More Sullivan’s travails…

I was going to bypass commenting on our pal Andy for a while since he is getting more blog time than he truly deserves. The fact of the matter is that Andrew Sullivan is a third-rate pundit who has become the flavor of the month since he has staked out his territory as the “gay, Catholic, neo-con” who latches onto every utterance from the administration as if were the revealed word, and then proceeds to use it to attack those poor, poor lefties who are only moments away from being swept into the dustbin of history. Meanwhile he gloms onto sodden contrarian Christopher Hitchens, by constantly exclaiming, ” Look! It’s me, Hitchens, and Orwell. The Abraham, Martin, and John of perspicacity! ” In terms of vicarious glamour, that’s a pretty low bar, even by Sullivan standards..(The day that Hitchens turns on Sullivan, I want to be there.)

So, having said all that…I want to note his little outtake from his Sunday Times column, which I’m not even going to link, that is up on his blog, which I’m also not going to link.

THE LEFT’S NEGATIVISM: “Ask the average leftist today what he is for, and you will not get a particularly eloquent response. Ask him what he is against, and the rhetorical floodgates open. That tells you something. Similarly, ask the average anti-war activist what she is for with regard to Iraq, what exactly she thinks we should constructively do, and the stammering and stuttering begins. Do we just leave Saddam alone? Do we send Jimmy Carter to sign the kind of deal he made with North Korea eight years ago? Will pressuring the Israelis remove the nerve gas and potential nukes Saddam has in his possession? Will ceding the West Bank to people who cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center help defang al Qaeda? They don’t say and don’t know. But what they do know is what they are against: American power, Israeli human rights abuses, British neo-imperialism, the “racist” war on Afghanistan, and on and on. Get them started on their hatreds, and the words pour out. No wonder some have started selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Central Park.” – from my latest Sunday Times piece on the anti-Semitism hijacking the anti-war movement

Aside from the fact that he now seems intent to convince us that the Left has become anti-Semitic just because we aren’t in lockstep with the Sharon government, Andy posits that the Left can’t tell him “what it is for”, proving that his ears are closed as his mind. The world and the blogoshere are full of people that can explain to him in simple words, that even George Bush can understand, what it is that they are “for”. He just has to choose to listen. But it’s so much easier for Andy to play the obtuse game which allows him to be bitchy, hysterical, and self-obsessed, as if the world needed yet another Ann Coulter..

So go ahead, Andy. Play the game to drive up those all-important hits to the Blog Where Logic and Reason Die. Maybe with a few more mentions of the dreaded Trinity of Streisand, Chomsky, and Sontag, you can attract the attention of a Scaife or Scaife-wannabe, which will lead to the Promised Land where all third-tier hacks ply their trade and fulminate for a meager paycheck: FrontPage magazine.

Bye bye Andy…and don’t forget to write.