andrew sullivan c/d

• surely singular in his online prowess/gayness/brand of conservatism
• weird irrational hatreds of clintons/palin
• enthusiasms pass through him like clouds on a windy day
• facebook/twitter/me will transform the islamic world
• unconvincing nods towards catholic thinkers
• 'sure i was wrong about these dozens of things, so what?'
• sometimes right, and steadfast re: torture

• sort of rly hot

monday: "THIS IS THE TRUTH AND YOU ARE WRONG AND TERRIBLE IF YOU DON'T ACKNOWLEDGE IT"
tuesday: "you are not a serious person if you don't see it this way"
wednesday: "there might be some flaws here"
thursday: "i never said it was perfect"
friday: "this thing is full of holes"

saturday: "look how honest and open-minded i am about admitting the holes in this theory"

sunday: "hey beardo, let's smoke up"

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/images/sullivan.jpg

i like him, tho i haven't read him in a while.

everyone always brings up his crazy post-9/11 spasm of calling liberals a 'fifth column' or whatever, but considering he's apologized for it like 4,000 times (the first time a few days after it happened) it seems a bit unfair to hold it against him now when there's about a million other pundits and bloggers who say that shit and worse every day. he's about as much of a 'conservative' as garry wills (and in pretty much the same, largely non-political way).

i'll take garry wills though!

i did not read him during the wisconsin thing -- i can't keep up unless i am amazingly bored at work -- but i understand he is not a union man

I'm completely mystified by the weight given to the opinions of this kook.

this guy's famous because he had/has an unusual-for-the-media personality (gay! religious! hawkish! libertariany!) and was online writing about politics at exactly the moment lots of people were starting to go online to read about it, and had something Big to Hold Forth About besides (the blog really started to roll, lol, right after 9/11). so he got super lucky. but i think he's totally fun just as a guy to have around; he has so many passionate, ill-considered convictions about so many semicontradictory things it is hard not to like him. i don't read him regularly at all though.

don't think he's just lucky - he's very hard-working & traditionally well-connected (old media pro, oxford (pres of the union), harvard).

just an absurd person, only on the internet

i mean i know he was big pre internet but only wired could he really let his freak flag fly, he seems genuinely insane and uncool to me

like his whole thing of trying to shoehorn contemporary american politics into traditional conservative thought 'sir you are not living up to the ideals laid down by mr locke!' - how out of it do you have to be

The Monday-to-Friday timeline posted above sums up his almost manic twists and turns well, but I started reading him in 2008, and I still do. My initial interest was his enthusiastic support for Obama, and that's still pretty much in place. (He tries hard to appear impartial, and it's sometimes funny when he makes a great show of scolding Obama for something.) Even for someone like me who finds Palin fascinating, his obsession with her can be wearing.

Juan Cole's tirade a few weeks ago was the best recent attack yet so irrelevant, you know? This is Andrew Sullivan.

I wrote a long thing about my history reading him.

He's all id, basically, for better or worse, which is why his willingness to apologize is refreshing. He do needs to stop posting so often – his weekend updates on birds, Episcopalian literature, and genome breakthroughs look like obvious circulation boosting.

his links are often golden, like the one he just put up, "the finland phenomenon: inside the world's most surprising school system"

a big portion of the stuff posted under his name nowadays is not actually by him

this is my all time fave sully quote:

"There are so many good reasons on both sides, so many different possible outcomes, that my only sure conclusion is that I'm glad I don't have to make a decision," - James Downie, on the Libya intervention.

Wise words. But a blogger has to take a position, even if not make a decision.

A BLOGGER HAS TO TAKE A POSITION

a new position!
let's go fishin' in the river of life

(From Alfred's piece linked to above) Longtime readers will have noticed that the bloom is DEFINITELY off the rose when it comes to Obama

I wouldn't go that far. His support of Obama isn't as unwavering as it was in 2008, agreed--that'd pretty much be impossible once someone starts governing--but he's still very supportive most of the time. He was tough on him over DADT, but eventually decided that Obama's handling of the matter made sense. He's been tough on some of Obama's budgetary and deficit dodges, but that comes and goes. When he has what he feels is cause to praise Obama--like with Bin Laden, or the Giffords speech--he still gushes. And I always get the feeling that he's looking to do that as often as possible.

But a blogger has to take a position, even if not make a decision, for an idea to reach fruition, and to see what condition, our condition is in, can I get a 'praise god.'

lol

I read Sully every day. I think his actual value (aggregate of links presented well and at a particular intelligence level) is underrated. I barely care about his opinions (he's pretty much wrong about everything tho admirable re legalization + sometimes torture) but he links to so many ppl that I wouldn't have the time to ferret out myself from such a broad range of opinions and thought that he's very useful to get links to much of the interesting stuff that shows up on the internet.

most recent example of Monday-Friday thing is Paul Ryan plan serious/adult on Monday dismissed by the end of the week. Also the birther-Palin thing is totally insane and no longer endearing.

yeah in that curatorial respect he's def served as a role model for me even if he's overkill sometimes

i'd say the major dichotomy for sully is that he reads broadly but w/ no depth

He can be an incisive, shrewd reader of texts when he wants, though, but yielding to the impulse to blog every twelve minutes surely can't help his reading habits.

I'm not convinced he's a great reader of texts. I can name a number of texts he totally misread (most recently his reading of Rush Limbaugh as praising Obama was pretty awful) but you could always say they are due to his lack of focus. I can't think of anything he has "shrewdly" read tho, at least off the top of my head.

Not to mention his poseur alert sometimes functions as a "I didn't understand this" alert

have you read Virtually Normal? His essay on friendship, using Moliere's as a base, is lovely.

Yeah, his interpretation of Limbaugh's monologue after Bin Laden's death was unbelievably off the mark. As soon as I started reading it--just words on a page, no audio--I thought, "Is he sure this is meant to be taken literally?" Limbaugh's sarcasm was as sledgehammer-obvious as ever.

yeah no doubt he's tone deaf, i attribute it to being british

((its joeks, its joeks))

Virtually Normal blew 18 yr old me away.

His blog was kind of interesting when he was actually going through his falling out of love with Bush conservatism identity crisis I guess. That long term shift underscoring all the short term reversals is kinda rare for such a big name, or rarely admitted to at least.

a big portion of the stuff posted under his name nowadays is not actually by him

he's the jim davis of bloggers!!

So what's his US Acres?

a big portion of the stuff posted under his name nowadays is not actually by him

ok, but no way this is true. when his interns take over all their bylines get slapped over his posts and he has disappeared during big events (one recently tho I don't remember the event) bc he's sick or whatever which would be impossible if someone else was writing his posts.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/sullivan-responds-to-ghostblogger-controversy-with-frontal-cortex-defense/

under-bloggers

well apparently i'm wrong. so the only thing that changes when he goes on vacation is that the underbloggers get to put their bylines up?

Yep, and sometimes it's not his minions but other bloggers (e.g. Ross Douthat).

As the Palin corpse shows signs of life, Sullivan's been pretty funny the past week trying to mask his glee and temper his five posts a day with deep concern about what a bad thing her candidacy would be for the country. He ought to be honest: anyone one who wants Obama to win in 2012 is praying she jumps in, for the political chaos and for the freak-show entertainment value. Especially Sullivan, whose obsession with her is boundless.

And as much as I loathe her, he ought to award himself one of his own Moore awards for conflating this upcoming documentary of hers with Triumph of the Will.

if he gets any more crazy for her theres gonna be a rabbit boiling in her kitchen

there's something a bit ironic about a guy whose political hero is reagan being so profoundly unsettled by the rise of a glib, ignorant demagogue, no?

oh c'mon: Reagan gave the impression that he had at least thumbed through a book. And he could write plain English.

I've stated my complete indifference towards Reagan before, but I agree that there was an intellect there (and politically, a formidable intellect)--and next to Palin, he practically came across like a Rhodes scholar.

I didn't get a chance to look at Sullivan yesterday, but I caught up this morning and count nine Palin posts--one of which links to a guy who pleads with the media to ignore her. (I guess I now become part of that chain: me expressing my disdain by posting on a guy who expresses his disdain by linking to a guy who expresses his disdain by...paying attention to Palin.)

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/06/dreaming-of-the-queen.html

Hertzberg on Sully

its funny--sullivan may not be the only guy writing, but the quality of the blog drops noticeably when hes gone

He is the brand. (Also given he's visiting the UK for the first time in forever for vacation RIGHT when this whole hacking clusterfuck bubbles up worse, I suspect he's gearing up for the mother of a post on that. Which given his general support of Cameron as the kindler/gentler conservative alternative to the GOP will be funny.)

xp otm, i stop reading it when he's not posting. i used to still read conor friedersdorf during these interludes since he at least wrote interestingly, but i haven't noticed him during this vacation -- maybe he's done filling in?

Conor F has a semi permanent spot at the Atlantic now, I think.

ok he wasn't THAT interesting

i like him, he's like a feisty kid brother who is sometimes surprisingly insightful

this guy bruce bawer really hates muslims huh

So he's updated a touch:

https://www.facebook.com/TheDishBlog

http://twitter.com/Dishfeed

http://twitter.com/sullydish

has he uploaded a new id?

That comes with next year's reboot.

i'm getting really tired of this guy

Catching up on some posts today. This cracked me up, responding to Perry's adventures today: "These two disgusting statements, in today's polarized climate, are, to my mind, a reason for Perry to withdraw, or for his party to disown this ugly, divisive, violent rhetoric." Geez, Andrew, he just got into the race two days ago. It's August of 2011--you might want to pace yourself a bit.

I've had two reactions to Sullivan the last couple of months: 1) In his longer posts, when he assesses the substance of what's going on, I still find he's often very perceptive. I don't think many people would agree with me on that. 2) On the other hand, he seems to be in complete denial when it comes to how politically precarious Obama's position is.

I would advise everyone (including myself) to pace themselves for the next fourteen months. Guys like Sullivan must by necessity devote a certain number of hours to Politico gossip and Beltway chatter. We can poke fun at Rick Perry while also reminding ourselves that nothing does more damage to serious change than the campaign cycle; now everyone in DC will concentrate on the election and not on the fucking mess we're in.

Let's also not forget that Sullivan is a conservative, at least a nominal one, and he believes Obama should have accepted the Bowles-Simpson recommendations as well as cuts to Social Security.

now everyone in DC will concentrate on the election and not on the fucking mess we're in.

I've seen two people make the same point today: Greenwald and (your favourite) Gergen.

Big and Lil G.

soto double otm

"Ben Smith infers that she will - from the way she behaved at the Iowa State Fair. Everything I know about her suggests she will. But Washington - Republican and Democrat - is convinced she's over. We'll see. I hope the establishment is right. But none of the current candidates seems viable to me."

He's talking about Palin, of course. Why does he persist in such a platitudinous lie? He wants her to run as badly as I do. It would a) be the greatest thing in the world for spiking readership on the Dish, b) be vastly entertaining, and c) come with no risk whatsoever--she'd undoubtedly do major damage to whoever emerges from the wreckage as the Republican nominee, significantly increasing (maybe even guaranteeing) the reelection of the guy he's rooting for. I wish he'd just say so for once.

he's taking another month off. am i wrong or have his vacations become longer and longer and more frequent?

The second reference to the awesomeness of Poppy Bush's foreign policy this week, this one alluding to the wisdom of Obama's:

s potent and nuanced a management of global politics as anything since George H W Bush.

What on earth did Poppy do that was so damn admirable -- in his own way he was as bellicose as Reagan (Panama) and as devious as Kissinger (basically elbowing Saddam into having a fit in the Middle East, then acting shocked when he invades Kuwait).

He was pretty savvy about the fall of the Soviet Union. Organized a good campaign at the UN and among NATO allies in lead-up to Gulf War I.

He may have been a devious fucker but he was far more competent that his son at getting shit done right.

Dunno if he deserves undue credit for the fall of the USSR. It was an impossible situation. Gorbachev gradually lost all domestic support, and international acclaim eventually destroyed him. Bush for years dithered between supporting Gorby or transferring this support to Yeltsin.

Iraq I was another war waged under dubious circumstances.

I didn't even mention a certain event in China in June '89.

In the light of his son's failures and the ideologues running for office these days, I appreciate the impulse to warm to Poppy's professionalism -- I'm guilty too -- but it's too easy to transform into a symbol of tweedy restraint.

I think he handled the fall of the USSR with great aplomb considering the stakes.

I think his diplomacy after Kuwait was invaded was pretty effective whatever you think about Glaspie etc...

I didn't even mention a certain event in China in June '89.

Sometimes a dude's just gotta blow chunks and pass out in another dude's lap. What can I say?

i suppose if i had to choose between reagan, bush I, bush II, and even clinton, i'd probably reluctantly opt for bush I as the best of a bad lot.

One heartbeat away from Pres Quayle...

Dunno if he deserves undue credit for the fall of the USSR.

oh none at all, but avoiding war over the pieces of a global empire is at least decent -- and historically unusual.

I didn't even mention a certain event in China in June '89.

so what should he have done?

is it just me or his blog super boring lately? I've been reading the blog for a bunch of years now, because I find the man, in all his batshitness, compelling, while rarely (at least since 2003) being malevolent. Which is to say: I like reading the man. But not a bunch of boring links. I don't really see how the blog as a link aggregator reflects the man, & I care about pretty much none of those links. I dunno: is something up with him so that he's not writing as much anymore (while just keeping the # of posts up by having his interns post lots of links each day)?

He employs interns and acolytes now. The death penalty "forum" was interesting. But I don't give a fuck about Palin or his obsession.

the rumor is that he's been pretty sick lately, though he looks okay in the recent video things

I'm tired of those curated "discussions", which is also just the work of acolytes. I'd be happy if they just filtered out Sullivan's own posts, even (& maybe especially!) if it's just one every couple of days.

(mostly this is me sighing at my rss feed overflowing yet again because I can't keep up with the volume, & Sullivan's the worst at this)

xp huh, yeah, that wouldn't surprise me

he is huffpo-lite, streamlined into one column

Breaking up is hard to do.

what a dumbass

9.50 pm. Ron Paul is now the leading candidate in Google searches in South Carolina. Hmmm.

GOOGLE EXIT POLL

too bad sully wasn't around to blog the 1860 elections

10.57 pm. A great night for Ron Paul:

Ron Paul quintupled his 2008 Virginia vote count, and because of the smaller turnout overall he octupled his percentage of the vote there. Paul tripled his 2008 result in Vermont, and he did the same in Oklahoma and Massachusetts. He is running ahead of his 2008 numbers in North Dakota, and he has a chance of scoring an upset in Idaho or Alaska.

A GREAT NIGHT

I try to keep social occasions off the blog since so much of my life is an open book. But it was a really magical evening. I'm a proud Tory and a proud American (almost a citizen) and to see my political party bond so effortlessly with a president I endorsed and admire was enormously gratifying. It made me feel saner, amid today's Republican madness.

I bumped into many people - we were next to John Legend and his fiancee and the British ambassador and his wife at dinner - and did have a brief and warm chat with the president. I think such things should remain confidential, but you should know that there's a Dish-reader in the Oval Office, and "not just the political stuff." So don't feel too guilty about our regular dips into pop-culture, high and low. POTUS gets the mix.

There were several openly gay couples present, which is change you really can believe in, and we entered with the future HRC head, Chad Griffin and his boyfriend. I also didn't realize the impact that the Newsweek Obama cover-story had on Obama donors and staffers until last night. So many people mentioned it. Oh, and George Clooney came up to say hi. Not since John Hamm came out as a Dish reader at the White House Correspondents' Dinner did such a shiver go up my leg.

The tent in the garden was gorgeous, as you can see above. And particularly poignant for Aaron and me: it was designed and produced by Bryan Rafanelli, who planned our own wedding. Good times. And a bit of a hangover.

I was going to link to that...makes me queasy too.

(The political incestuousness, I mean--don't want to be misconstrued.)

but you should know that there's a Dish-reader in the Oval Office, and "not just the political stuff."

PUKE

In other words, Obama appreciates beard fetishes.

vat a kantry

superfluous "-ry"

okay this is easily one of the most disappointing moments in obama's presidency

can't believe i once defended this guy: he's insufferable most of the time

I don't have problems defending him when I agree with him but I never, ever forget that he's a total dick

I don't fault Obama that much for issuing the invitation--the inherent political calculation is somewhat unseemly, but, as the saying goes, whatever. I don't fault Sullivan all that much for attending--in an ideal world he wouldn't, but I'm sure it's difficult to turn down an invitation like that. (I know I wouldn't.) It's writing about it in such a way that may not exactly be flaunting it, but is going to make anybody wonder, "And you're different from Fox how?" (I realize someone will ridicule the idea that anybody could ever have thought otherwise.)

If invited I would attend but would hope to have the good sense not to post a valentine.

lol wait, on what grounds should Sullivan have turned down the invitation

At the next such dinner:

"Greetings Dr. Morbius and Mr. Perrin. Are you together?"

"In a way..."

Sully is one of those guys who goes I HAD THE MOST INCREDIBLE NIGHT and when you ask what'd do he says nothing but smiles impishly and goes back to trolling bear-4-bear sites.

i can forgive the president for buttering up sullivan, like ive read the daily dish before okay, but encouraging his "not just the political stuff" just crosses the fn line - i pray that it was just some aide whispering in his ear 'and tell him not just the political stuff' and obama had no idea what he was talking abt

That's it (Alfred's earlier post)--it's the gushiness of the post that makes me queasy. And no attempt whatsoever to acknowledge the fine line he's treading. (The grounds would be, "Appreciate it, but I write about you 12 times a day, and supposedly I'm 'of no party' and beholden to no one." But again, I understand that he's a person before anything else, and that that's easier said than done. And admit that I wouldn't turn down the invitation either, were I him.)

WRT 'not just the political stuff' -- folks, you're sounding like what's his name from Homeland who was surprised that Obama watches his show. President again revealed to be wonky nerd, film at eleven.

sullivan has the worst taste in everything is basically what im reacting to fyi, homeland is sweet tho

andrew sullivan isn't someone for wonky people tho, like that's almost his problem

he is just kinda dumb

wdn't get in a room w/ either of the men in question, unless making a citizen's arrest

he likes Pet Shop Boys though

just hoping the he doesn't sing a few bars of 'west end girls' at the next fundraiser

xp lawl

for all sullivan's endless professions of noble orwellian objectivity, 'of no party,' etc etc, i can think of few political commentators more prone to gushy, uncritical hero-worship of powerful ppl.

Not since John Hamm came out as a Dish reader at the White House Correspondents' Dinner did such a shiver go up my leg.

Don Draper, I am disappoint.

should I post his 2002-era encomia to David Frum's pellucid prose voiced by Dubya?

I'd prefer if Sully went the weaselly George Will route and wrote Obama speeches while evaluating his debate performance in columns.

xpost -- Thank you, no. But it probably explains why he can never resist jabs at Hinderaker for his own comments on the mastermind that was W.

for all sullivan's endless professions of noble orwellian objectivity, 'of no party,' etc etc, i can think of few political commentators more prone to gushy, uncritical hero-worship of powerful ppl.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, March 15, 2012 3:28 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hes not the most self aware blogger in the blogosphere

i mean if you guys met andrew sullivan wouldnt you tell him you read his dumb blog

then write 300 words about it on mine

'I approached him with thoughts teeming through my head and said "I gotta question: the original version of "I Want a Dog" or the Introspective take?"'

whenever I do go to andrew sullivan's blog I just end up only looking at the 'picture from your window', he should just turn his blog into a 'picture from your window' tumblr

oh man, if Obama digs the Introspective mix of "I Want A Dog" I am not voting

'I approached him with thoughts teeming through my head and said "I gotta question: the original version of "I Want a Dog" or the Introspective take?"'

"Then he got excited (and I got excited too!)."

"No, really Andrew, Michelle and I followed up seeing Do the Right Thing by talking about how great "Domino Dancing" was. Man, can you believe some people hate that song?"

imagine a little avatar of me climbing into your web browser and punching the shit out of that post

watch the ned fall down

DJP of Persia

"My fellow Americans: at last, Guantanamo Bay has been emptied and the rule of law restored. We have made one exception for a man who once did the cabbage patch but thinks that songs like "Left to My Own Devices" and "I'm Not Scared" were somehow poor listening..."

the cabbage patch is a fine fine dance, you poor misguided dance heathen

I've no doubt, but I do not speak for the president.

Someone's upset:

And I should point out that, unlike Andrew Sullivan — a diseased criminal drug addict foreigner who should be deported

oh, that guy

Ah yes, the Other McCain. A bitter man, that one.

I don't really "get" why you guys read these ppl

It saves me the bother of having to go out looking for people to point and laugh at.

It saves me the bother of having to go out looking for people to point and laugh at.

apparently this is what I do

dan i don't have a good answer tbh

there is no reason to read andrew sullivan, he has never said anything interesting in like a decade

I like my token conservatives to at least be good trolls

I don't really "get" why you guys read these ppl

― thuggish ruggish Brahms (DJP)

I think it's connected to why they prefer "unintentional comedies"

my friend who is a cute hipster bear had sex w sully and they talked about ecstasy and religion afterwards

which kind of E?

I think it's connected to why they prefer "unintentional comedies"

You're likely onto something.

god Sullivan sounds like one of those guys who insists on talking meaningfully after sex

I don't always agree with him but Sullivan's not a bad political blogger. He's kind of a big puppy but that's kind of entertaining and I have learned to skip a lot of his obsessions

Sullyswoon fits perfectly w/ pattern of megacrushes I've observed that Professional Gays have had on the last two Imperial Stewards w/ a "D" after their name: "Oooooh, the captain of the team TALKED TO MEEEEE!"

Point 6 of Greenwald's latest dispatch brings the Sullivan lolz

"tmmrw, in series 56 of greenwald's ongoing series about the hypocrisies of modern political life, glenn will examine in 15 parts how american liberals defend obama. part 13, points 36 through 92 deal extensively with jonathan chait's own failings on this issue. 92 through 153, and appendixes g-k deal with andrew sullivan."

^ prefers to talk about the Robert De Niro joke

1. i don't know what that is
2. is lent over already?

doesn't greenwald's obsessions with the minutia of daily punditry bullshit annoy you at all? he's just as bad as politico, just one step removed. writing about how other writers are superficial doesn't somehow make you less superficial.

that describes what is annoying about like 95% of the political commentary I see on the internet

I'd be happy with an ocassional statement relating the minutia to the bigger picture, or noting that it is minutia. Also, it would be interesting if Greenwald suddenly began getting included in more mainstream outlets, and if the mainstream media would at least address some of these items so they would not seem like Greenwald's little hobby horses. The whole killing an American without due process issue has largely been ignored by much of the mainstream media. No one really asked Obama about it at his last press conference.

we currently have a state where it is legal to shoot and kill someone under the guise of "standing your ground"; due process is and has always been a fucking fantasy in this country

I cannot address political matters as Pope Mordy points out, but some churches do not count Fridays as part of Lent.

Go eat a capybara.

Always keep up my ACLU membership as they support legal battles for due process everywhere

xps "stand your ground" laws exist in like 16 states fyi, which obviously just strengthens your point

I'm going to respond to Goldblog's unhinged, thin-skinned rants against me in due course, but it's worth noting how he conducts debate. He resorts either to authoritah - my critics are too uninformed and dumb to engage - or to marginalization of his opponents.

lol referring to him as goldblog

i know a lot of ppl here don't like goldblog (for good reasons tbh), but sullivan really looks like a child when arguing with him.

i just found it amusing to see him accuse someone else of unhinged rants

They both seem like children to me no matter who they are arguing with.

oh plz.

Good God. The utter lack of engagement with the arguments of a book that has yet to be published is revealing - and the deployment of personal matters as a way to smear someone is exactly the same tactic as Jeffrey Goldberg's abuse of private matters, like his version of a conversation we once had

that's what this is all about. sullivan is embarrassed bc goldberg spilled the beans that his conversion on israel was about his love for obama. doesn't everyone already know that sullivan seems to know frightfully little about israel, middle east, etc and switches his opinion based on the political climate? dude's entire shtick these days is practically, "i used to believe X but now i believe the total opposite."

I'm sure I'm the last person still interested in any of this, but Sullivan in never-never land today:

"...like Joe Klein, I'm beginning to think that Eric Fehrnstrom's description of his own candidate as an Etch-A-Sketch, capable of erasing anything he has believed or said in the past instantly, is close to a disqualifying comment."

Ignoring for a second that the election is still 7-8 months away, ignoring whatever accidental truth there is to what the guy said, and ignoring that he posted this on a day where Obama reminded everyone of his own problems in that area, should he maybe take into consideration that it was something said by somebody on the campaign, not Romney himself? Disqualifying comment? "I'm suspending my campaign as of today; someone who works for me said something stupid."

Later on in the same post, he accidentally returns to reality: "But what does it say about Obama's strength that he's still polling only four or five points over this gaffe-prone robot?"

This is precisely why Etch-a-Sketch was funny exactly two seconds. A campaign aide made a remark that Reinforced A Narrative? really?

I can see where the story will make Romney needlessly squirm some more during the nomination. (Gingrich has a good ad up today.) Trying to carry the story over into the general seems silly to me.

Today on the Dish, Andrew wondered if America was on the road to post-Obamacare single payer while we detailed the specific path down that route, noted the somewhat circumscribed role of the mandate, guessed at whether the Medicad expansion would get thrown out by SCOTUS, cautioned against seeing the Constitution in black-and-white, developed a timeline for hearing the Court's decision, compared Obama's fight with the Court to Bush's, and forecasted the negative consequences of the mandate's defeat for Obama's reelection campaign.

he wondered, noted, guessed, cautioned, developed, compared, and forecasted. what a renaissance man!

so boring lately

so is this guy like a lutheran now or what

http://feministing.com/files/2012/05/newsweek.jpg

Yes, I am ready to eat jellyfish.

http://media.salon.com/2012/05/sullivan-460x307.jpg

what a fuckwit

Honestly, considering he could've died of AIDS as a wunderkind, it's great to see him bald and grey.

haven't read his blog in months and much happier for it, i think

uh, he's been bald since before he was placing ads for sex (while decrying gay promiscuity). xp

Posted on the Marriage to Alfred thread.... G.G. chronicles Sullivan's move from indifference toward Obama's "evolution" to full-on Daddy weeping:

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/andrew_sullivans_father_figure/

yeah I finally pulled him out (lol) of my reader & have been happier too, though I guess less knowledgable about the hott blogggg topics of the day. the news these days, it happens too fast.

This guy's such a courtier.

first black president (clinton edition)/first gay president is such a grossly cute way to talk abt things

besides i thought lincoln was the first gay president

Buchanan

This guy's such a courtier.

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, May 14, 2012 1:58 PM (2 days ago)

He seems to have been saddended by this judgment. (Well, not yours specifically but imagine if.)

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/05/pressuring-the-president.html

I closed that window yesterday, unwilling to be moved by the 0.0004456 of a percentage separating Glenn Greenwald and Sully's views on sodomy and civil liberties.

But but but the splitting of hairs

Friedersdorf shakes his head. It's a fair review: why Sully is infuriating yet so readable.

Will Wilkinson as well:

http://bigthink.com/ideas/does-andrew-sullivans-obamaphilia-make-sense

And Sullivan responds and etc:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/05/pressuring-the-president-ctd.html

lol that url does-andrew-sullivans-obamaphilia-make-sense

Spurred on by all the bad news for Obama last week, Sullivan has been in overdrive the last two or three days. It's June 11--I do believe he's headed for some sort of meltdown if Obama starts consistently running behind in the polls.

it's either that or posts with headlines like "Can Beagles Be Trained to Parachute?"

Wishin' and hopin':

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/06/the-core-reality-of-this-campaign.html

Skipping how Romney measures up against normal campaign legerdemain--I imagine he's worse than most, although not all that much worse--I'm quite sure Nixon in '72 (and probably '68, too) takes that prize with room to spare.

Yes, I take major exception to Romney being the most mendacious of candidates. He's got serious competition.

man this guy is really all about foreskins

Headline today: How Hot Is Hell?

Still taking time out for the occasional View from Bain Capital Your Window.

Tom Hardy says he experimented with gay sex. There are rumors that he played Bane in the latest Batman movie. I have to say: I couldn't tell. And couldn't understand almost anything he said. What a steaming pile of crap that movie was.

I know I've been the only person waiting for this:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/08/paul-ryan-vs-fiscal-conservatism.html

"But he is, in some ways, a pellucidly bright plant bred in the conservative movement's hydroponic greenhouse." Exactly--that's why his ears are big and his clothes don't fit.

Some nicely turned phrases by Sullivan in that post. Maybe he had extra time to work on it over his vacation. It's a more persuasive conservative dis on Ryan than the David Stockman op-ed that ran in the NY Times last week.

Sez he's planning on attending Burning Man next year:

After years of nagging by my most relentless partner in crime, I've agreed to go next year. In an RV.

oh for jesus sake

Anyone who had the BurningMan - Hillary4Prez quinella yesterday, don't forget to stop by the window to collect.

NSFW

haha damn dude

Jesus. I'm in a public place reading that, kind of not noticing the giant picture everyone around me can see...

But a question: If someone is that out of touch with reality, why are they given jobs as analysts in television or the newspapers? If a dentist drilled into your forehead rather than your tooth, he'd be accountable. Those paid handsomely to examine the American social and political landscape can miss by the same mile and blithely carry on as if nothing had happened.

Agreed (he's specifically talking about George Will). But didn't Sullivan himself flat-out declare that Obama was finished after the first debate?

lol @ this dude of all people saying this

Write to him and tell him that! He'd happily publish it as a Dissent of the Day. xp

I might, though I'm pretty sure he'd say the same thing he always says: he's a blogger, not an analyst, and his job is to write down his immediate reactions unfiltered. That's his umbrella explanation for everything.

Andrew Sullivan is the unfrozen caveman lawyer of bloggers

this fucking guy

But he just got RE-ELECTED. It's a classic time for magnanimity - and yet he began the critical negotiations by poking the defeated GOP in the eye. This is not the new politics. It's the old partisanship. I hope it works. I fear it won't.

re Obama's new belligerence.

I just heard David Brooks on NPR saying something similar: deep down GOP realizes Obama has a mandate to raise taxes on the rich, but they need some time to get their head around it, so Obama needs to be gentle with them.

"I can't believe he's acting like the president he said he was going to be!"

It's a classic time for magnanimity

It was tried in the past with the very same people and they responded, let's say, poorly. Why repeat a failed experiment?

my idea of magnanimity: everyone making over 100 G gets their fucking taxes raised back to 1980 levels

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mebdkuJ2ey1qz4zx9o1_1280.jpg

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110527083832/lotr/images/b/bf/Lurtz_2.jpg

so I went to Mass in Chelsea tonight, and exchanged the ritual Sign of Peace (ie, a handshake) with a bearded, squat congregant -- guesswho?

...Santa?

think more British and "tortured"

Shoulda told him about this place.

Anyway, going independent/pay model, 19.99 a year.

lol

sofa's reallly not working for me, but maybe its just a big dog bed

You get a free sofa if you sign up?

Free used beagle sofa.

Beagle not included.

Anyway, already making bank:

Basically, we've gotten a third of a million dollars in 24 hours, with close to 12,000 paid subscribers (at last count). On average, readers paid almost $8 more than we asked for....If our goal was an annual income of somewhere around $900K (we erred on the safe side), we have gotten a third of the way there in 24 hours, which is why we're all somewhat gob-smacked.

I guess if I peace him in church again, slipping him a $20 is... something I won't do.

I'm not sure that would be any worse than the collection plate...

Twenty bag might be appreciated by him though

At the Movies with Morbz and Sully

oh I don't give cash to Cardinal Dolan.

Hallelujah

Responding to a critique of Girls:

So few qualities in the men? Have you seen Adam with his shirt off? Have you never fantasized about fucking a carpenter with sawdust under his fingernails just after he fixed your creaking door? (#SullyTMI: I pulled that one off in real life in 1989).

if i fucked a carpenter

fucking a carpenter

this is some weird catholic shit, right?

Sawdust under fingernails sounds really uncomfortable.

"See, when I meant 'no glove no love'..."

I see he's in a major retrospective/info dump mood today

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/03/22/flies-collecting-on-a-wound/

In the summer of 2000, when I foolishly found myself wanting Al Gore to lose (Excelsior!), it was not a strong emotion. In the campaign, Gore was the advocate for a larger defense budget and Bush was all about being a “humble” nation. I figured there wasn’t much difference between them (and I still think Gore would have launched the Iraq War as well).

pretty sure sully becomes a rabid anti-war activist from day one in this alternate universe.

I started reading him regularly in 2002. Was he a pill or what. My memory is of he running a play by play of the troops reaching Baghdad while he called out pussies, wimps,.and traitors

lol @ Gore invading Iraq

yeah, that's just stupid. i can imagine gore doing some clinton-style bombings but the iraq war happened because cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitz, et al got into power, not because it was some kind of inevitable black hole that any president would've been sucked into. pretty much any president who wasn't as stupid and arrogant as W would've held off on an actual invasion.

Saddam never tried to kill Gore's daddy

I'm sure someone can find remarks on ILX in which I said Gore, going by what I knew of him as the hawk in the Clinton White House, might have invaded Iraq. To call for war when necessary doesn't mean an endorsement of all wars, of course.

i think we def would have been at war in afghanistan had gore been president, beyond that it's hard to play carnac

i mean, assuming 9/11 still happened

we might be at war in pakistan or iran instead! or the gulf!

yeah Afghanistan was a foregone conclusion after 9/11. Iraq, not so much

of course, had we been under a gore admin from 01 to 09 we probably would not be under an obama admin now. assuming the economy stayed on a similar track (no reason to think it wouldn't) we might be under a GWB44 at the moment

confounding variable is that the right would have done everything possible to destroy a president gore from 9/12 onward. if the 02 midterms went similarly, maybe they would succeed in impeaching him. a president lieberman! we might be in iraq no matter what...

Lieberman woulda gone for Iran imho

who knows? butterfly effect, man. We'd probably be speaking American English, but with clicks instead of consonants. and frozen yogurt would've come back strong by now.

This fucking guy.

Most influential political writer of the generation?

nah

dipshittiest political writer of his generation for sure

Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement? And after Romney’s convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.

His diatribe against Alec Baldwin the other day--one of the early ones; there've been a few now--was good.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/06/29/you-are-worthless-alec-baldwin/

(Don't go looking for anything via his archives, use search instead, unless you enjoy a barrage of subscription pop-ups.)

NYT conservative columnist quotes libertarian writer to make unsupported broad point

Most influential political writer of the generation?

I think he deserves a lot of credit for being way out in front on this issue, and reading his 1989 New Republic essay, its surprising how prescient his thinking was. However, its very hard to assess how much the huge swing in national opinion on this was due to his personal influence. For one thing, he was making the "conservative" case for gay marriage, and from my reading of the political history, it hasn't been conservatives out in front on this issue, so I'm not sure how much impact his arguments had.

I think "conservative" was the sugar casing for the pill – a palliative. Especially in the nineties ("OK, well, gays CAN be like you and me")

Sully goes to Burning Man. This'll be something.

relevant as ever

"Sometimes the point of a vacation is to vacate."

i'm sure he works very hard, but i mean, he needs to vacate from ptown?

By midnight, Andrew Sullivan, the 50-year-old political reporter and New York night life newbie, had already ripped off his white dress shirt in favor of the black tank top underneath and tugged at Mr. Maisani's elbow, asking him for some Jägermeister.

this guy's obsession with Jagermeister over the years is the most repulsive thing about him.

That's saying something! (Not disagreeing.)

Sipping Jager like a single malt! What the fuck?

'Oh myyyy...', etc.

From twink to bear … the cycle of gay

Speaking of, I spent a desultory Sunday afternoon reading his fall 2001/early 2002 archives. From fink to bear...the cycle of fey.

https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/497058322751975424

nothing huh

pundit TMI

who among us hasn't wished for more back hair

Bob Hoskins RIP

i get tired of:
-so many posts about religion, jesus, etc
-south park references, fuck that show imo

i enjoy:
-some of his posts about sexuality, usually when he collates others' writing on the subject, i don't always enjoy his own writing on it
-his pot activism

He sures loves complaining about radical leftist feminists!

yea that's annoying. tbh i don't often read anything he actually writes apart from the pot activism stuff, i just go there because he pulls together a bunch of interesting stuff from the rest of the web

I got the impression that Saturdays were for sex and culture posts and Sundays were for faith & religion posts. Maybe I was just imagining it.

oh could be, i just never pay attention

In 2008, from the Iowa primary onwards, I'd be checking his site every 15 minutes--it was like a clearing house for everything that was happening, and we were rooting for the same person. In 2012, I'd take a look every few days; the debate meltdown was funny. I hardly ever look at him anymore. I'd say it's about half because of loss of enthusiasm on my part, half that he lost me when he started what seemed like a complicated pay scheme.

My minor pet peeve with the site (and I'm a subscriber) is that unless Sullivan is gone, none of the posts have bylines. He has a big staff of writers, editors and contributors, yet they're never created for the work they do, creating the misleading impression that he's authoring all that content. That seems like something he'd gripe over if another big media site did it.

Anyway, I probably won't resubscribe unless his 2016 election coverage is sensational. The site has seemed removed from the subjects that interest me lately.

i kind of feel like a dick for doing this but one way to view the subscribers-only non-truncated posts is to right-click the post's title & "open in a new private window"

I wouldn't feel too guilty about that. For all the hubbub he makes about the importance of supporting independent journalism and all of that, so much of what that blog does is link to outside content and other sites' reporting and analysis. If anything I feel guilty that I'm supporting that aggregation over sites that do actual journalism.

I understand outside sites benefit greatly from his links, too, so it's a symbiotic relationship, but still, one party is doing significantly more work than the other

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2015/01/28/a-note-to-my-readers/

welp

that post endorsing Chait was a suitable last straw

RIP - i read sullivan for a year or two back when he was still at the atlantic. some things he always did well (primarily social issues) and some things he has always been horrible with (geopolitics)

still read him every day, often nervously

And now, where will you go?

Damn, end of an era. Can't believe he's crossing the blogger rubicon

https://twitter.com/johnjcook

it's always been hard to take this dude seriously because of his support of the iraq invasion. how can someone so "smart" be that dumb?

as a general rule, you won't go too far wrong ignoring any political writer who was wrong on iraq in 2003

see also: jonathan chait

I can't think of any political writer that was right on iraq in 2003 unless Seymour Hersh counts

the general preponderance of willful ignorance and cynical opportunism was mind-blowing

why does anyone care about andrew sullivan

gay rightwingers are funny

is there any issue on which he's still a rightwinger?

being 'a rightwinger who's not really a rightwinger' seems like such a great shortcut to undeserved attention

yeah that was a cheap shot but after yesterday's political correctness bullshit he deserves it

xp

is there any issue on which he's still a rightwinger?

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 28, 2015 2:32 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

charles murray

Most of his shit these days is aggregated, with the occasional splenetic outburst to remine people tbat he's a dick and his "A Prayer for Today" twaddle.

Dude was editor of Thw New Republic during its 18th Brumaire phase; every mastheas Dem waa as conservative and insufferable as he.

loves Obama, still a rightwinger

Was gonna make that B- joke.

i lol'd

is there any issue on which he's still a rightwinger?

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 28, 2015 8:32 PM (32 minutes ago)

uncritical adoration of ronald reagan?

or i dunno, maybe that's a bipartisan thing at this point

the recent bell curve apologist stuff...

The timing of this is really a slap in the face, just a year after going all in on this ad-free independent blogging model, touting himself as a model for others to follow.

And accepting a ton of money from readers to do so, right?

Yup. Also for all his self-congratulatory posts about what a strong community his team and his readers have created, the truth is it's not strong enough to survive with out him and his distinct voice and perspective. There's no way that site will carry on as a reader-sustained, ad-free venture without him. It's over.

http://mashable.com/2013/01/03/andrew-sullivan-daily-dish-third-million/

Time to cash out, suckers!!

wow that's crazy

Happy Tenth Anniversary of Andrew Sullivan's Previous Blogging Hiatus

As you can see in the accompanying screenshot of Sullivan's Dish archives, in the nine months following Sullivan's 2005 announcement that he was stepping down from blogging, he updated The Dish 1,564 times.

Andrew Sullivan is not retiring from blogging.

http://tktk.gawker.com/happy-tenth-anniversary-of-andrew-sullivans-previous-bl-1682343500

It's a lucrative gig and he's good at it, so yeah it doesn't seem unreasonable to speculate he'll be back. Especially if he remains financially vested in the Dish; the incentive to return to blog up the 2016 election has got to be huge.

people aren't gonna come back to his pay model after getting burned

Not to get too speculative/cynical, but he could use this as his hiatus to parachute away from the dish, then return to blogging in the year to cover the elections for some other site that would probably pay much better. The hunger for election coverage is going to be huge, and I could see a few sites bringing him on as a renter the way NYtimes did Nate Silver

lmao the dean hits on what's really important

https://twitter.com/rxgau/status/560554662815076352

(yes that is from like 1min ago heh)

Checked in hourly during the last few months of the 2008 election. Not too often the past few years.

oh xgaupaws

"he could crank it out ps eat shit"

Great now I'm gonna be singing "Fuck any pipsqueak" to the tune of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" for the rest of the day

"What does Robert Christgau do in bed? You know, is he a pipsqueak-fucker?"

Charles Pierce:

Andrew Sullivan has given up blogging again until he starts blogging again. (Too bad, I was hoping to be called a Fifth Columnist again, having been born too late for the Red Scare.) During the Chait-Coates dust-up, Sullivan chimed in with another defense of his tenure as editor, and another explanation of why the sourest bilge of scientific racism, spruced up by The New Republic for a new century, was worthy of debate. The fact is that TNR, which already was headed for Crazytown because it was owned by a bigot and a maniac, accelerated in that direction under his command. And it wasn't just The Bell Curve, either. It was Betsy McCaughey's tobacco-industry knob-gobbling hit-piece on Hillarycare. It was using Stephen Emerson, a crackpot so garish that even Fox News won't have him any more, to "debunk" the October Surprise story. It was he who was her editor when Shalit began to steal everything that wasn't nailed down from other publications. Her reward was to write a completely meretricious piece on affirmative action at The Washington Post. He also hired Stephen Glass, which turned out to be good for a laugh, anyway. (He seems to have been a little weak on the editing aspects of being an editor.) For those of us who watched what happened to that magazine, and who chafed under the entire notion that, on the big issues of the past 35 years, it had anything to say about progressive politics beyond the bacon-wrapped scallop liberalism of a very insular Beltway circle jerk, and who believed that political writing in this country could use a lot less TNR in its DNA, this has been a very good week.

the bacon-wrapped scallop liberalism of a very insular Beltway circle jerk

ok this lily is way gilded - circle jerks are insular by definition, no? - yet "bacon-wrapped liberalism" deserves enshrinement

jerks within jerks

depends on how big the circle is

you could all be facing out i guess

take it the sex droughts thread, guys

http://pando.com/2015/01/28/andrew-sullivan-is-not-the-future-of-journalism/

Wow. Thanks, J.D. And I started reading the dear in 2001.

Here's what this man was posting in March 2003: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2003/03/page/3/

ouch. this is painful, horrible reading.

at the very least, it's a good antidote to any lingering positive feelings i might have had about the guy.

It’s really wonderful to watch apologists for inaction now have to watch as action defeats evil. They will change the subject; they will attack those who got this entire story right while they got it entirely wrong. But they will never reconsider. That would require the kind of open mind that Conason jettisoned years ago. The forces of evil are being dealt a terrible blow on the battle-field. But their chattering enablers are about to be politically annihilated.

Last post on Friday.

Hope he just does this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE

RIP:

I’m known for changing my mind, when the facts change. But on this, I remain convinced that we were more than right to elect Obama twice. His even temperament, his endurance of so many slings and arrows, his integrity and his patriotism loom large at this moment, but will seem, in my view, even larger from the rear-view mirror. We will miss this man when he is gone; and I am deeply proud of having played some small part in framing the case for him, and in seeing it through.

Ah yes. One last time with feeling.

Meep meep, motherfuckers. Meep Meep.

At least shaking his hand at Mass convinced me to stop going to church. Never been back.

I’m known for changing my mind, when the facts change

lol

a Groucho Marxist

"those are my opinions. if you don't like them, I have others"

"those are my opinions. if you don't like them, I have others wait til you get a load of these...."

Lots of retrospective posts and do-you-remember-whens today. From 2004:

Well, I could easily be wrong, but I have a feeling Cheney will crush Edwards tonight. The format is God’s gift to Daddy. They’ll both be seated at a table, immediately allowing Cheney to do his assured, paternal, man-of-the-world schtick that makes me roll on my back and ask to have my tummy scratched. (Yes, I do think that Cheney is way sexier than Edwards. Not that you asked or anything.)

what's the opposite of asking

Okay, that's just...ew. And Sullivan is one of my favorite hate reads, but I don't read it for Re-puke porn.

https://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/andrew-sullivan-i-was-wrong-cover2.png?w=244&h=391

So I miss this blog. Are there any other good general-discussion blog heavy on politics that I should be reading in its place? Seems like a very big readership to just send into the wind without a clear successor

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

Not sure if that's a joke suggestion or not. I do read the Corner from time to time, because it's nice to read smart conservative opinions, but I'm looking for something a little less ideologically rigid (and borderline hateful)

Larison often shrewd about GOP foreign policy pieties.

u should read twitter

chait stepping into the vacuum, it seems

i miss this blog too!

He must be giving an earful tonight to whoever's sitting next to him at the bar / on the beach.

One-day return:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2015/06/26/it-is-accomplished/

His 1989 article advancing "a (conservative) case for gay marriage" is worth a read:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/79054/here-comes-the-groom

I haven't been keeping up, so this was probably posted in the political thread:

https://newrepublic.com/article/138951/beyond-hope-barack-obama-legacy-age-trump

It's a roundtable on Obama, and Sullivan's part of it. Unsurprisingly, his is the most uncritical evaluation, so much so that he's ridiculed by the other participants more than once.

It’s easy to mock this reductionism, I know, but it reflects something a little deeper. Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning more, on average, than whites? Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years. In the late 19th century, as most worked in hard labor, they were subject to lynchings and violence across the American West and laws that prohibited their employment. They were banned from immigrating to the U.S. in 1924. Japanese-American citizens were forced into internment camps during the Second World War, and subjected to hideous, racist propaganda after Pearl Harbor. Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?

His primary question is worth asking. His coyly suggested (but simultaneously denied) answer, that "they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work", is based on little more than stereotyping - which he (again, coyly) suggests are "true stereotypes" w/o offering any hint of evidence.

That is opinion writing at its laziest. Ask a worthwhile question, then give a worthless answer made up of anecdotes and intellectual sweepings.

As some folks on twitter have pointed out, Sullivan never read this article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/14/asian-americans-used-to-be-portrayed-as-the-villains-how-did-they-become-a-model-minority/?utm_term=.e29c96639c44

Sullivan's take is lazy and not well-researched, compared to the Jeff Guo & Daron Taylor Washington Post article I posted..

Well, Sullivan seems forever locked in competition with Jonah Goldberg to see who can push out the laziest, least-researched copy, so.

After commenting on this I went to the kitchen and as I started cooking supper the truly poisonous racist assumptions that are hiding in plain sight in that paragraph jumped out at me. wtf were you thinking, Andrew Sullivan?

His primary question is worth asking. His coyly suggested (but simultaneously denied) answer, that "they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work", is based on little more than stereotyping - which he (again, coyly) suggests are "true stereotypes" w/o offering any hint of evidence.

That is opinion writing at its laziest. Ask a worthwhile question, then give a worthless answer made up of anecdotes and intellectual sweepings.

Not worth asking

i mean it's _worth asking_ (assuming you, for whatever reason, haven't given the idea serious thought before) why some minority groups are more well-off than others. though it's probably a more appropriate question for google.com than an op-ed

I'm not sure what 'primary question' exactly is being talked about here, like

why have asian-americans been so successful in many way = question worth asking

does asian-american success prove that racism is actually nbd = question not worth asking

though I got the impression that Aimless was talking about the former?

Asian-American and Jewish men are not seen as threats to white male supremacy

I’ve always felt a little insecure about my homosexuality because I’ve never really understood camp. Well, I do understand it as a concept; it just doesn’t come naturally to me.

And is it any wonder that reactionaries are gaining strength? Within the space of 50 years OR SO SINCE REAGAN SLASHED TAXES ON THE RICH, America has gone from segregation to dizzying multiculturalism; from traditional family structures to widespread divorce, cohabitation, and sexual liberty; from a few respected sources of information to an endless stream of peer-to-peer media; from careers in one company for life to an ever-accelerating need to retrain and regroup; from a patriarchy to (incomplete) gender equality; from homosexuality as a sin to homophobia as a taboo; from Christianity being the common culture to a secularism no society has ever sustained before ours.

ftfy andy

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/andrew-sullivan-why-the-reactionary-right-must-be-taken-seriously.html

speaking of reactionary

I don't wanna cross-pollinate too much between the stupid people thread and this one, but this New York magazine gig has really hammered home for me how well the old description "a stupid person's idea of a smart person" applies to Sullivan. He's superficially well-read, and can write a whole sentence with no punctuation errors in it, but he's a fucking imbecile.

the most withering read of Andrew Sullivan is the one by Sarah Schulman, in Gentrification of the Mind pic.twitter.com/rQ31B7WPet

— Sarah Nicole Prickett (@sylvia__north) February 2, 2018

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/andrew-sullivan-will-there-always-be-an-england.html

send this guy back to his imaginary white kingdom

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DgTnf4OVQAA9U15.jpg:small

Of course, as a lot of people have pointed out on twitter already, the Dems already offered him the wall a couple of times in their big immigration reform deals, and he refused it.

Honestly. Andrew Sullivan is tiresome. You can't have that high church pomposity yet celebrate yourself as a heretic. It comes out as a wash.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) March 30, 2018

Fun lil' thread here

Holy cow. Sullivan got a federal simple possession charge tossed because he was rich and famous and his citizenship application was pending. Now he wants a wall. https://t.co/MvEk2PH61l

— Charles, Star of Mic Dicta (@Ugarles) June 23, 2018

he really loves people in power huh

i wish someone had nuked the 90s new republic from space

he really loves people in power huh

― the bhagwanadook (symsymsym),

he loves daddies

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/did-trump-just-help-stop-brexit.html

I accidentally read a few paragraphs of this without checking the byline at all and I was like who is this catastrophizing accelerationist madman writing for nymag? Jesus he's fucking lost it. I knew this when he was obsessing over the Palin children, but why is he still getting paid by anyone to write this lunatic dribble?

andrew sullivan’s newest column is complete garbage and i’m embarrassed to be even tangentially associated with it

— brian feldman (@bafeldman) August 3, 2018

Everyone's dunking on Andrew Sullivan but you can hardly blame him for his feeble attempt to reason when he's cursed with the sloping brow and shallow brainpan of an Irishman.

— Michael T Sweeney (@mtsw) August 3, 2018

lolll

Hate this overpaid asshole

a bologna sandwich with a British accent

https://splinternews.com/andrew-sullivan-can-fuck-right-off-1828090872

so repulsive.

to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle

he is a middle-aged adult and he has been getting paid for 15 or however many years to indulge his fetishization of white masculinity in a weekly column. it's so empty, stupid and disgusting.

as a male-presenting queer with facial hair who is attracted to power and masculine bodies i at least appreciate his existence as a lesson about mistakes not to make. many people just cannot see beyond their own asshole and the last thing one of those people should become is a pundit.

i'm told he's written a climate piece

does he still need Daddy

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D8ekQxiUYAAcqRB.jpg

How to suck themselves?

Worst person ever.

i used to read sullivan's atlantic blog daily. a lot can change in 12 years.

I got off the ride back when he was losing his shit about some conspiracy theory involving Sarah Palin’s grandchild. The man’s not well.

Apparently I make the same post every time this thread gets bumped.

The poster formerly known as ice cr?m OTM 8 years ago

he seems genuinely insane and uncool to me

man this guy is really all about foreskins

― he bit me (it felt like a diss) (m bison), Friday, June 29, 2012 2:40 PM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm?

and bearskins

forever dud

*sings to rod stewart's "forever young"*

She decided to include what she calls a "myth" about "large sex organs" among African-Americans. As a test to see just how fact-checked these essays were, I merely asked her what sources she had that this is indeed a "myth." 2/

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 6, 2020

I realize that your brain has been broken ever since TNC surpassed you in acclaim as an essayist and wrote books people actually bought and read, but re-embracing race pseudoscience invented by slavemasters is not the way to validate yourself.

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) January 6, 2020

dud

My favorite non-Adam Serwer response to this:

How much do you spend on https://t.co/8vBv2C1H9f subscriptions my man

— ㋐esthetic🏳️‍🌈boysposter (@anarchotokonoko) January 6, 2020

that link was "blacked.com"

Revised 90s TNR cover:

pic.twitter.com/rrlmT6o4Hw

— David Gómez Trujillo 💀 (@DGomezTruj) January 6, 2020

I spent a rather long afternoon with Andrew Sullivan at Christopher Hitchens' place ages ago. It was Father's Day. Sully was a condescending dick. From all the noise, I'm guessing that's still the case.

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) January 6, 2020

whew, im glad we got dennis perrin's take on this thread, was worried he didnt have anything to say on this

finger on the pulse

yes but how long was it

whew, im glad we got m bison's take on this etc

aw welcome <3

what about my take? I have takes too you know

Being stuck in a room with Perrin, Hitchens and Sullivan would be a violation of the Geneva Convention.

I bet it smelled like whiskey and old ham.

Good thing they’re all white and so presumably left their shoes on

wait did I miss a meeting?

Decided to self-isolate. No gym; no indoor public spaces; no restaurants. I’m lucky I work from home. And the thing about face masks even if they don’t protect you - they help you avoid touching your face. Worth it.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) March 9, 2020

sticking your fingers in the garbage disposal also helps you avoid touching your face

we'll never know how much did the health mask industry pay him to say this

buh bye

How soon will he start writing for Persuasion?

This will be my last week at New York Magazine.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 14, 2020

Why, if this trend keeps up (I know, it takes 3 to make a trend - I'm hoping for Bret Stephens), high-profile New York media outlets might become measurably more readable!

and/or we are about to get an entirely new New York media outlet funded by some truly abhorrent ghouls

i think the third is ben shapiro?

wanna hear more stories from max about trying to edit sullivan

learning that he wrote the forward to some "the truth about matthew shepherd" trash has made me hate him even more than I did, which I didn't think was possible. may he starve to death

racists together!

Where is Shapiro even quitting from? Isn't his day job EIC at the Daily Wire?

That's what he's quitting

Doesn't his dad fund it? Isn't Ben fils basically the entire show?

no and no iirc

Is Weiss going to be the editor of this thing? Where's the org chart

lol this incredible piece of shit

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdJf_DWWkAAWQGz?format=jpg&name=small

The whole thing is so immensely self-flattering--a kind of bathetic Checkers speech from someone who refuses to own up to their own grave intellectual errors--and yet he defines his own conservatism as a mix of liberal and leftist ideas...so what really is the point of Andrew Sullivan?

anyway, dud

what does he think critical theory means? is he alluding to the fascist conspiracy theory about the frankfurt school inventing political correctness or something?

Big day for us DISHHEADS!

he's essentially been frothing about his white grandpa fetish for years, lol at that being a luxury item

he should use his wordsmithery to describe the exhilarating experience of sticking calipers up his butt

to see if his head would comfortably fit in?

To think I regarded this choad as a blogging model 15 years ago.

didn't he go into blogging so he wouldn't have to report his conflicts of interest to editors?

fortunately sully will still be on twitter so we’ll still have a chance to debate pointed, controversial questions like “how big is the typical black hog?” pic.twitter.com/nCBYL5qiDh

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 17, 2020

I’m all for ending the carceral state but anyone who uses any derivation of the phrase “bend the knee” should be locked up indefinitely

how do you feel about "touch the forelock"?

Today's antiracism is racism. Once you realize that, a lot of it makes more sense. https://t.co/rcocedxn1E

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 18, 2020

This is like discovering that that the FDA has allowable standards for microscopic fragments of rat turds and insects in peanut butter and announcing that "today's peanut butter consists of rat turds and insects".

Yascha Mounk was recently interviewed by Ezra Klein, and he kept harping on Robin DiAngelo as though White Fragility was some kind of woke Bible beloved by the left and not a book that has occasioned a fair amount of debate across the spectrum.

White fragility is HR nonsense for rich, dumb liberals

How do we not have a thread for how much Yascha Mounk sucks

RIP

sully should really do some bdsm scenes with samuel delany, delany as the dom obviously

I’m saying that Christianity and critical race theory, which is the core philosophy of BLM, are diametrically opposed, and rooted in utterly different views of the world and human nature. You can’t practice one and be part of the other without incoherence. https://t.co/n5FWhrq2oR

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 25, 2020

uh

awful

Has he signed his contract with the Daily Stormer yet?

christ what a toad. hey Andrew, let me introduce you to some Christians where I’m from and see what they have to say about you and your “compatibility with Christianity”. you insufferable ass.

It’s funny to me how so many Christians seem to think themselves experts on Christianity.

Nope, there were never any communists in the civil rights movement. Or in early gay liberation either. Nope. https://t.co/TrwDyxXiLo

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) July 25, 2020

Sully must know about Bayard Rustin, right

shhh!

i mean "no" seems a totally plausible answer here

Sullivan praised Rustin in Time magazine in 2003. He notes that Rustin "unfortunately dabbled in Communist Party activity before quitting in disgust." He does not mention Rustin's later involvement with the Socialist Party.

the new data does incline me to change my answer greatly

lol does NOT incline me ffs, i am new to posting and the internet

Piss on this turd:

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-trap-the-democrats-walked-right

Please don’t tell me you subscribe to his newsletter!

I'm also dating a woman with whom I'll have my first child. I'll celebrate with a mimosa.

Mimosa would be a good Florida baby name imho

lol i'm not clicking that

suffice it to say, dud

lgm excerpts the “relevant” paragraph and gives it an appropriate headline

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/08/andrew-sullivan-fascist

Fuck Andrew Sullivan and his racist “alleged rapist, Jacob Blake” bullshit. I tried to read that yesterday and couldn’t make it through.

Also, what about these out-of-control cops behavior could be considered either lawful or interested in maintaining order?

got some good lols reading that, what a shithead

trump talking about wyatt earp... a balm, according to andrew sullivan

Foreign Homosexual Pot Fiend Concerned About Law, Order

as usual with conservatives and especially gay ones Sully confuses order with law.

y’all pic.twitter.com/kdLwOcUl6Q

— gavin newsom is about to evict a ton of people🌹 (@uhshanti) August 31, 2020

impressive!

I'm not sure I've ever been this happy in my entire life

lol ☠️☠️☠️☠️

this is very beautiful

incredible

The whole Ben Smith article is worth reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/business/media/im-still-reading-andrew-sullivan-but-i-cant-defend-him.html

An illustrative example of how “ironic racism” works: Sullivan lied to Ben Smith about his email to the New York Times about black men and penis size, claiming it was a “joke.” In fact he was serious and defended his decision to do so at length, publicly. https://t.co/gceaX6XqHv pic.twitter.com/z2G6v0WF5y

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) August 31, 2020

Laying down some sick beats for Sammy Hagar

https://www.instagram.com/p/CTCpfSQA5Q5/?utm_medium=copy_link

this is good and funny and i'm pretty sure it's the last thing i ever need to read about the wasteman

https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/bad-faith-peck

you’ll never guess the context for this pic.twitter.com/kbbyJckMcb

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) March 23, 2022

kind of impressive that he summed up his entire deal in such a concise tweet

could it have something to do with, oh I dunno---trans?

‘ever-increasing levels of racial identity’