andrew sullivan c/d

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