Mr. Sullivan decries the falling standards of modern Catholicism:
In Onaiyekan, you have a classic Benedict/JP II Archbishop: dumb as a post, sheltered from the actual debate in the West, incapable of argument, and pathetic as a spokesman. The problem with the theoconservative take-over in the Catholic priesthood is not so much its extremism as its mediocrity. And it is mediocre because it has been trained not to thin[k], not to argue, and not to engage the modern world. It has been trained solely for obedience.
As a Victorian reviewer once said of Shakespeare’s Anthony & Cleopatra: Soooo unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!
joe from Lowell
Popes weren’t supposed to serve for almost thirty years, and remake virtually the entire bishopric.
Or be replaced by a right-hand man who pursues the same agenda for another decade or two.
Fat pope, thin pope, you know?
Leelee for Obama
It seems there’s a lot of that kind of thing happening in another religion or two, no?
The problem is that there are few thinkers left who want to waste their time, and their lives, banging their heads against the stone walls of reactionary religious hierarchy. So, something as semi-open-minded as the Jesuits, who wanted you to DECIDE to surrender, after careful consideration of all the options, just had no applicants anymore.
Besides, one never knows when witches and demons might just steal your soul, so it’s best to be protected by idjits like Sully describes.
kommrade reproductive vigor
What fucking planet is this man from?
Sorry, that should be: What fucking planet in what alternate universe is this dipshit from?
inkadu
Catholics like to wrap themselves up in intellectuality. They have a history of it, but it’s not what religion is about.
@joe from Lowell: That’s why Catholics who want to change the church are idiots. The structure doesn’t care what you think. It only cares what a bunch of old italian guys think. And even by popular significance, the American liberal Catholic is a minority among American Catholics, and insignificant among world Catholics.
Sinead was right.
Comrade Jake
Oh look, another thread for bashing Sully. Fun.Nevermind.
cleek
be sure to watch that video. Hitchens can be an ass, but holy crap do i not want to ever be on the other side of an argument with him.
jeffreyw
Looks like a good place to plug these youtubes of hitch and fry destroying some hapless believers.
Jason Bylinowski
Not sure what was meant by the Antony and Cleopatra line, and I also fail to see any controversy in Sullivan’s post. Disclosure: I’m a born-into-the-fold but non-practicing Southern Catholic who left the church because it was both too modern and too antiquated. Long story full of contradictions, one day maybe after a few positive integers I’ll tell that story.
Somebody enlighten me here.
jeffreyw
Oops, teaches me to click the links first, nevermind.
Midnight Marauder
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
That would be the same planet where he found the gall to write this:
I mean…seriously, man? SERIOUSLY?!
Keith G
Expecting logic from folks who seem to believe in a male sky dude who is often petulant and always dis-involved.
Sorry believers, but oh my.
Steve Balboni
Go read the comparison between the dirtyfuckinghippies and the Tea Baggers that he posted just a bit ago. It’s vintage Sully.
General Winfield Stuck
Religion is too important to leave it to the preachers and priests.
WereBear
Well, I’m kinda ticked about the extremism. You’d think being stupid would undermine the effort, but apparently not so.
But then, I’m the product of a mixed marriage: Lutheran and Methodist. (Such were the mores in the Midwest in the ’50’s.)
Jason Bylinowski
@Keith G: Yeah, this is all part of the reason why I can’t claim to be Christian or any other religion. I probably believe in some sort of small-g god, or at least I believe in a prime source, whatever you want to call it, but my “god” is very likely to be entirely disinterested in his creation and is certainly completely inscrutable. And until such time as some other idea of god supplies me with incontrovertible & miraculous proof of his existence (or, i suppose, one could again become, through external circumstance, so emotionally needy as to be willing to believe again in spite of its obvious flaws), but I somehow doubt for this reason and more that I’ll be much welcome in the church again.
PeakVT
From the department of not getting it, Silly Sully sez:
John Ball
Oh, Sully. Will you ever learn?
Hookers and Cocaine
@Midnight Marauder: The left openly wants (needs) US foreign policy to fail. Period.
John had to argue with people here about whether or not the sharp drop in US fatalities in Iraq was a good thing.
Hardly anyone is going to openly state that our soldiers getting killed is a good thing. And I think most left wingers, being basicly decent people, would never allow such thoughts to enter their concious minds. But one is a necessary precursor to the other. In order for US policy to be reversed, as the left demands, our current policy must fail. And that will not happen if their if our military can operate without taking any significant losses.
This creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. It is why people argued (and continue to argue) that the surge (or whatever you prefer to call the change of strategy Gates and Petreus implimented in 2007) didn’t really work, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
It’s kind of like people who insist that they’re not anti-gay even though they oppose marriage equality. They suggest civil unions as a way to satisfy their own cognitive dissonance, as they don’t want to think of themselves as bigoted. But as long as they continue to vote against gay marriage they are de facto supporters of the worst of the anti-gay movement.
As long as the left keeps being mindlessly critical of each and every aspect of US foreign policy, and opposing the use of military force every time it is proposed, and blaming the US and our military actions for every problem in the world, and hyping every bad act (real or imagined) commited by anyone wearing our uniform… then they will correctly be seen as being anti-american and anti-military.
Go Cowboys.
Silver
Sullivan just doesn’t want to come to the grips to the fact that he was a major cheerleader for an activity that killed around a million or so innocent people.
He does feel bad for Iraqi homosexuals. The rest of the dead don’t matter, because he was standing on principle…
stranded
I don’t know why you folks even bother to keep up with the bellringer for narcissism that is AS, but this post sure made me snicker. Two laughable institutions skewered in one sentence. Three if you count the actual Queen.
Keith G
@Jason Bylinowski: Amen, bro. Been working for decades to answer those questions, so I hope I did not sound overly snarky.
I just find the off-the-shelf god stuff to be insular, repetitive and unhelpful. I’m sort of like the celebrant in Bernstein’s Mass – perhaps the best religious-based work of art created in America.
BTW y’all, if you have not listened to it lately, please do so now. It is eerily quite relevant.
jimBOB
And it is mediocre because it has been trained not to thin[k], not to argue, and not to engage the modern world. It has been trained solely for obedience.
The Catholic Church is, without apology, an authoritarian patriarchy. Promoting ideologically reliable mediocrities is what it’s meant to do. This would be true even if it weren’t an organization dedicated to propagating iron age fairy tales.
The Soviet Union and all the old monarchies are gone. The Pope must be lonely.
Violet
Gawd, he’s like a parody of himself today. I can’t even believe he equates the anti-war folks with today’s right wing nutjobs. The only thing they have in common is they were both angry. But one was angry based on facts.
Donald G
Sully sounds suspiciously like me as an eighteen year old freshman back during the Reagan era at the University of Dallas, a conservative Catholic institution. (Pat Buchanan’s niece was a student there during his 1992 presidential bid, so that might give you an indication that its Catholicism wasn’t all that liberal.)
My (lapsed) Catholic (albeit liberal Catholic) wife, a UD grad, used to refer to me, not only as a protestant, but as the “ultimate protestant.” I protest everything religiously based. :-)
But back to Sully, he’s clearly conflicted. He wants so desperately to remain within the Catholic Church, but said Church would rather not have people like him. He should just become an Anglican/Episcopalian, already. In some ways, they’re more Catholic than the Catholics, but are moving away from the gaybashing. That’s why a lot of phobic Episcopalians/Anglicans are becoming Roman Catholics.
Steve Balboni
@ Leelee
As someone who spent his high school years at an all boys Jesuit high school I couldn’t agree more with your description.
General Winfield Stuck
@Hookers and Cocaine:
Then the only good American thing to do is salute and say go for it Mr. Bush. This is an easy and cheap charge to make, and we have heard it many times from the right. Or, you can’t be against the policy and war without being against the troops;
Most here, though John not among them, were against the war from the first moment it was suggested. So once it started were faced with a false and unfair dilemma from people who think like you. Continue to be against the war when it goes bad and troops die, which was part of the original belief that it would and they would, or be open to the charge you are rooting for the troops to die, because you want the policy to fail. Or to give in a just salute.
It is the lowest form of political point making and a charge from scoundrels who were wrong to begin with and remain wrong and seek redemption by feeble attempts at ciphering the motives of the people who were right.
Midnight Marauder
@Hookers and Cocaine:
I can understand where your argument comes from, and there are some elements of it which I agree with in many respects; however, I think where your argument is inherently flawed is in its failure to acknowledge the primary different in the foreign policy for many of “the left”:
If it was up to “the left,” there would not have been an Iraq quagmire war in the first place.
Chuck Butcher
@Hookers and Cocaine:
Who the fuck is it you’re talking about? Do you just make shit up as you type? What left? You want to talk about pacifists or fringe anti-war groups or the left?
Actually I reckon you’re a complete dumbass looking for an audience as stupid as you are…wrong place.
Keith G
@Hookers and Cocaine:
Man, it is my wish that you have just typed this to stir up shit. No one, and I mean no one, smart enough to feed them self can believe this totally unsubstantiated rot.
Cheers
Midnight Marauder
@General Winfield Stuck:
It seems the BJ mind-meld strikes again.
Violet
@Donald G:
In some ways Sully reminds me of an abused person. He keeps sticking with the one who’s abusing him (in his case, the Catholic church) because he so desperately wants to belong and feel loved. Leaving is terrifying. Just hang in there and take all the abuse. He’s sure they’ll change.
He’s quite rational in some ways, yet in many others he goes with emotion. In this case his rational brain seems to be taking a break.
srv
@PeakVT:
Er, that would have been “Hitler’s” WMD’s. He seems to have forgotten which side went Godwin first.
Sully, always a decade late and billion short. I could have told him a senile lobotomized Jesuit could mentally wrestle all of Opus Dei twenty years ago.
demimondian
@Hookers and Cocaine: You’d win a medal if you were eligible for the Special Olympics, because at least in that case, you’d be a winner for effort invested.
Sadly — but not unfortunately — you aren’t disabled, merely foolish. That’s your own responsibility, and not that of anyone else.
John Ball
I’m trying to come up with a reply to Hookers and Cocaine that doesn’t begin with “You moron”, and end with “burn in hell, you cowardly sack of shit.” And so I’ll leave things to Ambrose Bierce…
Oh, yes, and burn in hell, you cowardly sack of shit. Hey–I avoided one of the two.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@Hookers and Cocaine: Forgive the invective, but why don’t you crawl back under whatever rock you crawled out from.
” The left openly wants (needs) US foreign policy to fail. Period.”
“The left” doesn’t need something that has already been proven a failure to fail. The reason you don’t see it that way, I think, is what I will call the “McNamara fallacy”.
When being involved in military operations, it is very easy for them to become defined as their own ends. Military officers are trained to defeat an enemy, full stop. So they think of their success in terms of military objectives–how many x of the opposing side they’ve killed compared to how many they’ve lost, what their moral is vs. enemy moral, etc. These are very appealing metrics, and they have contagious appeal for those higher up in the chain of command, particularly at the SecDef/President/Adviser levels.
In this regime, it becomes very easy to lose sight of the original objective of the military exercise in favor of narrow assessments of military superiority. So rather than asking “is this exercise making america safer”? “is this enhancing our reputation in the muslim world?” we ask “are the insurgents defeated?”, a goal which is not necessarily coincident with the first two.
And this gets to the basic truth of warfare–while it’s (relatively) easy to win battles, it’s much harder to achieve broader social or political objectives. Military force is a blunt weapon, capable of destroying countries and thousands of lives–while the objective you’re trying to achieve is a relatively finer reconciliation between ethnic groups or deposal of a dictator. It works well when your objective is the utter destruction of an enemy (Germany, Japan) but it’s considerably more dodgy when you’re particularly trying NOT to cause broader social disorder.
So my point is–all of this is INDEPENDENT of the number of American soldiers that die, so liberals are hardly rooting for their deaths. The number of American soldiers dead is not a piece of data used to calculate the success of the ultimate objective–are the Iraqis reconciled and stable, or not?
Leelee for Obama
@General Winfield Stuck: This is the truth. Blind patriotism is the last stand for scoundrels. The people who knew Iraq was a disaster in the making before it began must be marginalized, because that protects the cheerleaders from examining their own stand. I have spent the years since March 2003 hoping for the safety of the military sent to do their jobs in my name, knowing full-well that the other side would castigate me for opposing the war, and accusing me of wishing for more casualties to turn the public against it. I didn’t do that 40 years ago, I didn’t do it this time. They are small and crabbed souls who deserve my never-ending disdain, and so I give to them.
The fact that the are wrong in orders of magnitude will weigh on them. My conscience is clear.
jl
“In order for US policy to be reversed, as the left demands, our current policy must fail.”
What if someone honestly thinks the policy is bad and won’t work? How does that fit into your scheme?
Suppose for instance, some one decided to pour water into the gas tank in order to ‘make it last a little longer’? I point out that this will not work. Then when the care stops moving, I get accused of wanting the car to break down? Is that what you are getting at? Or do you engage in magical thinking: American military force can do anything (perhaps added by Force of Will of the American People), so it will succeed at all things, like a magical Swiss army knife, if only allowed to operate?
I do not want American troops killed, any more than necessary to win a worthy cause, or in following any orders, wise or unwise. I want them to succeed. I also do not think any and all military solutions will work under any and all circumstances. Where is the contradiction?
As for Sullivan, at least he makes a sensible observation in that post. He is also charging into that endless hall of mirrors called Sarah Palin’s head, getting ready to sink himself in the mysteries surrounding of her last pregnancy, once again. Andrew, dude, she just says stuff, and no one can figure it out, least of all Palin. Leave it alone, please.
simonee
The stupid comparison between the tea party movement and the opposition to the Iraq war by “the left”is what really needs to be dissected.
Where are you DougJ?
Ugh.
General Winfield Stuck
@Leelee for Obama:
I am not entirely sure that H and C is not spoofing us. But it doesn’t matter that much either way.
demimondian
@General Winfield Stuck: I’m sure it is spoofing us.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun along with it, instead of at its expense.
brantl
Never did that, and never will. Although I have found, on thoughtful examination, that very few of anybody’s military actions are well-founded, that they wouldn’t have been better served by diplomacy and the even-handed application of international law. And the U.S. is not a special case in this.
So, go play in traffic, dickhead Cocaine and Hookers.
Leelee for Obama
@General Winfield Stuck: No, it really doesn’t, General. Spoofing this kind of thing is worthy of Purgatory, at least.
General Winfield Stuck
@demimondian:
I always welcome the opportunity for a righteous rant to knock down a real strawman.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Hookers and Cocaine:
Yawn. Just another ridiculous circa early 1930s argument based on the premise of false-consciousness. Can you people on the Right at least make some sort of effort to use rhetorical tropes that haven’t already been beaten into the ground by the f’ing Marxists. It’s like you’re not even trying. What did we ever do to deserve this plague of subliterate neo-Trotskyites?
El Cid
In fantasy nostalgia, all Catholic officials used to be book writing philosophers.
Corner Stone
@Hookers and Cocaine: DougJ.
AhabTRuler
@Corner Stone: If that’s DougJ he’s lost his edge ad needs to turn in his wings, let Maverick and Goose go to Top Gun.
Seebach
Doesn’t Sullivan’s continued support of the Catholic Church make him objectively pro-child rape?
Cerberus
Ugh, I really hate the “left hopes and prays for soldiers to die”.
Know the fastest way to become an extremist pacifist anti-war activist? Go to war. War is Hell, it’s horrid, it’s slaughter, it breeds war crimes by the ton, it’s not a fucking joke to be tossed around just because it’s the latest “US Foreign Policy” aim.
Know what policy is best for soldiers? What foreign policy is in the best interests of having the most living soldiers? Not sending them places to get shot at, especially not for lies or no reason at all, but also not when the “foreign policy need” can be met by other means (treating terrorism like a crime like Clinton-era USA and Denmark, diplomacy, not destabilizing middle eastern countries more than usual and colonizing them).
I love soldiers, but I’ll never love them more than the staunchest pacifist, the most extreme anti-war protestor who does not want to see those men and women die if there is any way to avoid it.
Those who see them as so many pawns to be calculated on the big board of “foreign policy aims”, they will never hate those living breathing soldiers more.
With everything to do with the right, it is as always, projection.
AhabTRuler
Oh, and Hooch.
Xenos
““In order for US policy to be reversed, as the left demands, our current policy must fail.”
This is the difference, jerkoff. Being a liberal, I was studying Iraqi history for the fun of it, back in the 80s, when there was no particular reason for it. At least in terms of politics. So while I was no great expert in the subject I at least had a pretty good idea how the place worked politically and culturally.
Now when W decides to go off and take the lid off of that can of worms in order to watch said annelids spontaneously line up and form the text of the Magna Carta, my reaction was ‘what a dumb idear!’ Now it would have been swell if it had worked, and indeed I felt a bit of a rush of excitement once the battle was joined and it looked like something exciting was going to happen. When the Shia started their pilgrimages to their holy sites, I thought ‘hey this is great’, and also, ‘what a shame these nice people are getting bombed and shot up by all the weapons we left in the hands of the Fedayeen.’ And my next thought was ‘what a clusterfuck! W set up and set into motion a civil war at least as bad as Saddam.’
Note I was wrong on a few of these issues. But I would have been thrilled to see my dire predictions proven wrong. When W finally pulled his head out of his posterior a couple inches and *at last* allowed a surge to go ahead, I thought it was way too little, way too late. To a degree, I was proven wrong. But a lot of lefties like me thought it was necessary to go in with more boots if we were to go in at all, so if anything I feel vindicated by the limited success of the surge.
Oh, no. None of that happened. I am misremembering. I must be because some pussy nicknaming himself ‘Hookers and Cocaine’ knows that all lefties want soldiers to die so they can laugh at their political adversaries. My bad.
DIAF, asshole.
Ash
@Hookers and Cocaine: There’s really nothing you can say in response to something that gargantuanly stupid, except…..go fuck yourself and have a nice day.
Corner Stone
@AhabTRuler: Honestly, I think DougJ is bored and throws out stupid shit once in a while just to see what happens.
He’s tired of running the BoB character into the ground and is trying something new.
After all, this is his blog and a good 1/4th of the personas here are DougJ.
tripletee
WTF? I don’t know who’s writing Hookers and Cocaine, but I have to say I’m disappointed in you. Recycling spoof that was obviously written in 2006/07 and trying to pass it off as new material? Lame. If you’re going to half-ass it like that, don’t bother – we already have Makewi for that.
Brachiator
@Hookers and Cocaine:
This is nonsensical with a tiny dollop of truth. There are some liberals who believe that US foreign policy changes only if the American people are forced to assume a higher level of risk, which in turn supposedly will lead to serious debate about foreign adventures. But this could be a resumption of the draft, more than an increase in US casualties.
But the larger issue is that the Bush/Cheney Crime Syndicate never had a coherent policy that they were pursuing in Iraq, or even in Afghanistan. So, we were in Iraq to liberate it from a tyrant, to capture WMDs, to staunch the spread of Islamo-fascism, to nation build Iraq into a stable democracy, or whatever contradictory nonsense that the Republican Administration wanted to push.
And everyone, conservative and liberal, went along, because no one wanted to admit that American troops were being put at risk for no good reason. Support the troops meant STFU.
But even if the US did have a coherent policy, it would not have meant much, since invading Iraq resulted in all kinds of unintended and unmanageable consequences. We freed the Shia from domination by Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority, only to find that the Shia were more fundamentalist than the Sunnis. On top of this, free roving mullahs, warlords and local despots all began jockeying for power while paying lip service to the idea of national reconstruction. And Al Qaeda was always lurking in the wings.
The conservative fantasy is that we could have won a victory in Iraq. Against who?
The liberal fantasy is that withdrawing from Iraq will somehow create amnesia in the Iraqi people, that they will forget who wreaked such havoc in their country, and never seek redress or revenge. Or they think that distinctions between Democrat and Republican, peace activist and warmonger, liberal and conservative, mean a damn thing to people who were used as pawns in the West’s stupid power games.
The surge did nothing to reverse the ethnic cleansing that gripped Iraq and forced people out of their homes and neighborhoods. It has done little for the Kurds or created a zone in which reconciliation of various groups vying for power might be possible. It allowed a lull in which the US could plausibly draw down its forces, but suicide bombings continue, and areas which formerly were considered to be pacified are slipping back into darkness.
So yeah, maybe there are some liberals who believe that the US military should never be used anywhere. But this is almost nothing compared to those who blindly acquiesce to a brutally wasteful misuse of our forces by dopes who believe that the raw application of power can make any error into pumpkin pie.
Xenos
@Corner Stone:
Is John Cole a creation of DougJ? What a disturbing thought…
But it would have to be the greatest spoof job ever!
El Cid
Hey, if we keep fantasizing that somehow we’ve telepathically materialized the institutions and operational experience to make warlord undeveloped 3rd world nations into compliant, trouble-less colonialized democracies, then it will surely be true!!!
After all, the British practiced over 50 years of native-focused rule in British West Africa and that worked out perfectly!
And anyone who doesn’t share this fantasy is some sort of left-wing troop hater who doubts the perfect AWSUM power of THE SURGE [hallowed be its name].
El Cid
If I ever find out for sure that DougJ is BOB, I will never ever visit this blog again.
Mike in NC
So, to paraphrase Johnny Mac, are we all Atanarjanuts now?
Xenos
Oh Hell. You made me click over to Sully, and he is going on and on about Palin’s amniocentesis. This guy does not understand parenting, and pregnancy, in anything but the most abstract and bizarre ways. He has got to get away from this subject, because I can’t even begin to describe how off-base his analysis it.
The man is driving me to defend Palin. This is getting real bad.
ilsita
@Hookers and Cocaine:
That’s pretty clever, H&C.
It doesn’t make any sense at all, though. Being against this bogus war means that the first casualty confirmed it as a brutal tragedy. “Success” or “failure” just don’t factor at all for me, because there’s no way a pointless nightmare like this could turn out to be a success. You want people to feel good and supportive about there being fewer deaths from one month to the next? Or because the military was able to stymie the clusterfuck for a few minutes?
In order for what you said to make sense, you’d have to assume that we’re using the same point of reference and standards. We’re absolutely not.
General Winfield Stuck
Tormenting yourself with paranoia that every troll is Dougj will soon lead to suspecting every commenter could be. It is the road to madness I tell you. I just think that there is a little Dougj in all of us, and in Dougj there is a little bit of all of us.
The Universal Bot Theory.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@El Cid:
I’d bet money that BOB is for real. He was trolling ObWings long before the commentariat of the two blogs started to overlap, and only began popping up here after he was banned by hilzoy. That doesn’t sound like a DougJ spoof to me.
Brachiator
@El Cid:
The twin pillars of delusions of the effectiveness of the Iraq campaign: Shock and Awe, and The Surge.
El Cid
@Brachiator: I am somewhat embarrassed to admit having been surprised by the weird effectiveness of the whole “SURGE” propaganda campaign. I’ve hardly seen a more effective domestic propaganda campaign since, well, that which launched the invasion and occupation itself.
jwb
@El Cid: I don’t know if DougJ is BoB, but it’s pretty clear that BoB is a spoof; nobody who knows as much as BoB does and knows how to deploy what he knows as well as BoB does could be as dense as BoB; and he always reverts to type in very predictable ways.
El Cid
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I have always personally regarded such BOB = DougJ speculations as unrealistic. I was mostly just clarifying that I don’t think this shit is in the least funny or justifiably ironic.
Persia
@Xenos: I think about the premature kid I had, and the fact that Palin got on a fucking airplane in labor with hers, and decide that Palin has everything thrown at her coming. In spades.
But this is possibly because I am a horrible and judgmental person. (And I still don’t read Sully rambling on about her half the time!)
jwb
@Xenos: My life became a lot saner when I stopped visiting Sully regularly.
Corner Stone
@Xenos:
Yes, IMO. You have to evaluate who the strongest spoof personalities are. They all have a geographical anchor, and a hook that makes them stand out from the other regular commenters. The Cole persona fits into this pattern as a Stillers fan and owner of Tunch.
I vaguely remember when DougJ was “frontpaged”, and wondered why a persistent spoof had been picked out of the commentariat.
I think “DougJ” is the originator of this blog and Cole is a byproduct.
IMO, “DougJ” is one of the greatest and most prolific internet authors of our time. It’s actually pretty mind blowing when you think about it a little.
No proof of this, just IMO. And no, I’m not bagging on him at all. I think it’s pretty amazing.
tripletee
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
DougJ works in mysterious ways.
Jackie
Jeez, I’ve been all involved in health care. No shit the surge worked? The political factions have passed an oil sharing deal? The kurds have agreed to be reintegrated into a country they despise? The minute we’re out of there there won’t be a civil war? Great!. I was hoping I’d be proven wrong. It would be a great thing for the iraqi people.
Did they find the WMD? Were we greated as liberators? Did the war pay for itself? We’re we in and out in 18 months? Did the middle east erupt in democracy? Yup all the left did was root against the troops because we hate them. No rational person would have opposed this clusterfuck. No one who appreciates the military and doesn’t want them sent into a quagmire should have said a word. Weak sauce my friend should not be peddled here.
jl
Is it appropriate for a main poster to spoof up and hijack another poster’s post? Or is Anne Laurie DougJ too?
I want a blogger ethics panel on this incident.
And, whether troll or spoof, we do need new material. I agree with that.
Tunch behind it all, probably.
tripletee
@Corner Stone:
OK, you’ve now managed to convince me that you’re actually scs. Which would also be amazing, in a creepy sort of way.
jwb
@Corner Stone: What makes everyone think that DougJ is the original and that he is not the product of John? Or maybe Tim F. is actually running both DougJ and John under the deep cover of seemingly being obsessed with home brewing and his new macro lens.
jl
No one take Sullivan’s ravings on Palin’s pregnancy seriously. Do not look into that abyss, or you will wish the abyss only looked back at you. Can some one explain to him very slowly and in great detail that Palin just makes stuff up, and it is impossible to tell what the heck is what?
PS: Cole, a mere figment? Too bad. A truly Dickensian character, a memorable invention. But Tunch is real, we have photo proof. I need a drink. And, if Cole is a fiction, who is Lily’s daddy-o? It’s a murky business.
At least we don’t have to worry when Cole chews us out anymore.
twiddledick
Cole=DougJ=BoB=H&C and we’re all minions or spoofs
Comrade Kevin
Hookers and Cocaine, American Idiot
Corner Stone
@jwb:
Well, it’s interesting isn’t it? Tim F. is clearly the most far left of the three male personas. Tim F. -> DougJ -> Cole.
The Cole persona has moved to the left to a significant degree over the last two years +/-, but still displays an inherent righty mindset. DougJ is more even tempered but clearly left-center. Tim F. is an open lefty.
All three are academic-esque, at least self-described to some degree. And they cover quite a spectrum of ideologies and interests. But are oddly consistent in a lot of ways as well.
Personally, it’s why I think Michael D. stopped front page posting.
But I’m just speculating. It would be irresponsible not to, eh?
Mayur
Hookers and Cocaine has got to be a spoof. That is all.
In the event that (s)he isn’t: The answer’s kinda obvious here. Liberals, quite simply, don’t want any of our soldiers to risk harm. Nor do we want either American or Iraqi non-combatants to die, either, but we don’t even need to go there because we oppose actions that create needless US military fatalities.
Period. Done. The only “side” that seems to want our boys shot at is rather clearly the one that features lots of registered Republicans or self-professed “conservatives.” I marched so that my friends (two of whom are dead over this shit) wouldn’t go into action for entirely no fucking reason.
kay
I’m just relieved and thankful Andrew Sullivan gave up writing about health care reform. Not his thing. No sir.
This subject is perfect for him. I won’t be following it, but I’m sure it’s one of those endless subjective debates that is fascinating to certain readers.
Fern
@Persia:
Anyone who thinks the “labour on the airplane” story is truer than anything else that woman has said about her pregnancy – is a little misguided.
Just assume that every thing that Sarah says is filtered through her need to embellish her life to make herself a better heroine in her own story.
Prevents torturing yourself trying to sort out the truth.
srv
Given his Washington Post contest submission last month, maybe DougJ is trying to get back to his roots with H&C. Honestly, he went off the rails there – I think only Oakeshott was missing from that treatise.
Corner Stone
Actually, after Anne and then Tim F.’s posts – I’m starting to believe this whole blog is a Sullivan front.
Brachiator
@El Cid:
I know what you mean. I guess people want to believe. But I think that maybe it was Hurricane Katrina which led to a muted, unstated, but growing sense of disappointment in the Bush Administration. And even if people believed that the surge worked, they were no longer willing to give the Bush Administration, architects of the plan, free rein.
jwb
@Corner Stone: Naw, Sully doesn’t get Merkin politics at a deep enough level to be able to pull it off.
Chuck Butcher
In the spirit of outing H&C, BoB and the rest, I will come out, I am a spoof. All you ever had to do was see my site to figure that one out. Between guns, cars, and Harleys you had every opportunity.
I have to say I think I’ve pulled off the loony lefty thing pretty well.
Anne Laurie
And Corner Stone has been accused by several regulars of being another DougJ spoof, so the bloggingverse has come full circle!
My personal suspicion (and I can’t see the ISPs, so I’m going by style alone) is that the ‘BoB’ nym is used by the original nutter, plus a rotating cast of regulars stealing his schtick as necessary for their idea of high intrawebs comedy. Thus the uneven quality.
It may be that I’m the only one not in on the joke, but I assert that neither John Cole, DougJ, TimF, or even Michael D could have, or would have wanted to, produce the posts tagged under ‘Vagina Outrage’. And I’m not capable of producing the statistics-oriented posts. So there are, at a minimum, at least two different front-pagers, just to calm the fears of the most paranoid among us.
Corner Stone
@Anne Laurie: Actually, I’ve never been accused of being a DougJ anything. I obviously don’t write well enough.
And I never doubted your authentic voice.
Splitting Image
@El Cid:
Indeed. I know that the blog-owners can’t stop their commentariat from doing whatever it pleases, but the fact that spoofs seem to be tolerated here and even encouraged (to the extent that we sometimes have to wonder if the blog-owners are responsible for them) is to me the only blemish on an otherwise perfect blog.
There are plenty of people here that regularly say things I disagree with, but many of them are worth reading simply because they are expressing an honest opinion and trying their best to justify it. Trolling seems to be the only thing that spoof characters do well, and they invariably detract from the discussion rather than add to it.
My problem with Brick Oven Bill doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not he honestly holds his opinions. It’s that he consistently tries to derail the discussions here regardless of the original topic and he gets more and more inflammatory if people start to ignore him.
Splitting Image
@Persia:
I’ve come to the conclusion that everything that seemed remarkable about La Palin’s pregnancy makes a lot more sense if you assume that her water broke when she got home rather than in Texas and she was simply lying about it from the beginning to make herself seem like a tough gal.
She never expected to be caught out because she never expected to be put on a Presidential ticket. When she was, she doubled down, as always.
She is still dishonest, self-centred and careless in the extreme, but she isn’t as completely crazy as her own story made her out to be.
burnspbesq
@Keith G:
And there is a fabulous new recording of it out on Naxos.
Splitting Image
Damn. Screwed up a blockquote.
And I’d been so good at doing them properly too. :o(
tammanycall
Doug J is the Walrus.
Yutsano
@tammanycall: Koo-koo-ka-choo and stuff.
AnotherBruce
Like Elvis, DougJ is everywhere.
Chuck Butcher
If you listen to the Hitchens rebuttal you have to wonder exactly what kind of spokesperson Andrew expects. JC himself? The catalogue is wretched. A person could start to wonder to just what depths Sully’s masochism delves.
Is it a thing of, “Until you accept me I can’t walk away?” Or is it just, “Beat me Daddy?”
AnotherBruce
@Brachiator:
The liberal fantasy is that withdrawing from Iraq will somehow create amnesia in the Iraqi people, that they will forget who wreaked such havoc in their country, and never seek redress or revenge. Or they think that distinctions between Democrat and Republican, peace activist and warmonger, liberal and conservative, mean a damn thing to people who were used as pawns in the West’s stupid power games.
Although I identify as one, I don’t claim to know what liberals fantasize about, and neither do you. But I’m going to make a guess that the reason that most liberals opposed the Iraq invasion is precisely because the collateral damaged Iraqis will indeed seek redress and revenge. If my family was killed by some damn foreign power because of some insane power scheme, I sure as hell would seek revenge. No, you got it precisely wrong, the people who opposed the war at least understand that there are evil unintended consequences to any war, and your existence better be on the line if you are going to engage in one.
DC
The health bill passed
Little Dreamer
@Leelee for Obama
How exactly does one know if a soul has been stolen, and if these Christians (or other religious adherents) are actually protecting such a thing or not?
I have no idea what a soul even looks like (or if such a thing exists at all), does anyone else?
Little Dreamer
@inkadu:
There’s no place like Rome!
Honus
When invading/occupying armed forces withdraw from a country the populace is more concerned with rebuilding their own lives and societies than with revenge. There was no redress and revenge sought by the Vietnamese, or the Japanese, and I don’t even recall the Lebanese wanting to invade Israel; even they have repeatedly largely concentrated on rebuilding their resorts and discos. Revenge is an endeavor of sociopathic political narcissists, not societies.
Little Dreamer
@jl:
LMAO
@Hookers and Cocaine:
Was it the syphilis or the blow that did your brain in?
Leelee for Obama
@Little Dreamer: And therein lies the problem in a nutshell. People are convinced that an invisible part of the person exists in a constant state of threat from an invisible evil (Satan) and so have created an invisible construct (God), with rules to protect them from the evil.
As a once upon a time Catholic, I still knee-jerk believe, occasionally. But, then my thinking self comes back.
It’s about power and control.
That is all.
Little Dreamer
@Leelee for Obama:
That’s why I mentioned it. ;) Thanks for noticing.
Wile E. Quixote
Sully writes about the Catholic Church because Sully is a huge drama queen. Think about it. If Andrew Sullivan weren’t gay and conservative and Catholic what drama would he have in his life? None at all. If Andrew Sullivan was say, a gay, Episcopalian Democrat no one would give two fucks in a dead rat’s ass about anything he has to say. He’d be nothing more than a balding wanker with a British accent nattering on and on about Burke, Oakeshott and occasionally the Pet Shop Boys and no one would give a fuck and he’d have to find a real job that would involve actual, real work, an anathema to members of the punditocracy.
Andrew knows this, which is why he’s doing his “gay Catholic conservative” schtick. “I’m Andrew Sullivan. I’m gay. I’m Catholic. I’m conservative. Pay attention to meeeeeeeeeeeee. Listen to me whine about how hard it is to reconcile my sexuality with the fact that the church I’m a member of is run by an ex-Nazi, staffed by child molesters and hates gay people. Listen to me whine about how hard it is to reconcile my sexuality with the fact that the political movement I follow has been taken over by idiots, consists of bigots, morons and the terminally lazy and ignorant and hates gay people. See my drama. Give me page hits so that the editors of the Atlantic think I’m relevant and so I don’t have to get a job.”
Oh, and as far as the Catholic Church this Louis CK video nails what the church is all about. Hilarious, but definitely NSFW.
Persia
@Splitting Image: You and Fern make me feel much better.
EconWatcher
Wile E. Quixote:
Best and most convincing take-down of Sully I have ever read. Well done, sir (or ma’am).
Paul Crowley
How very different from Sullivan’s brilliance defence of the Catholic Church against Sam Harris’s withering attack.
Harris: I now feel like a tennis player, in mid-serve, who notices that his opponent is no longer holding a racket.