of France’s foreign policy, but what sort of nutcase would seriously suggest that terrorist attacks against French citizens would be a good thing? What a despicable thing to say.

But that’s Andrew Sullivan.

Homosexuals Are the New Nazis?

As I’ve mentioned before, in general I’m ambivalent about gay marriage, but once in awhile some of the conservative rhetoric about it is so far over the top that even I get annoyed. Andrew Sullivan points to just such an example by Shaunti Feldhahn that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,

When the countries of pre-World War II Europe noticed Adolf Hitler’s emerging aggression, they said, “It’s not my business.” But, as we now know, it was their business. How much sorrow might have been prevented had they recognized that burying their head in the sand wouldn’t help?

Today, we are facing a Pandora-like threat that — once allowed to escape — can never be put back in the box. With activist judges rewriting the will of the people, it’s only a matter of time before gay marriages are declared legal nationwide.

First, I’d think that Al Qaeda and Muslim extremists are a bit more frightening than gays and lesbians who want to get married.

Second, Feldhahn is clueless. Let me see if I can summarize this particular argument — U.S. culture is on some sort of moral precipice and institutionalizing gay marriage will push the country off into the abyss. Okay, reality check — American culture is so far past the point of no return that even if Feldhahn were right, there’d be nothing to do about it.

When I was a teenager, the local radio station refused for months to play Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” because of the sexual allusion. The other day I turned on the same station and it was playing a rap song in which the male vocalists describe the various sexual positions his lover might want to assume. ABC has a show called “Wife Swap” for Christ’s sake. We crossed the point of no return long ago, and that general cultural change is driving the push for gay marriage not vice verse.

Source:

Wage war on gay threat to marriage. Shaunti Feldhahn, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 6, 2004.

The Lesson of the Nigerian Miss World Riots

As many as 500+ people are dead in Nigeria after Muslim extremists began rioting over what seems like a rather inocuous comment in a story by a Nigerian journalist — that if Mohamed were alive today, he would probably take one of the contestants as a wife rather than protest it being held.

There are two important lessons from the rioting: a) placating religious extremism does not work, and b) nonetheless, there is no length to which some Western liberal-leftists will go to placate religious extremism.

Placating religious extremism does not work.

One of the issues being debated is who is responsible for the riots. The answer is simple — the blame rests with Nigerian President Obsanjano.

Obsanjano has tried to have his cake and eat it to. When talking to Western reporters he constantly says that he will not allow human rights outrages — such as the death by stoning sentences for adultery — to be carried out. But at the same time, Obsanjano has refrained from actually doing anything about the death sentences and other outrages because he doesn’t want to alienate Muslim voters ahead of planned 2003 elections.

This is why, for example, Obsanjano says that the death sentences will not stand, but he has not intervened at all to stop public floggings and other equally inhumane punishments imposed by states. It is also why Obsanjano has backpedaled into blaming the Nigerian media for the riots rather than confronting the problem of Islamic extremism.

In the West, we hear this constant refrain from some corners that we need to understand and accomodate religious extremism. The same people who are apoplectic (and rightfully so) when an Alabama judge displays the Ten Commandments in his court room turn around and insist that we need to identify with and accomodate theocratic Middle Eastern states. Thanks, but no thanks.

Some Western liberal-leftists will go any lengths to placate religious extremism.

In a Salon.Com piece, Andrew Sullivan does an excellent job of chronicling UK objections to moving the Miss World contest there. Much of it runs along the lines of this bizarre quote from London mayor Ken Livingstone,

After the violence and terrible loss of life in Nigeria, the staging of a Miss World event in this city is not welcome. It defies belief that after Miss World has brought tragedy and strife to Africa its organisers should think it appropriate to carry on with the razzamataz as if nothing had happened.

On this side of the Atlantic we call that blaming the victim. It defies belief that Livingstone thinks that the Miss World pageant is responsible for religious nut cases run amok.

Feminists also jumped on the blame-Miss-World bandwagon on both sides of the Atlantic with Jill Nelson outlining the oppression inherent in Miss World, “As far as I’m concerned it’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burkas in order to survive.” Muriel Gray added, “These girls will be wearing swimwear dripping with blood.”

Sullivan aptly sums up this bizarre situation,

Now imagine a scenario in which, say, the play “Corpus Christi” was produced in New York (as it was). The play was highly offensive to some fundamentalists because it depicted Jesus as gay. What if a mob of enraged Christians, after a holy sermon at a neighboring church, had decided to torch the office of the New York Times because they ran a favorable review, or to burn down the theater? What if they killed hundreds of innocent bystanders in their rage? What if they issued a call to all faithful Christians to kill playwright Terence McNally for his blasphemy? Do you think the rampage would be described as “atheist-Christian riots”? Do you think leftists would call on the playwright to be more sensitive in future? Would the mayor of New York blame the theater? Yet when it comes to a far, far deadlier menace to our freedoms than fundamentalist Christianity, much of the left is silent or, worse, making excuses for this Islamist threat.

Sullivan blames P.C. moral relativism, but a bigger problem is that liberal-left and feminist ideologies tend to romanticize and place non-Western “oppressed” peoples on a higher moral plane. Much of the post-9/11 analysis on the far Left, for example, implicitly accepts the view that Western democracies are sites of extreme decadence and corruption as compared to the more “authentic” lives of people barely surviving in the Third World.

Sometimes this occurs as admiration, such as when Leftists admire Cuba for its lack of commercial billboards, and sometimes it is condescending, such as the Chomsky-ite thesis that poor people have no choice but to turn to terrorism.

Speak for Yourself, Andrew

In an exchange about weblogs on Slate, Andrew Sullivan has this to say,

But the speed with which an idea in your head reaches thousands of other people’s eyes has another deflating effect, this time in reverse: It ensures that you will occasionally blurt out things that are offensive, dumb, brilliant, or in tune with the way people actually think and speak in private. That means bloggers put themselves out there in far more ballsy fashion than many officially sanctioned pundits do, and they make fools of themselves more often, too.

I hate to break it to Sullivan, but some of us do actually fact check what we write on our weblogs and feel a need to be as accurate as possible.

What Sullivan is describing here is a personal problem — Sullivan is simply a old school pundit exploiting the weblogging format and like all such pundits, the goal is to speak as loud as possible and make the most outrageous claims for attention, with things like accuracy and fact checking coming in second.

When Sullivan claims his weblog entries are more hurried and likely to be wrong than his old media articles, surely he is speaking only in degrees. Sullivan has never struck me as a particular stickler for accuracy, especially when that might interfere with a good angle.

It is telling that when Sullivan took a break from his weblog for awhile, he managed to sucker Camille Paglia into covering for him. Could anyone imagine a more perfect replacement for Sullivan?

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

Maybe Andrew Sullivan and Michael Moore should get together and coauthor a book because each seems to share the same characteristic — they issue very harsh broadsides against perceived enemies, and then whine to no end when someone dare criticize them.

SpinSanity has come out on the short end of both Moore and Sullivan’s recent complaints about their respective critics.

SpinSanity has found a number of errors and distortions in the comments Sullivan posts to his web log. Individually, none of the errors really adds up to much, but taken together I have to agree with the SpinSanity folks that they show a pattern of someone who seems more interested than getting something quickly posted to his site than in getting it right. In one instance, for example, Sullivan erroneously summarized a New York Time story, indicating he didn’t read it all that carefully before posting about it.

In a chat hosted by the Washington Post, Sullivan replied to suggestions that SpinSanity and The Daily Howler keep pointing out errors on his sites with this retort,

Both those sites are ideological hit-machines.

If you look at my track record of around 1,000 words a day on my site, links to hundreds of other sites, comments day in and day out, you’ll find at most a handful of errors in 18 months, all immediately corrected or addressed. some of these “errors” are simply differing interpretations. But sure, I’ve made a handful of mistakes in the last year or so.

I don’t think it is fair at all to characterize SpinSanity as an “ideological hit machine” — although The Daily Howler certainly fits the bill. On the other hand, I am not sure what relevance at all that has. This sounds like the sort of whining that Justin Raimondo and others have done about the so-called “warbloggers.”

Being that it is a “ideological hit-machine,” SpinSanity has also earned the ire of Michael Moore in two separate articles that pointed out factual errors in Moore’s book as well as strongly suggesting that Moore plagiarized part of his book from an e-mail that had been circulating the Internet.

Moore’s response? SpinSanity is jealous of his book sales and public appearances. Here’s an exchange between Moore and Lou Dobbs,

DOBBS: Salon.com [which publishes SpinSanity’s columns] just took you to task on this book, pointing out glaring inaccuracies, which — what in the world…
MOORE: Some of these, I think they found some guy named Dan was named Dave, and there was another thing. But you know, look, this is a book of political humor. So, I mean, I don’t respond to that sort of stuff, you know.
DOBBS: Glaring inaccuracies?
MOORE: No, I don’t. Why should I? How can there be inaccuracy in comedy? You know.
. . .
DOBBS: It was metaphorical. And when you say that president…
MOORE: Well, your point was that Salon and others are like liberals, so why would they — actually, the only attacks on the book have come from liberals.
DOBBS: Is that right?
MOORE: Yes.
DOBBS: Perhaps that’s because, again, just dealing with what they know.
MOORE: Yes, maybe. Or maybe they’re just — some people get a little jealous. That’s what you do. “How come he’s on TV? He’s on Lou Dobbs! What’s going on?”

Moore’s position seems to be that it does not matter whether his book is accurate or not, and his critics are just jealous SOBs.

Both Sullivan and Moore would do well to focus on increasing their accuracy rather than launching ad hominems at their critics.

Sources:

News, Politics and U.S. Policy With Andrew Sullivan. Washington Post, April 9, 2002.

Spinsanity in the news. Spinsanity.Com, April 12, 2002.