Every couple of weeks, in between visits to a Pampered Chef outlet or the Iphone store or a wine party held by Cato or Reason, McMegan will belch out a post so silly and riddled with inaccuracies that some poor bastard like Tom Levenson or Susan of Texas will have to spend hours noting all the mistakes and absurdities.
Then, a few days later, after everyone has already had a laugh and the piece has been thoroughly debunked, Sullivan will then link to it and call it “interesting” or “provocative,” and we here will then have to field 5000 comments furiously asking why DougJ and I continue to read Sullivan (because I like his writing!).
But the worm may have turned. In her latest offering, Megan asserts that the GOP in-house polling unit, Rasmussen, really isn’t that off, and Sullivan not only corrects the record but appears to have finally had enough:
“Gimme a break,” he says.
I, for one, am hopeful.
Betty Cracker
I think the proper phrase is “Know hope.”
El Cid
They say it springs eternal.
jacy
Ah, hope springs eternal. Sometimes Sully seems very reasonable, and his blog is usually good for some very interesting links.
Although I did find his anti-Mo’Nique snit this week unsettling in some vague and not-quite definable way.
freelancer
He is the one he has been waiting for.
garage mahal
I am so fucking sick of Republican bullshit. Had it.
demkat620
@jacy: Snit. That’s a good word.
Sully always seems to be in a snit about something. Usually something very stupid.
Tom Levenson
@Betty Cracker: Win…and thanks JC for the prop.
I’ve noticed before this that Sully seems to be getting a little less patient with his stablemate. May it continue.
Carlo
See now, if you had ended this post with “Know hope”, it would have been perfect.
Carlo
Gaah! Beaten by the first comment!
Jim C.
I’ve always had a bit of a hard time understanding the anti-Sullivan nature of some of the posts here. Maybe because I’m relatively new, but to me Sullivan has always struck me as one of the more thoughtful and open-minded conservatives out there.
I don’t always agree with him, but unlike the vast majority of conservatives in this country he actually seems to give a damn about facts. He actually takes the time to link to the debunking other people do.
I’m all for putting certain conservatives in front of the firing squad for being blatantly evil and intellectually dishonest, but Sullivan has never really struck me as either one. Sometimes wrong, occasionally misguided, but always well-intentioned and intellectually curious.
MikeJ
Just earlier today I was thinking about how nice it was that nobody had linked to McMegan lately.
There just wasn’t that much to keep my mind engaged while picking up San Marzano tomatoes.
Warren Terra
Sully almost never changes, and I’m sure he’ll be back to loving the Atlantic’s Economics Editor ASAP.
The particular post Sully responds to here is not in anything like the same league as her most egregious posts, not nearly so bad as the ones he’s previously praised. She’s wrong, of course, about whether Rasmussen is biased, but his rebuttal citing these specific data is weak: after all, we don’t know that Rasmussen did polled (and suppressed inconvenient results) back in the beginning of the process when health care was more popular (looking at the other-polls graph, it appears that very few polls were done that early by anybody), and although the curve-fit on the Rasmussen polls doesn’t pick up a trend of increasing support for Health Care Reform if you look in the graph at the raw data points it’s possible that the Rasmussen polls are reporting the same recent trend as all the rest of the polls, it’s just that because the Rasmussen-only graph includes fewer data points the movement is discounted as being noise by the curve-fitting algorithm (or is it maybe just a sliding average?), while in the other-polls graph there are enough data points that the movement is clear, and the curve is fitted to it.
MattF
Sullivan, I think, is a conservative wanna-be. He wants to be conservative. Some of his instincts are conservative, but for the most part, he doesn’t have the temperament for it. He tries, and he fails. Again and again.
And now, more recently, he’s finding that the people who are, in fact, real-world conservatives, often turn out to be evil, amoral bastards. And in the back of his mind, he’s realizing that it can’t be a complete coincidence. Poor Sully.
I have some sympathy for him, but I’m keeping my sympathy under control– he’s done damage in his time, and I’m not going to forget and forgive that any time soon. Doesn’t happen to be part of my cultural tradition.
maus
@jacy:
That’s an excellent sum-up of why I don’t trust Sully. It’s like he says reasonable things, but he’s ready to snap right back in line once there’s a slightly less reprehensible candidate than Palin offered. I agree with him on a good bit, but something about him seems untrustworthy.
EconWatcher
@Jim C.:
Your description is accurate for Sully the last several years. Some people have trouble forgiving him, though, for accusing critics of Bush of being traitors and Fifth Columnists in the lead-up to the Iraq war.
I can see their point of view. When it really mattered, he was shouting crazed accusations at the only people who were thinking straight. They’re not required to forgive.
But it should help that he’s apologized many times, apparently sincerely, and occasionally engages in unprompted self-flagellation over his past behavior.
And you gotta give him credit for his dogged persistence of the torture issue. I believe that has helped move the ball.
Xenos
It won’t last. He has Tory Dementia, the poor thing.
Warren Terra
@Jim C.:
I’m not going to start this fight over again, here and now, but if you think this it probably is because you are new. He’s got a long record – going back decades as a writer and magazine editor, and going back a solid decade even as a blogger – and he’s done quite a few truly awful things, and then showed a truly remarkable lack of meaningful introspection or self-assessment about them, not only in the immediate aftermath but in many cases even years or decades later.
He’s a fantastically talented blogger, a very smart guy, and a hard worker. But I think he’s a narcissist with huge moral blind spots and really not a good human being, and he’s got a huge proclivity for cultivating the friendship and the professional association of some truly awful specimens (Charles Murray, Jamie Kirchick, McMegan, Peter Suderman). He’s also written some brilliant and deeply true things, and provided important attention for the blogging of some excellent people such as Hilzoy (a true great, who sadly hung up her keyboard last year, and who guest-hosted for him a couple of times). So I sometimes read him – but I never respect him.
Well, I started saying I didn’t want to get into this argument, and from the length and discursiveness of my comment I guess that’s not really true. But basically, I’ll just say: you’re right there are a lot of people who cultivate some strongly negative feelings about Sully. But, in our defense, he’s earned them.
Chuck Butcher
there’s hope because something anyone who has looked at polls other than Rasmussen has seen actually tripped the Sullivan BS meter? OK, Sully is only an ass rather than a complete and unadulterated ass. Yippee, progress…
maus
@MattF:
Many of us have been there. But you know what? I’m not going to respect him more for bashing his head against that wall of simple solutions over and over. It’s not worthy of respect, it just gets tiring to listen to and observe.
Mark S.
Heeeeeere’s McMegan:
Fine, I took both of them out (that’s a handy little tool over at Pollster). Result: 45.9% oppose to 42.7% favor, which is pretty close to everyone else except Rasmussen (45% to 44%). So yeah, YouGov is a bit more favorable, but it’s nowhere near the outlier that Rasmussen is.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Sullivan is erratic — and has managed to turn that into a virtue that gets him read and regular front page posts on BJ. Not to mention a Tweety Sunday Morn staple. For that he alone he gets my respect, though not my business of reading him. I leave that to the big brains.
Jim C.
@EconWatcher
Thanks for filling me in.
That was right around the time I started becoming politically active and watching issues closely. I don’t think I started reading Sullivan regularly until a little while after the Iraq war started and since then he’s been one of the few conservatives to really and continually publicly chastise both himself and the Republican Party. So I probably have a different view than some of the others here since I’ve only seen the “good” Sullivan.
And yes, I give Sullivan a lot of credit in some areas. Torture is one. The taking on of the Christian Right in the country is another. So is his dogged support for Obama and basic rationality on things like Health Care Reform.
mai naem
I like Sully’s writing. For whatever reason, I just find him annoying. I also feel the same way about Eric Alterman and Chris Hitchens. They’re just snotty.
Warren Terra
@EconWatcher:
This simply is not true. He’s apologized to himself for believing in Bush, and he’s occasionally he’s apologized to his readers for his having pushed the Bush agenda (which isn’t all that different from apologizing to himself, in a way). So far as I know, he’s never apologized to the specific people he traduced early in the “War On Terror”, and he’s very rarely mentioned specific wrong things he did while caught up in the excitement of Dubya’s Great Adventure. I’ve read him on-and-off for about six years, and daily for at least one solid year of that, and it’s only in recent months that I’ve ever noticed him even mention his shameful “Fifth Column” comments – except early on in his turn against Bush, and back then he repeatedly lied about his comments, saying that he made them only once and right after 9/11 (in fact, he made versions of his “fifth column” comments several times, in more than one venue, including at least once a good month after 9/11).
But, yes, he is good on torture. And I’m glad he’s come around on health care (after posting some deeply vapid posts on the subject last Spring).
Just Some Fuckhead
Sullivan may be an idiot but at least he got his 2004 President vote right.
Starfish
Rasmussen tried to poll me today. Some of the questions were so strange that I did not know how to answer. They asked if the Supreme Court justices ruled based on the constitution and precedence or a sense of what is fair and right? There was an I don’t know answer but that didn’t quite fit either.
A Ghost To Most
Bless his heartFuck him. He carried enough water back in the day to discredit him completely.freelancer
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Burn!
edmund dantes
@Jim C.: That means you just missed his “fifth columnist” phase. Sully is one of those ones that went insane after 9/11. In addition prior to that he had his bell curve fun and assorted others. He’s rightly earned his enmity.
KG
I’m a mark for Sullivan, his was the first blog I remember reading, and one of only a handful that I still read regularly. He’s been pointing that Rasmussen has been as much a GOP house organ as Fox News for a while. This really doesn’t come as a surprise to me at all.
As for the Sullyhate, I don’t get it, but to each his own.
freelancer
@edmund dantes:
True, but by that metric of wingnuttitude, shouldn’t we still be raking Cole over coals?
AFAIK, JC did not have a single one of those positions prior to 2005, bell curve, or otherwise, but scroll through his archives and you’ll see what I’m getting at.
John Cole
@Chuck Butcher: Yes.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@A Ghost To Most:
But you have to admit that recently Sully has become a very useful
idiotstalking horse for the left, in a reverse-TNR “even the conservative Andrew Sullivan thinks that…” sort of way. That’s a big reason why he gets so many links. Apostates from the other side are always useful in the heat of rhetorical battle, if for no other reason than that they usually provide good quoting material.John Cole
@Just Some Fuckhead: I resemble that remark. Asshole.
John Cole
@freelancer: Again?
mr. whipple
@EconWatcher:
This.
Plus, I think the overall quality of the blog is very high. He either works 20 hours a day or has a very large staff of minions.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@John Cole: the link goes to the critter post.
Mark
Sullivan spends a lot of time hammering the Cheneys for being such sick fucks, voted D in 2004 and 2008 (and presumably 2006 and 2010) and is a supporter of universal access to health care and presumably even single-payer – and for moral reasons, not just for budgetary ones.
The day that Megan McMoron is living in a fucking cardboard box on the street (I call it a “Libertarian box”), then we can string Thatcher-loving Sully up for his sins. But let’s focus on destroying McMoron first. Please.
freelancer
@John Cole:
See my edit. No you’ve paid your penance.
I’m just saying it’s a little ridiculous to still make up a Shibboleth that Sully has to pass through, and excoriate him for his past positions, especially when he’s doing that by way posting on the site of a reformed wingnut whose reconciliation he is (ostensibly) okay with.
Just Some Fuckhead
@mr. whipple:
The beagles maintain the site. You can see it in the writing and debating style. They are very smart but you can’t tell them a goddamn thing.
Chuck Butcher
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
I get that more than once in awhile…
SOB sometimes…
edmund dantes
Except I’ve yet to see John go back and try to defend his prior actions. Sully still defends Bell curve and he still hasn’t fully removed himself from his previous fifth columnist stuff.
Sully has seen the light on many things, but Sully is not that far removed from his previous wingnutty. Plus you can see him just waiting to tip back into it on certain topics. He still gets pulled in by the BS far too often.
John on the other hand doesn’t fall for that shit anymore (or at least extremely rarely). Sully is still a good 40-60% chance he’ll fall for it depending on where it lands on Sully’s belief system.
mr. whipple
With no comments, they make sure of it. Huge drawback.
malraux
@Jim C.:
It really depends on what you mean by openminded. When the direct result of some of the worst excesses of conservativism affects Sully negatively, he’ll end up moving to the left on that point. But it has to be something that affects him, and he very rarely ends up generalizing that leftward move beyond the very specific point that affects him.
edmund dantes
@Just Some Fuckhead: Plus there was the recent kerfulle over his interns posting stuff without attribution as to whether it was sully posting the links or his workers.
It was never really satisfied. The big lesson was that if it’s just a link and quote with little editorializing it’s most likely one of his minions. Longer form stuff is actually Sully but no by-lines to remove all doubt.
Jim C.
@the various folks providing useful explanation and context
Definitely sounds like I missed some doozies from the Sullivan years prior to my becoming politically active. I definitely understand the point that some folks are making here. The thing that made me politically active was that I actually got myself a European girlfriend.
She’s the one who started having me read things that I previously didn’t. Things like UN Inspectors finding no evidence of any active WMD programs in the runup to the war etc. When I started speaking up against the war to my family, I actually got asked at one point, “Where’s your patriotism?!” by my mom. (Now, my entire family are liberals who volunteer regularly and donate money. I converted them!)
Still, without wanting to take us too far down a rat hole…
1. The vast majorities of the conservatives that I’ve read who say vile and awful things and hold horrifically misguided and incoherent views on a wide variety of things never actually admit to being wrong.
It doesn’t matter how often they are shown to be wrong or how blatantly the facts prove them to be utterly full of shit, they never go back and do any sort of introspection or review at all. I think the minuscule number of conservatives who DO go back and adjust their views when reality shows them to be wrong should get a bit of encouragement for doing so.
Ironically, the very first John Cole blog post I read was when I followed a link from Sully’s blog over here to the post where John posted a very memorable “I’ve had it with these assholes” style rant about the current GOP in the country and announcing he was leaving their ranks. :)
2. I suppose this “new’ Sullivan could be biding his time before reverting to being the “old” Sullivan that I just barely missed, but he’s been pretty decent for six years or so now. At what point does the statute of limitations for old dickishness kick in?
I’ve said some pretty idiotic things in my day. I’m damn sure that I wouldn’t want some of the things I said seven or eight years ago still haunting me today.
deadrody
Ah, if only you dopes had the ability to do something other than post images.
If you actually went to Pollster.com and used their tools you would see, first, that Rasmussen absolutely NAILS the “favor” voting block. As in their numbers are on the overall trend line.
Second, the shape of the oppose line is the same, just higher. And why ? Because they sample “likely voters”. And yes, with anti-Obama sentiment running very high, likely voters are, indeed, polling to the right.
What’s worse, however, is that if you do the same thing for hte other pollsters ? Wow, they are REALLY bad. Some of them tend to skew the overall trend in your favor, but if you look at them compared to the overall, they are out to lunch.
Good luck with that.
edmund dantes
Unless I missed it. He’s still proud of his promoting of the bell curve bullshit.
Mike in NC
American conservatives are still trying to argue that Winston Churchill and George W. Bush were cut from the same cloth. Clap louder.
I have to go read the ‘Fire Megan McArdle’ blog at least once a week for some quality snark over her glibertarian stupidity.
BillCinSD
@Mark: He also pushed Betsy MacCaughey into the limelight to enable the killing of Clinton’s health care initiative, backed The Bell Curve idiocy. As far as I can tell he hasn’t really apologized for any of this, and still thinks he was correct. Or maybe that’s just his ghost bloggers
Warren Terra
@edmund dantes:
Yes, exactly.
Contra freelancer, I see a difference between Cole and Sully in their behavior as former Bush supporters: I think Cole has thought about what he did wrong and what he’ll do next, while I think Sully is always leaping wholeheartedly into undertakings with as little consideration as underlay his backing of Bush. I don’t criticize Sully for having backed Bush, but I do criticize him because in so many ways he’s still the same person who backed Bush. I don’t think Cole is.
If we were to ostracize all sinners, it would be a pretty small blogosphere. After all, to greater or lesser degrees a whole bunch of A-list liberal bloggers backed the Iraq invasion – including (as far as I can recall) Matthew Yglesias, Josh Marshall, and Kevin Drum. And I love Yglesias and Marshall, and I respect Drum. But the other side of sin is sincere repentance, and I don’t really see that in Sully.
Tax Analyst
Sullivan has his positive moments, but deep down inside he really wants to be part of the Republican camp. He can agree with the Democrats for a moment on an issue, but in that same moment he will start looking for any possible point at which he can separate himself. He seems to have some sort of viseral dislike of all things associated with the Democratic Party so even when he agrees at various times he is ready to jump back to the “R” reservation at the first tiny glimmer of any singular shiny sequin flash he might see.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@deadrody: RAsmussen is no more than a polling arm of the RNC in between elections and their numbers are not and cannot be defended during those times, and on particular issues like HCR. When elections approach, then they go straight and are pretty reliable. Nothing but partisan hacks in between however with perpetual outlier results to every other polling company.
Midnight Marauder
@Jim C.:
I would say that you were blind to the behavior pattern of the “old” Sullivan appearing frequently during recent times. I am reminded of his brief flirting with birtherism a few months back; his insane “I am moved, but cannot change my positon” during the abortion chronicles last year following Dr. Tiller’s assassination; as well as his repeated meltdowns and tantrums over patently inane “issues,” such as his demand that Janet Napolitano be fired after the whole Underwear Bomber fiasco.
Or as was stated earlier in this thread:
@edmund dantes:
PeakVT
Another Sully meta thread?
No Joy in Mudville
@malraux:
I agree with your assessment of Sullivan. A shorter way to say it is:
Sullivan is very open-minded about himself.
A rare trait among humans.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Jim C.:
I wouldn’t expect much more of an ideological about face from Sully than what we’ve already seen from him. This is as good as it gets. He finally realized that American “conservatism” has little in common with the British Toryism he grew up with (apart from that both of them benefit their respective elites, which is something that Sully still hasn’t quite figured out) – much of his recent political awakening can be chalked up to that alone. But as an expat upper-class Brit he is still incredibly tone-deaf to a lot of things in American politics that you need to know in order to follow the dog whistles here and sniff out the bullshit, because he just doesn’t have the cultural background needed to understand what the conversation is really about. Compare the way that Sully and TNC comment about any topic which touches on race or gender issues for example, and you’ll see what I mean.
edmund dantes
@Warren Terra: This is the thing.
The difference between Sully and Cole is summed up with a simple idea.
Sully looked back on his previous views and blamed it on his passions. He never really examined what caused him to think the way he did or why he got taken in. He simply chalked it up to his passions and gives himself a pass. He’s even explicitly gone into why he won’t change that “passion” way of thinking. So Sully will always be susceptible to the same triggers and moments that he was in the past.
John Cole on the other hand actually critically and demonstratively examined his thinking. He went through the process of recognizing what, why and how he thought the way he did. He may not have done it for all of his past behavior or found an exact reason for each belief, but he’s actually done introspection and examination that got him to where he was.
The difference for me between John and Sully is that they’ve both looked into the mirror of introspection. Sully looked into and just saw the passion and how it lead him astray. John looked into it and saw how his own actions, thoughts, beliefs, etc led him astray. He didn’t just chalk it all up into “I got caught up in the moment” (which is understandable to a point).
Michael D.
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Sully, like all non-citizens, didn’t vote in the 2004 election and has never cast a vote in the US.
@KG: I don’t get the hate either. Sullivan’s problem is that he thinks for himself, makes very bad mistakes, and corrects them. As is said about him, if you think he’s on your side, just wait for a bit.
Jim C.
@Midnight Marauder
Hmm. No, I recall the things you’re mentioning. But to me, I think something Warren Terra said strikes a chord: “I don’t criticize Sully for having backed Bush, but I do criticize him because in so many ways he’s still the same person who backed Bush”
How Sullivan processes and comes to his points of view is remarkably consistent. His blog is amazingly prolific. With a lot of bloggers, they think about things for a while…maybe take a day or two. They process and analyze privately and then post the results publicly after giving things some time to play out.
Something I’ve noticed about Sully is that he does all of that stuff in plain view. It’s kind of like the old “stream of consciousness” writing exercises that you do during English classes in school. He’s emotional and jumps quickly rather than waiting and seeing what happens before forming an opinion. Basically, he’s got a tendency towards snap judgments. This makes him compelling to read, but does have it’s drawbacks as you’ve posted.
I recall the flirtations that Sully has had at some of the things you describe, but where he ultimately ends up on issues is more important than his brief considerations. At a “macro” level, more often than not he ends up with a reasonably sensible position on things.
I mean, obviously that last statement should be prefaced with a caveat “by the standards of modern conservatives”, but at the end of the day the man IS a conservative. You can’t expect him to suddenly turn pro-choice overnight for example.
Mark S.
@Jim C.:
I wish I could say the same thing about my family. Instead, I get the digested version of Fox News during family reunions.
For me, Sully’s lowpoint was his flypaper article. Since then, he’s gotten a lot better as he realized the GOP is really about homophobia and torture.
El Cid
Pelosi blows off Stupak:
Bart has a sad.
Warren Terra
@PeakVT:
I know, how lucky can we get?
But you’re right, it does seem to happen a fair bit. I think we need a Sully-meta-thread tag.
nancydarling
I think I discovered BJ through Sullivan. I have sworn off of him many times in the last year and a half, but keep drifting back—Just can’t quit him.
Joel
@mai naem: Can’t speak for Alterman, but Hitchens is an epic douchebag. Sullivan is far too bipolar to achieve that status.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@El Cid: Ought to make for some good teevee. They should maybe wheel in a little portable guillotine just moral support.
Joel
@Mark: This.
Also, Ben Stein. I hope he dies with a lump of gold shoved up his con-artist ass.
Tonal Crow
@Warren Terra: I don’t think that’s so. He’s always got a larger disapproval-to-approval ratio than the average of the other pollsters, and his data (I use that word advisedly) are flat for the last 2 months when the other pollsters show a great deal of movement. If he can’t pick up that movement with the 8 polls he did this year (which, BTW, appears to be the most of any single pollster), he’s doing something wrong.
Mike in NC
@Warren Terra:
‘The Daily Douche’ ?
jacy
@PeakVT:
We’re only dissecting Sully so we can avoid talking about McCardle — that way lies madness.
Jim C.
@jacy
I’d say we’re dissecting Sully because he’s a bit more interesting than Megan. He’s actually complicated. He’s got good parts and bad parts.
But if you like, I’d be happy to dissect her.
Begin dissection:
Megan is an airheaded idiot with pretensions of actually having the capacity for original thought.
End dissection.
Fergus Wooster
Fucking about time.
I can believe in a Sully conversion, given that all the pro-Cole vs. Sully arguments stand. Sully has blamed bad decisions on his passions, been milquetoast in apologies / apostasy, etc., but if he’s making progress it is unequivocal grounds for praise and encouragement. He can be an ally.
Also, Ben Stein sucks. I can’t believe Netflix is streaming his crap “documentary”. Too.
Carlo
Sully’s done a lot more than just blaming past mistakes on “passions”. He’s actually written repeatedly and at length on this. See here and here.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Carlo:
See here also.
Cat Lady
I too came here from Sully – My First Blog (R) was Eric Alterman’s Altercation when he was on MSNBC’s website way back when. I admired Eric’s passionate contempt for Sully’s 5th column Iraq dissent business, so I checked Sully out. He wasn’t a whackadoodle – probably because of teh gay, and Eric’s intransigence about acknowledging Sully’s evolution struck me as petty and overly harsh. Sully’s site was the portal to here, although I remember coming here a few times and it was still whackadoodle territory. I’m with @edmund dantes here.
Like John Cole, I think Our Sully Is Learning. Cole’s conversion has been a thing of diamond-like beauty, and solid. I still feel like punching Sully in the neck when he makes a classic liberal argument and then attributes it to Oakeshottian conservatism – WTF? I read him more than Alterman now, but he still needs to repent for his sins. You’d think his Catholicism would impel him to do that. He’s got a lot to apologize for – war mongering, The Bell Curve, Betsy McCaughey. But, his focus on the torture regime is important, his support of Obama, calling out the Pope, calling out McMegan, and the hypocrisy about gays, etc. keeps me going back.
Fergus Wooster
I haven’t forgotten or forgiven the “5th column” slander. I’m just keeping an open mind.
Free At Last
I used to read lots of left-leaning and centrist blogs, but now I find that I’ve limited my reading to about 5 blogs, 3 of which are run by reformed wingnuts: John Cole, Andrew Sullivan and Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs). Funny that it turned out that way. I wonder what that says about me.
The other 2 I read regularly are Josh Marshall (for inside dem party info) and Tbogg (for snark, of course).
Also, I must confess that I occasionally force myself to browse the post titles at Red State – but being a glutton for self punishment is something I’ve long known about myself.
arguingwithsignposts
@Free At Last:
Sully is NOT reformed. He’s still a jackass, and Johnson is a libertarian jackass who has some kind of principles to tell the Sarah Palins of the world to GTFO. But that doesn’t make him a prize. Sully, especially, still holds to his conservative IGMFU principles. He can DIAF as far as I’m concerned.
ETA: Megan McAarglbargle isn’t even worth justifying. Her MBA gives her NO QUALIFICATIONS to pontificate about economics, and yet she’s the “econoblogger” for the Atlantic. Piss on that.
edmund dantes
@Carlo: Except that critique of his War beliefs is largely based on the idea that he was wrong to defer his beliefs in Thatcherism and Reaganism to Bush and his cronies. It was his fault for believing they (Bush and Cronies) believed in Reaganism and Thatcherism like him not that those beliefs were wrong.
He doesn’t actually examine those underlying beliefs in Thatcherism and Reaganism. You can even see in his writing on that he in part believes that Reagan was deeply responsible for the 1989 events. Reagan played a role to be sure, but Sully still seems to harbor some rose colored glasses about Thatcherism and Reaganism.
This is the difference between Cole and Sully. Sully got back to the surface of where he went wrong. He didn’t dig deeper into the actual core beliefs and whether they were right even if applied to the “right” person. Cole went all the way to look at his core beliefs and also held them up to the light of day.
This is why we see Sully still getting sucked back into arguments (and even congratulating himself on how he’s examined his own “errors”) and thought processes of old. He hasn’t fully converted his thinking or truly examined it. He’s on the path possibly, but he’s just as likely to slip back giving the right stimulus. This difference in the extent of how they’ve examined their prior beliefs is why I highly doubt we’ll ever see John slip back to his former high wingnuttery.
res ipsa loquitur
Sullivan’s latest obsession — “How smug and self-righteous was Mo’Nique” — was just about what I’d expect from a Charles Murray fan like Sully.
Warren Terra
@arguingwithsignposts:
No, she’s the “Business & Economics Editor”. A much more impressive title for her not to have earned, I’d say.
Tonal Crow
@deadrody:
I didn’t realize that a flat line has the same shape as a curve showing an average decline of 1 percentage point/wk and accelerating. ‘Cuz that’s what the Rasmussen and average-of-other-pollsters curves for the past 6 weeks look like, respectively.
Carlo
@edmund dantes: Fair enough. Sully drives me crazy sometimes too. My point was mainly just that “passions” was vastly oversimplifying Sully’s mea culpa.
Although, imagine how much saner US politics would be if the biggest problem with mainstream conservatism were Thatcherism and Reaganism.
MikeBoyScout
I confess, I read the Daily Doozy.
At times his writing is both brilliant and spot on.
At others it is confused, sycophancy and misleading.
Regarding the prospect of his breaking with McMegan, don’t bet on it. The only thing she’s ever brought to the field of business/economic writing is the spawning of a cottage industry of bloggers mocking her stupidity.
Sully does not need The Atlantic with its obligatory cross posts, insufferable site load times and bad re-designs, yet he seems besotted with the need for associating himself respectable mastheads.
He is what he is. Good & bad. Grain of salt.
By the way, my stumbling upon John at BJ was part Atrios and part John’s high google rank on a Steeler thread search the same Sunday.
Serendipity is a good thing.
But maybe there is a Big Ben exception to that thought?
Mayur
@arguingwithsignposts: Thank you. This is pretty much exactly what I was going to say.
Also, I find it utterly ridiculous that so many commenters on this blog are quick to damn Jane Hamsher for her jackassery (and yes, it is jackassery), but give Sully the time of day when, by the measure that bloggers have any “influence” on political events (I’m not sure if it’s >0), he’s done far more lasting harm.
tc125231
So, Emo John calls Krugman, who usually knows what he’s talking about relative to economics, “Kthug”. meanwhile, he’s sympathetic with Sullivan, who has been right about twice, and writes sympathetic posts about the dumbest Mickey Kaus ramblings imaginable,
Sullivan was right about torture, and that was important.
There must have been another time Sullivan was right, but I’m damned if i can think of one. Oh wait. He was right about mCcAin.
Was Krugman wrong about these? No. And his batting average on economics is very high.
So what’s the deal? I guess Cole just doesn’t like Krugman.
That’s fine. i don’t like Cole.
Warren Terra
Um, tc125231, lots of people call Krugman Kthug affectionately, as a way to mock those who’ve criticized Krugman’s vociferousness. And the Krugman post was clearly in agreement with Krugman – indeed, I doubt any frontpager at this site has substantially disagreed with Krugman since at least when Lehmann went under. You could probably find some Krugman criticism in the archives – especially in the 2008 primaries, when Krugman was fairly heavily on Hillary’s side – but if you think Cole was bashing Krugman, or doesn’t like him, and if you care about Cole’s opinion enough to call him out on it, you need to relax, maybe have a drink, and try reading the post again.
Libertina
Tried to post this back when there were about 10 comments, had Firefox issues and forgot till just now. I am forever indebted to Sully for the link he posted that led me here. Now neither the Daily Kos or the Daily Dish are daily for me. My daily happy place is BJ. Because of that, I always give Sully the benefit of the doubt, but he can be up and down and all over the place. What I respect about him is that he will say what he thinks, consequences be damned. Sometimes, he has his head screwed on straight, and then, his stuff can be a joy to read.
edmund dantes
I wish I could remember how I stumbled across BJ. It’s one of the great things that happened for me. At the time I was reading a lot of liberal blogs and the occasional “conservative” blog, but I was having a hard time finding one where I could at least respect the thought process of the individual. Too many of them were just batshit insane.
I was looking for someone to challenge my own thought processes and thinking. It was surprisingly hard. Then John had to go and convert from a righty, and I was left without a thinking conservative. Luckily I’ve found Larison (though he does have his problems).
Reaganism is not a benign thing. Reaganism is, if not the birth, but the proving ground for a lot of what ails us. Supply siders came of age during his time and gained a stamp of “it works”. The Christian Right was brought even further into the fold. Military spending and deficits expoded. Americans were taught government was the enemy by an entire political party versus being just a fringe part of the party. Reaganism is where many of the worst aspects came home to roost within the bosom of the party versus being held out on the fringe.
Paul L.
Good thing Sully is taking the GOP to task over Massa/Foley 2.
Andrew Sullivan doesn’t know Massa is a Democrat?
Progressives/Democrats are showing how civil they are by downplaying the whole Massa scandal.
Gregory
I absolutely love how in 90 comments some people defend Sullivan to one degree or another, but not one person has anything nice to say — and rightly so — about McArdle. At least Sullivan didn’t once blog under a pseudonym inspired by Ayn Rand.
@Warren Terra:
This. Also.
les
Au contraire. He quite appreciates it; he’s an elite and loves it. He’s a narcissistic sophist with good grammar and vocabulary; if it’s good for Andrew he’s for it. Classic: everyone should follow the teachings of the Catholic church, cause that would make for a great society. Oh, except the bit about gays, cause, ya know, Andy’s gay. Wadda douche.
ksmiami
Look, I feel kinda sorry for Sully. If he were in England, he would be comfortable being a Tory and he would be done with it. It is in America where he is starting to come to terms with the fact that most of the current American Republican party is pretty ffed up. I mean it is a motley collection of home “scholers”, racists, sexists, homophobics, chickenhawks, rapturists, neanderthals, neocons and fat doodes (I am looking at you Ailes) And yet, they are given so much “respect” here it is pretty crazy. I think they used to do a better job at sounding reasonable, but then there was the torture gulag, McCain nominated the Wasilla chick and the teaparties started and we all got a good look at the modern GOP and it was a pretty horrendous visage. I don’t think Andrew will join the fold again soon, but I think he is having a hard time realizing that conservative in this country means stone cold ffin nuts.
Buck B.
Best post title ever. Makes me laugh every time I tihnk of it.
John Cole
@tc125231: Kthug is a term of endearment.
psychobroad
I used to read him even though a good bit of his stuff bothered me. Then he did a post about how he could NEVER support late-term abortion, no matter what, and I’ve never read him again. That stupid asshole apparently is incapable of understanding that NO ONE gets a late-term abortion because they’ve just decided carrying a baby to term is inconvenient. It’s virtually always because there’s a medical condition that is going to result in a dead mother or a dead baby, or both. Also, I think its unconscionable to force a woman to carry a dead baby to term and make her deliver it, rather than let her terminate the pregnancy.
Sorry for the rant. As you can see,it’s a hot-button of mine.