Apparently last night’s post went right over the Sully borg’s collective heads:
Do you think they understood the point of my post last night? Like, for example, the people on “teh left” who are all nominated for awards are basically folks with no institutional power, and whose grave sins range from saying fuck too much and pointing out that wingnuts are crazy? That it is absurd to equate a bunch of slightly obnoxious comments from random bloggers to the Malkin awards, which is a list of individuals who make up the institutional right. When was the last time Digby was on television? Or Tbogg? Or Amanda Marcotte? Do they understand that Markos is essentially blacklisted from NBC?
Do they even understand the concept of false equivalence?
Do they understand how silly it is to nominate someone for a Moore award for noting that the right-wing is fomenting violence, and then hosting an award for a dozen right-wingers fomenting violence?
Do they understand my comment was a riff on a well-known remark by Dave Wiegel?
Do you think there is even the slightest chance they understand we’re making fun of them? Probably. Which is why my post is now a nominee for “for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric.”
Clowns.
And I don’t want another hundred comments telling me you love Sullivan. Clearly, I love the blog, too. But the false equivalence between a couple of powerless bloggers and William Donohoe and Roger Ailes and comapny, who can get on tv with the snap of their fingers to spread their poisonous bile, is just absurd.
El Cid
Okay, maybe they don’t have any significant institutional power, but bloggers considered to be loony ‘progressives’ can all merge together to form one giant robot with heat rays which can melt government buildings and party headquarters.
harokin
The greatest trick lefty bloggers ever pulled was convincing the world they didn’t have any power.
Jman
You sure got lots of questions. TBogg is tied for the win. Go TBogg!
blogbytom
I think you hurt their feelings, Cole. They are underbloggers and they are pissed. Hear them roar!
some other guy
“Do they understand my comment was a riff on a well-known remark by Dave Wiegel?”
Clearly, they are not aware of all Internet traditions.
guster
Stop defending Ward Churchill.
Dollared
Maybe Sully understands the slippery slope he stands atop. If he just for one minute acknowledges the institutional right as far more powerful than the social democrats on the center left, then he might have to acknowledge the fundamental imbalances in our society, and then he might understand that his reflexive Tory-ism has no place in a society where the top marginal rate is 30% and there is the most minimal safety net in the developed world.
And then he might have to think about the 40 million impoverished people and the 100 million working poor people in the US. And thinking of them – that, that is unthinkable.
DougJ
@guster:
That made me laugh, although I don’t know what you are referring to (I know who Ward Churchill is, but not why he is relevant here). Somebody please fill me in.
Joshua Norton
The main difference is that we hear the voices coming from outside our head.
Paul W.
Sully hates ever admitting that he actually likes the left… which just makes him adhere closer to the right that I’m pretty sure he is ideologically opposed to.
Those knee-jerk reactions that we develop early on in our lives are hard to get rid of.
MattF
Aaand… when Sharron Angle (Republican candidate for the US Senate, in case you’ve forgotten) suggested ‘second Amendment remedies’ as a cure for ‘the Harry Reid problem’… the difference, of course, was that she was just little ‘ol Sharron, and not a powerful blogger.
jacy
NO. But Sully is still on his mythical quest for “rational conservatives” like he remembers from the storybooks, and for him to willfully persist in his belief that there are some conservatives that aren’t evil, crazy, or at best only out to take care of themselves and to hell with all the rest, the left must equal the right. If they don’t, the poor boy’s head going to asplode. The fact that he’s still a “conservative” and a Catholic should give you some idea as to the industrial-strength anti-matter comprising the wall he’s built between himself and reality.
Li
Um, isn’t this apparent from the names of the awards themselves? Michael Moore is a fat, opinionated documentarian that likes doing obnoxious stunts against the powerful, largely in order to line his own pockets. Michelle Malkin is a racist who identifies far to much with white people who would have gladly bombed her and her family just a few years back, and has repeated called for genocide against Muslims. I’m no fan of Moore, in some ways one couldn’t ask for a worse spokesman, but he is in no way the equivalent of a virulent hate monger like Malkin.
The awards themselves are a monument to false equivocation. The use of the awards to create false equivalencies shouldn’t be a surprise.
Just Some Fuckhead
It pains me to be associated with you denizens of the far left who want everyone killed who doesn’t agree with you. Praise Jesus for sensible centrists like Sully.
John Cole
And how does any list of nominees not include Marty Peretz EVERY SINGLE YEAR?
Elisabeth
Make sure, John, should you lose that you graciously thank the members of the Academy and remark that is was enough just to be nominated.
Yeah, I’m telling you to lie.
mk3872
I love Sully. I’ll admit it.
While BJ & John are not like the lunatics on the right, there is a clear equivalency between bloggers like Jane Hamsher & Markos and Michelle Malkin and Erik Erikson.
They are the same, just on polar opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.
DougJ
@Li:
I know not everyone will agree but I don’t even like the idea of spending too much time criticizing Malkin or Moore in the first place. Save it for Roger Ailes and Glenn Beck and people with important positions in government.
Li
Boy, I mangled my English in that post. I should know better than to try and race to be first on -this- blog! lol
pragmatism
can’t they rename it the “michael moore is fat” award?
abrxas
No, I love the Dish, but you’re spot on with this one. I was a little surprised to see them give you the Moore Award. Lame.
liberty60
I used to be active in the Coffee Party, which was formed to be a civil, sane, fact-based opposition to the Tea Party.
Except they ended up equating “civil dialogue” with “ambiguous false equivalence”, and refused time and again to promote any principle or idea about the role of government or society.
There is a tendency with Sully to do this- to equate strong opinion with rash invective.
No matter how politely it is worded, viewing unemployed people as lazy and undeserving of assistance is a monstrous bit of cruelty; at least Rick Santelli (channeling Mr. Potter) was honest enough to do his snarling openly.
No matter how delicate and decorous Bill Kristol is, John’s right- he openly advocates policies that are murderous, even by their own terms.
And it is not unfair or intemperate to say flatly that the Republican Party now stands for royalism and ethnic grievances domestically, and imperialism and bloodlust internationally.
There is plenty of time for conciliation and compromise, but I’m not the first one to note that all important change usually comes about with a lot of pain and suffering, sometimes outright bloodshed.
Slavery, civil rights, labor rights, suffrage….not one of these things would have been accomplished without someone somewhere earning a Moore Award.
Mikeg
They showed you, John Cole. They showed you. Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of far-leftist blogging, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful.
Marty
Actually you can tell when Sully’s on vacation, because the posts on his blog suddenly become so halfwitted that you have to do a double-take and check the byline. Like this week.
Just Some Fuckhead
Michael Moore is fat. John Cole is fat. I think John Cole has a fat chance to win.
PS
@John Cole: Um, because that wouldn’t be funny?
Go TBogg! The People’s Armada is surging into the lead. How does it go? The people, untied, will never be tidied up? Or as I once chanted (following the lead of others) on the streets of San Francisco: “What do we want? Ummmm. When do we want it? Hmmmmm.” Vote often.
xochi
@John Cole: You do realize that these lists are compiled by Andrew Sullivan, right?
pragmatism
@Marty:
+1. the dorf makes me want to spew chunks, and he is the de facto sully when sully is out sullying about.
mistermix
I’m generally a Sully defender, but I “mark all as read” without even looking when he’s out of town. And the Yglesias award is the only worthwhile one in the bunch.
James E Powell
Do they even understand the concept of false equivalence?
Understand false equivalences? They are skilled at creating them out of nothing. They certainly understand them.
Do they understand my comment was a riff on a well-known remark by Dave Wiegel?
Response deleted because some other guy already responded
mark
I stopped reading E.D.s blog after they refused to call out Peter Thiel (women shouldn’t vote) but went after Amanda Marcotte for calling him out. Sully did the same thing. Fuck them all
Aidan
Stop whining every time someone calls you out on saying stupid and hateful things just because you’re a powerless little blogger. Take responsibility for your words.
MikeJ
@mistermix: Is that one for speeling?
New Yorker
How did I know this post would be here after taking a glance at Sully’s blog and seeing the Moore Award nomination….
John, honestly, who the fuck cares? Sully’s awards are not a Nobel Prize. They’re not even the Razzies. They’re stuff one blogger arbitrarily throws together and lets his audience vote on. It’s about as noteworthy as the winner of a random poll at the AV Club on what was the best rock album of the 90s. Now, granted, I enjoy voting for Sully’s awards, just as I enjoy voting on random pop culture stuff, but I don’t think it actually means anything.
Who cares?
guster
@DougJ: It’s completely meaningless. Just popped into my head and made me laugh, too.
Well, plus I like blaming Cole for things. I wasted 11,000 words in the past couple hears on BJ, hating Obama for not overturning DADT. That’s a whole lot of wrong in one place. His place. So his fault.
amk
@El Cid: The perfect ending would be for that robot to self-destruct in 5,4,3,2,1….
DougJ
@MikeJ:
God damn does MY make a lot of typos and other mistakes. I make them too, but he doesn’t even correct them. He also doesn’t read comments.
Dollared
@mark: Yeah, that is the new world we live in. The media behaves like the NBA ref that can never catch the dirty attempt to injure players away from the ball, but always catches, T’s up and ejects the player that retaliates for the cheating.
Lesley
Andrew Sullivan is the Victorian Miss Manners of the blogosphere.
MikeJ
@DougJ: I don’t mind the typos that much, it’s the homophones that drive me up the wall.
Bill E Pilgrim
“I read something at Andrew Sullivan’s blog that was really stupid”.
You’d think that people writing that would eventually realize that the two thoughts in that sentence aren’t meeting for the first time but are actually well-acquainted.
Spiffy McBang
Marcotte was on Maddow a month or so ago.
The point still holds. But it was good to see.
CJ
Hook, line, sinker.
General Stuck
This post gets my nod for Bored Blogger of the Holidays award.
BrklynLibrul
Dear Andrew has praised Mitch Daniels repeatedly for his so-called fiscal conservatism (read: proposed tax cuts and spending cuts) as well as his moderate temperament, but now that Daniels has come out as a hater of gay marriage, just watch him do his Tory 180.
Lit3Bolt
@New Yorker:
Of course, you could turn your argument around to Sully and wonder why he delights in going after powerless little bloggers who say naughty things on their blogs while nodding solemnly to rhetoric that results in the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands. Why does he care?
Moderates and moderation in our political discourse stake out silly ideological positions such as that if a person is uncivil, they should be labeled “unserious.” It’s a lame exercise in intellectual cowardice.
Zifnab
So we’ve got a bunch of violent lunatics lining up for their conservative awards, and we’ve got people who regularly observe and mock said violent lunatics lining up for the liberal equivalent.
The only thing these awards seem to show is that the liberal blogosphere is – at least by comparison – composed of a whole bunch of pleasant-as-fuck motherfuckers.
tomvox1
I do not love Sully. Because even the most “enlightened” conservatives lack the compassion necessary to feel for those on the lower end of the economic scale in the economically developed nations of the world. For all his good words for the Iranian people and gay rights, his hard-on for the austerity measures being enacted by the Cameron regime in the UK and breathless hope that Obama would follow that lead by embracing Simpson-Bowles is just vile. I really do think the Right, even the moderate Right, are a bunch of “I got mine so tax me less/you should just work harder/poor people deserve to be poor” assholes. And that most definitely includes Sully, too, whatever personal growth he has made in the last 8 years.
different church-lady
That’s a really weird acceptance speech, John.
Violet
I voted for TBogg in solidarity. Is there any point in power voting? I’m a pro at that kind of timewasting activity (remember Little Bitsy?), but don’t usually bother if more than one vote per IP is thrown out.
Mike in NC
After 10,000 installments of “The View from Your Window” he couldn’t get any lamer.
Jager
The last rational conservative died July 1st, 1969. My Republican Judge grandpa told me in 1968 and I qoute:
“Dick Nixon is a lying son of a bitch” and added “if any of those crazy, god damned Birchers ever get elected its the end of us all”
taylormattd
The real question is why you people continue to “love” his blog. The guy is a certified, warmongering wingnut, who is occasionally marginally coherent.
If he didn’t have members of his preferred political faction constantly claiming he was an immoral abomination, he’d likely still be claiming you were part of a traitorous fifth column out to take down the glorious USA.
Li
I, for one, have never understood people that can sit next to grinning, genocidal maniacs like Kristol on the tube, and yet get all hot and bothered about someone saying ‘fuck’. It’s as if they have no concept of right and wrong, and have substituted politeness for ethics and morality.
And, if any of one like that might be reading this thread, then fuck you.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Zifnab: When someone is arrested on the freeway with an actual bag of salted dicks in his car on his way to force-feed them to someone, then I’ll entertain Sullivan’s bullshit equivalences.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Zifnab: When someone is arrested on the freeway with an actual bag of salted dicks in his car on his way to force-feed them to someone, then I’ll entertain Sullivan’s bullshit equivalences.
different church-lady
@Li: Maybe John needs to start a “Sullivan Award” for false equivalency?
JGabriel
Last night I wrote:
Apparently not.
It really doesn’t take much to inflame clueless winger apologists, does it?
.
Comrade Dread
@El Cid: When the five PUMAs combine, they form Kostron.
PS
@Violet: The instructions clearly say “Vote early. Vote often.” And it seems to work.
Li
#56 That would be ideal. Turn it back on him. David Brooks would probably win on a bi-weekly basis, but it would be fun!
Dollared
@different church-lady: This. This would be very fun, and no work at all. Jeffrey Rosen could just mail one a day to JC.
Tom Levenson
I don’t love Sully/The Dish. I find it interesting, up and down and all that. But Sully’s too sloppy a thinker to love.
The use of the blog as an experiment in publishing/aggregating — now that’s worth paying attention to, and it is where Sully really has earned some respect. But it matters how well he performs his curatorial function, and frankly, I don’t think he does it all that well (or perhaps, all that consistently).
And yes, the Moore award stuff is pretentious and malicious nonsense. Also too.
Allan
@Bill E Pilgrim: I think that was how they finally took down Dahmer.
Redshirt
Time for a “Sullivan Award”!
pragmatism
it appears that emo is going meta. emobama, emoconservatarians, emo great orange boehner, emo glibertarian ombudspeople, emo CEO’s. its all hurt feelers now. ’cause its relatable or sumthing.
kdaug
Wait – I thought Sully was off for the holidays and his understudies were in charge. No?
Violet
@PS:
This is true. Time for some power voting while I watch the news on TV. TBogg FTW!
John - A Motley Moose
@different church-lady: That’s a good idea. He could add a ‘Galtian Overlords’ award. That would be awarded to people who worship the ‘successful’ as Sully did recently in a series of posts.
Brick Oven Bill
Digby made the back cover of Glenn Beck’s new book, which means she is more famous than John Cole. Even worse news for Balloon Juice is that John is defending his words by deferring to the originality of Dave Weigel.
Top Secret Conversations of Dave Weigel with a Photograph.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Allan: You see? And he clearly read TBogg, using time travel.
The logic of modern conservatives is easy once you realize that you just leave out the logic part. It’s like how easy it would be learning to ice skate if the goal were to do nothing but fall down.
Anne Laurie
‘Understand’ it? It’s the Dish-Underbloggers’ favorite trope!
No matter how much Sullivan may have done for the blogoverse (and I try to keep in mind that I first found this blog through the Dish blogroll) he really, really, really needs to take a look at what his minions are doing to his reputation. He’s never going to dump even the worst of them, because he’s stubborn that way (and besides, anyone with an IQ over room temperature who can link McArdle uncritically just doesn’t have very good judgment). But one would think that The Founding Proprietor of The World’s Foremost Political Blog would pay a little more attention to what his named & unnamed assistants’ bad faith and poor critical thinking are doing to his own reputation…
Of course, then one remembers Sullivan’s defense of Betsy McCaughey’s blatant HCR lies, not to mention the whole Bell Curve disgrace. Maybe Andrew’s just addicted to the political equivalent of ‘Two Girls, One Cup’.
JGabriel
@kdaug:
Yes. Patrick Appel seems to be running The Dish Awards.
.
Sixers
What power does Bill Donahoe have besides making himself look like an asshole and forcing catholics sitting on the fence to leave the church forever? Don’t people have to take you seriously to have power?
demkat620
So tbogg tells one of the main agitators for the disaster in Iraq to fuck off and die and Sully had to clutch his pearls?
For gawd’s sake Sharon Angle, Bachmann, Beck and lots of other people with actual power were talking armed revolution and other nonsence but tbogg’s bag of salted dick jokes hurt Andrew’s feelings?
Hey Sully? Get a fucking grip.
Citizen Alan
@Lesley:
That’s unfair. Miss Manners has wit.
Anne Laurie
@Tom Levenson: __
Thank you for saying this more cogently than I could.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Redshirt:
How about an Andrew Sullivan Award For Egregious False Equivalence ?
demkat620
Well, I voted. I hope tbogg wins and gets a segment from Olbermann for stealing his award.
That would be justice.
jrg
I wonder… If you had suggested that the world would be a better place if someone who helped cause 100,000+ deaths were dead, and that person was ANYTHING other than an American “conservative”, would you be hearing a peep out of the Sully brigade?
Somehow, I’m guessing not. Remember when “conservatives” used to chastise liberals about “moral relativism”? Good times, good times.
paul
Meh. Sully the Pooh (as The Editors have long referred to him) lost his claim to credibility with his “fifth column” remark right after 9/11. When a foreign-born gay conservative (ie, a chicken who owns stock in KFC) openly attacks Americans as traitors, I have a hard time taking them seriously. I think we sew Sully and Buchanan, egomaniacal bloviators that they are, in a sack and throw them over the side.
Barb (formerly Gex)
The weird thing is that if you said “screw” instead of “fuck” that magically makes it all better for conservatives. It has nothing to do with the *ideas* contained behind words. Otherwise Kristol’s in trouble. No, it is conforming to the appropriate arrangement of letters to convey those ideas that is important. The whole point of the exercise is to put themselves in the superior position. They set the rules. You have to play by them.
It almost seems to me that Sullivan could prove the myth of curing the gay right out of people. He so identifies with white male Christian privilege (and superiority) that I bet he’d love to shed the one thing that keeps him from being accepted into the fraternity. And if he hasn’t shed the gay so he can toady up to the powerful, it means it can’t be done.
TR
The Sullivan Award for False Equivalence is genius.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@demkat620: Makes sense, doesn’t it? Sully agitated for the war too. Digby, that Fifth Columnist, might as well have told Sully to FOAD. How rude. That is much worse than saying things that cause us start a war and torture innocents.
Have you people no sense of propriety?!?!?!
@Citizen Alan: And I bet Miss Manners can spot the false equivalences as well. I think she may even side more on the “go ahead and swear” folks than the “bomb Middle Eastern countries every couple of years” folks.
Citizen Alan
Personally, I think Sully is possibly the most ridiculous person talking about politics on the web today. Certainly not as hateful and malicious as the majority of his tribe, but definitely ridiculous. He certainly has the most idiotic view on the class war — he has virtually excised the words “rich” and “poor” from his vocabulary, replacing them with “successful” and “unsuccessful,” as if the heirs of Sam Walton did anything at all to deserve their largesse except crawl out of the right womb.
Honestly, it’s like somebody watched Monty Python’s “Upper Class Twit of the Year” sketch and decided “WOW! That’s what I REALLY want to be!”
Mark
@different church-lady: This! This! This! You are so right and it must be done!!!
t jasper parnell
First Sullivan has an award named after Yglesias, the dumbiest of the fake liberal/left pundits, and second he nominates Sarah Palin for it. Sullivan, and whomever, might actually be dumber than a box of rocks.
kommrade reproductive vigor
I don’t know. I never willingly read Sullivan, I read what gets posted on other blogs about what Sullivan has written and I’ve been left with the overall impression he wanders between simp and complete asshole. Am I missing something?
@Bill E Pilgrim: Celebrating their silver anniversary even.
Citizen Alan
@Barb (formerly Gex):
Amen. There is almost no question in my mind that, had Sully been born straight, he would be condemning the repeal of DADT at the top of his lungs.
John O
@Barb (formerly Gex):
Ahhh…that was beautiful. Internet win nominee.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
Obot Alert: Annual Kennedy Center Honors tonight at 9 PM on CBS
http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/specialevents/honors/
http://www.cbs.com/specials/kennedy_center_honors/video/
Bill E Pilgrim
I try not to ever read Sullivan but I remember very well hearing him debate several people on Maher’s show– I’m sorry but the guy seems mostly like a right wing hack. Much of what you mock here, the belief in magic trickle down fairies and all the rest of it, he was delivering on auto-spew, praying at the altar of the worst most destructive segment of our population that had just finished joy riding our economy then torching it and tossing it off a cliff for the insurance money.
This stuff has real consequences. Nobody should be forgiven for still pushing this insanity.
Mark
@Barb (formerly Gex): Dear Ms. Manners,
I have an acquaintance who continually tells me that the poor don’t deserve to go to the hospital and that we should drop bombs on muslims in foreign countries. Years ago, I respectfully disagreed with him and he called me a treasonous traitor.
Eventually he changed his mind on the bomb-dropping part, but a friend of his was still going on about it. After almost a decade of this, I’d had enough and I told his friend to STFU. Now everyone’s mad at me because I used a profanity. Whatever should I do?
kommrade reproductive vigor
Not for Sullivan they don’t (at least not yet). That’s all that matters.
stuckinred
No Eeer Thread????
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mark:
Nothing, let them revel in their imagined victimhood. It is what they do best. You did the best thing you could do for your friend’s friend.
Southern Beale
It’s telling that Sully didn’t include the third sentence in that offending paragraph:
I wonder what he was afraid of?
stuckinred
@Mark: Did you ask him what other kind of traitor there was?
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Sheer fuckin’ genius.
NobodySpecial
When someone says ‘I love Sullivan’, I automatically insert ‘And you can too, for only 20 bucks!’.
No, really, why does any lefty read him for anything other than mockery?
stuckinred
West Virginia football??????
Bill Section 147
@guster: In a nutshell.
HyperIon
@DougJ:
One reason I stopped reading him.
Sometimes the first fucking sentence did not scan.
Plus I got tired of hearing about the Wizards.
Just Some Fuckhead
@NobodySpecial:
It’s the allure of the reasonable conservative which stems from our own need to be validated by members of the right.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@NobodySpecial: They’re really desperate for an imaginary gay friend?
Bill Section 147
@guster: Well. I thought it was far from meaningless. Ward Churchill was at one time THE example of progressive thought and treated as the leading spokesperson for all of the left-of-center anti-Americans who danced on the ashes of all ‘the little Eichmanns” in the twin towers. Of course he had absolutely no power or position in any way and was unknown to anyone outside the small Colorado college department to which he was connected.
Juxtaposed against complaints from the left that George W. Bush lied and misled us into war Churchill is the epitome of false equivalence.
But also Ward Churchill is a ridiculous figure.
Kittehs to the rescue
Sweet Jebus, I don’t see Glenn Beck on any of his lists — and that guy caused on at least one occasion for a nutbag to shoot at cops while on his way to kill people at some institute Beck had vilified.
I mean: when shit like that happens, do you still need a vote? Where do you get the balls to compare this to other people who simply *insulted* someone?
Hell, Dubya admitted to ordering people being tortured ON TV — but saying “f_ck” in a blog post is worse? I wish I was a millionaire so I could hire people to follow the likes of Sullivan around and point at him and laugh and treat him like the village idiot he clearly is.
Silver
@DougJ:
Matt Yglesias is one of the bestest and the briteist, DougJ, don’t you forget that.
We have a whole cohort of retards from Ivy League schools that do nothing but fail up in media.
Bill Section 147
@DougJ: For false equivalence Ward Churchill is my poster child.
He is the ersatz Polish radio guerilla making threats to the Third Reich. Proof of perfidy that quashes all need of debate.
asiangrrlMN
@kommrade reproductive vigor: No. You’ve gotten Sully in one fell swoop. As it were.
@Bill E Pilgrim: I saw him on the Olbermann show after Dr. Tiller was murdered. That rankled me. Why the fuck I care what Andrew Sullivan has to say on abortion? Then, all he talked about was how he personally was struggling with the morality of abortion and blah blah blah. That’s what turned me off him forever. It was all about him and what he could accept. Asswipe.
@Barb (formerly Gex): Co-sign to this. Sully would be just another stereotypical conservative if he weren’t gay.
stuckinred
@Bill Section 147: He was in basic at Ft Campbell the same time as I was in 66. From what I’ve read he made up a bunch of bullshit about his tour in Vietnam.
GregB
But, but Alec Baldwin said we should stone Henry Hyde and his family two decades ago!
MikeMc
Is this really a big deal? Isn’t “the dish” doing this with a wink and a nod? Isn’t this a bit like Olberman’s “Worst Person In The World”. This isn’t suppose to be taken seriously. It’s just kinda’ goofy…isn’t it?
stuckinred
@asiangrrlMN: It is amazing to me how much people talk about this guy here.
SiubhanDuinne
I’m changing my vote from TBogg to John Cole.
John, I’m voting for you eleventy thousand million times, plus infinity, plus one.
R-Jud
@Barb (formerly Gex):
This is why I had to stop reading him: there’s such a strong undercurrent of misogyny, cloaked in Catholic “reverence for the female” in a lot of what he writes about. Even when he writes about Lady Gaga.
2liberal
i am waiting, just waiting , for an NFL open thread.
stuckinred
@R-Jud: I never started reading him and it sound like I’m not missing anything.
stuckinred
@2liberal: And the blog owner is a die-hard WVU fan and . . .zip! WTF-K?
R-Jud
@stuckinred: He came up in a Google search I did after Sarah Palin was nominated, so I clicked, and read, and liked his non-political stuff like “The View From Your Window”, (he posts interesting pictures readers snap from the rooms they’re in, all around the world). He is also how I found this blog, so I kept reading for a while because of that.
stuckinred
@R-Jud: cool
dogwood
I’v read Sullivan for 10+ years and will continue to do so. It’s a habit. I also think what keeps me hanging on there is my curiosity. I continually look for signs that he has grown up, but they never materialize. Sullivan is going to be 50 soon and he’s still a kid. Smart, a gifted writer and an internet innovator in many ways, but still a kid. He writes about gays, pot and Catholicism – it’s always about him. The best thing you can say about the Daily Dish is that it brings significant traffic to the Atlantic, thereby increasing the chance that writers like Coates and Fallows reach a wider audience.
GregB
Sully needs to submit to anti-gay spanking therapy.
It worked for this guy.
PS
@SiubhanDuinne: Next year! (In Marienbad.) This year, TBogg rules. Seriously, I can think of no better way of ridiculing the Sullyborg than spamming their fake awards. It’s easy, crowd-sourced fun. I’ve only voted about eight times myself. So far. And if they don’t get the humor (or even humour), well, that tells us something, does it not?
Evolved Deep Southerner
TBogg is now ahead by four percentage points as of just now.
He’ll go down as Obama to Olbermann’s Hillary.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@stuckinred: You ought to check him out some time, stuck. In the immortal words of Chuck D, don’t believe the hype. I don’t like all of it but I don’t like everything here, either. I sure as hell don’t get all the Sully-hate. I like his blog better than half the time.
stuckinred
Cool, I can vote for KO. Where’s Rachel?
Beauzeaux
The world would be a better place if Bill Kristol were dead.
(Not “was dead” — grammar, lads, garmmar!)
Just Some Fuckhead
@GregB: That was funny as hell but there is no evidence spanking the gay out is as effective or any more effective than dildo-wetsuit therapy.
stuckinred
@Evolved Deep Southerner: With that I shall! Thx.
Violet
@dogwood:
This is generally true, but he did do a really heartwrenching series on abortion, specifically later-term ones. I think that’s one issue that will never really affect him personally, yet he did delve into it in a way that I’ve seen no other prominent writer do.
MikeMc
@PS: You really want to ridicule the Sullyborg? Don’t go to his site 8 times to vote for their fake awards. He doesn’t care and your upping his page views. Congrats! We’ve now made it seem his site slightly more popular.
Stacy
I hate the “civil discourse” argument. I was writing for a news site a few years back, around the time when the Edwards affair came out, and the story at that time was that Rush Limbaugh had said “It just seems to me that Edwards might be attracted to a woman whose mouth did something other than talk.”
I titled my post about it as: “Rush Limbaugh’s advice to ladies that want to hold on to their man: ‘Less talking, more dick sucking’.
I had a chorus of right-wingers screaming about my “obscene” title. They tried to get it pulled from the site. To which I replied that my crude language was the point: Are you guys really okay with Limbaugh saying such things (because there’s really no denying what he was saying there) so long as dressed up in “civil” language?
Apparently it was. I got a lot of promises that we’d discuss his comments if I just changed the title. So I did. And then all the right-wingers disappeared, because to get me to change the title was their victory. That Limbaugh actually was promoting the idea that women need to do more dick-sucking then talking? Meh.
This whole “civil” BS is nothing more then a means to close down debate.
StacyMN
Argh. Sorry, I’m actually “StacyMN”. I keep forgetting to change it on this computer.
MikeJ
@2liberal: Are people that into high school debating?
stuckinred
@MikeJ: fuck yes
srv
Sully treats John the way John and pragmatic dems treat powerless progressives. Pot meet kettle.
In what universe can someone argue that Bill Kristol and his gay twin make the world a better place?
dogwood
@Violet:
I see your point, but abortion is about Catholicism in Sullivan’s mind; therefore, it’s worthy of discussion.
gbear
@Barb (formerly Gex):
You do know that he wrote a book about teh gay called Virtually Normal? Incredibly convoluted and unreadable IMO.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@stuckinred: The only thing I really have strongly against it – and this is a big negative – is that he doesn’t really allow open debate in the comment threads. He’ll throw out “A reader writes …” shit here and there, but …
Fuck. The comments are what I come here for. As much as I like Cole and most of his front-pagers, I don’t know I’d come here nearly as often if I was just reading their stuff with an occasional “Reader Brick Oven Bill responds” bone thrown my way. Hell, it wouldn’t be 20 percent as much fun as it is now.
And that’d be about how I’d sum up The Daily Dish. About 20 percent as much fun as Balloon-Juice. And I go there about a fifth as much as I come here. So it works out.
Now Daniel Larison? If I want smart, reasoned conservatism, that’s where I go. His commenters suck, though. And sure enough, there’s a bunch here who hate his ass, too.
Violet
@dogwood:
Yeah, I know abortion is all tied up in Catholicism and wingnuttiness, so it’s a bit more of a general topic than other issues primarily affecting women might be. Even so, he did have a very moving and affecting series of posts on it with heartbreaking stories from those who had been through it. By the end I think he said it had got him thinking that maybe it wasn’t as cut and dried an issue as he thought at the beginning.
It was deeply affecting and truly showed the various sides of what is such a divisive issue in our country. I wish news outlets had the courage to cover the issue in such a way. I think it could profoundly affect how people think of about abortion.
stuckinred
@Evolved Deep Southerner: I’ll have to see if it appeals to me.
schrodinger's cat
Like many others here, I found this blog through the Dish. That said I am no longer a regular reader of the Dish. The quality of the Dish seems to go way down, in Sullivan’s absence. I find his posts on religion sanctimonious and boring, also the true conservatism, pot and the view from the window posts, not very interesting. Daily Dish has become mostly a big yawn these days.
ETA: May be he should change the name of the blog to Daily Drivel instead.
Anonne
Conor’s the only one readable when Andrew is away.
@StacyMN – you should have left the title in place.
BruceFromOhio
Not only the concept, but also the profit margins.
gbear
@dogwood: It has a name:
Elia
I’d like to co-sign the idea that a Sullivan False Equivalence Award would be a great idea. But I’d understand if John & the Gang don’t want this blog to turn into some kind of Daily Dish *OMBUDSMAN* or whatever.
Speaking of…whatever happened to our unofficial ombudsman? He hasn’t posted in a long time — did a quiet bowing out occur or did I miss something more dramatic or is he just on vacation?
schrodinger's cat
@Evolved Deep Southerner:
I often wonder, whether these are the imaginary conversations he has with himself.
schrodinger's cat
@Anonne: I find Conor, unreadable, trite and pompous.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Sully gets no love (or like) from me, not a bit. If there was an award for being irrelevant, Sully would be a top contender.
@El Cid:
The problem is that whenever the ‘progressives’ assemble and form up Progtron, the damned thing starts attacking and tearing itself apart. The left leg goes one direction, the right another. The left fist delivers powerful blows to its body while the right repeatedly punches its face.
Then it starts babbling gibberish and collapses into a mangled, smoking heap.
PS
@MikeMc: Yeah, I thought of page views. Then I just laughed again. Anyway, I’ve been going straight to the Moore Awards page, not the front, there is no hiding going on. It’s a giggle, that’s all.
different church-lady
@SiubhanDuinne:
…squared! No: cubed!!!
dogwood
@Violet:
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. It was a great series. My post probably sounded too harsh. I like Sullivan; I just think he’s too self-absorbed to be taken seriously as much of a thinker in the broader sense. I’m really baffled by his admiration for the President whose world view is diametrically opposed to his own. But he does have a romantic tendency toward hero worship, so perhaps that explains it. When he actually finds a worthy right wing hero, he’ll be over this president in a flash. That will be fun to watch.
Bill White
I propose that this blog design an official trademarked Balloon Juice “snark detector” and send it to Daily Dish.
Theirs is obviously badly broken.
BTW, what might a snark detector actually look like?
schrodinger's cat
@dogwood: I think he has a crush on Obama.
Sixers
I’m sullivan is disappointed he couldn’t come up with a more emasculating term than underbloggers.
SiubhanDuinne
@PS #124:
ZOMG, someone else old enough to remember “Last Year at Marienbad”!! You wouldn’t believe what I went through to get my hair to curl forward from behind my ears!!
Violet
@dogwood:
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to watch what happens if he ever feels like Obama has “let him down” or something. I’ve seen glimmers of it with the DADT stuff, because it didn’t happen fast enough or whatever, so I know he can turn on a dime.
@schrodinger’s cat:
It does kind of seem like that, but Obama is about as far from a bear as I can imagine. He doesn’t seem like Sully’s type. I think it’s more of the authority figure hero-worship thing he does, like with Reagan and Thatcher.
El Cid
@Bill Section 147: I had actually heard of him before, heard parts of speech, went and looked him up and looked up one of his books and concluded that he was a total dick.
In a couple of his books he bitches and moans about how ‘bourgeois’ anthropologists and archaeologists demonstrate anti-Indian imperialism when they argue that the people who populated the Americas evolved on other continents and migrated here instead of humanity evolving in the Americas first and spreading outward, as ‘documented’ by a pseudo-archaeologist in a book American Genesis. The same dude earlier suggested that based on what a psychic had told him, Indians probably migrated to the Americas from the Lost Continent of Atlantis.
As a matter of fact, pseudo-Indian Churchill and some others think it’s somehow insulting to suggest that the peoples of the Americas didn’t evolve along with the rest of humanity — which apparently spread by migration — and that they too migrated to different areas, including the Americas.
Beyond whatever debates, or non-debates, there are about where humanity originated and where it spread to, the notion that it would somehow be an insult to Americans of indigenous origins or ‘bourgeois’ to hold that the currently best supported evidence holds for a populating of the Americas via humans arriving from other continents is just too ludicrous to really need any commentary.
But, then again, it allowed Churchill to once again play up to whoever seemed to be on the cutting edge of ‘radical’ indigenism, therefore he did it.
There’s my off-topic and unrequested rant, but it’s just yet another thing which pisses me off about Grifter Churchill.
Socraticsilence
The funny thing is given Sullivan’s tolerance for hypotheticals and philosophical questions you’d think the question “would the world be better off if Bill Kristol died in a fire” would be worth debating (even though TBOGG is mostly being facetitious) I mean I honestly want to here the argument that if Bill Kristol had passed away tragically in the Spring of 2001 (or simply left public life) the world as a whole wouldn’t have improved at least a little bit.
SiubhanDuinne
@different church-lady #153:
*…squared. No: cubed.*
Plus 1
Delia
I like Sully’s View from Your Window series and the links to weird and off-beat stories I’d never find otherwise. I never read his Moore/Malkin award bits. Nor most of his political stuff.
That said, I think Sully’s already lost his battle to be accepted as a conservative by the true believers. I just saw this in Debra Saunder’s column today:
My italics
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Delia: Yeah, Sully’s got the same kind of obsession with Palin that Charles Grodin used to have with O.J. Simpson.
Anne Laurie
@BruceFromOhio: __
So full of win! Mind if I steal it?
Anne Laurie
@schrodinger’s cat: __
At least a couple of commentors here have claimed credit for different “A reader writes” letters. I know some of the other ones sound like sockpuppets or strawmen, but attracting readers who either vehemently agree or viciously attact one’s every statement is kind of a natural peril of blogging, in my opinion.
(And, of course, I’m sure Sullivan’s emails are also pre-selected by his minions, so the opinions he eventually reads may not fairly represent the actual views of his general readership.)
tomvox1
@HyperIon
Yeah, what is with Yglesias’ Pro B-ball posts (and really–the Wizards?!?)? That sport has not been interesting since the Jordan Bulls era. Talk about a game that its athletes totally outgrew–they should make the damn rim 12 feet high. Then we might see some passing and outside shooting again instead of a dunkathon that you only have to watch in the last 3-4 minutes. And whatever happened to traveling? Not to mention the refs are often crooked. Ahem. OK, rapidly aging white guy rant Off. Sorry about that.
alwhite
@mk3872:
I’m not sure if you are aware of this but Erickson & Malkin appear on TV all the time Jane Hamsher never and & Markos was rarely on Olberman but is he still? So NO, they are not the same, not even close.
N W Barcus
I wrote him off as yet another hypocrite years ago when, after excoriating gays for promiscuity he was caught trolling online for gay sex. It seemed especially egregious because he’s HIV-positive and was looking for bareback (ie, condomless, unsafe) sex.
Between that and his post 9-11 “fifth column” nonsense he’s pissed away any moral authority he may have claimed for his Orwellian (in the negative sense) opinions.
He’s just another narcissistic fringer (a la Camille Paglia) who figured out that he’d be more salable if he played the contrarian moral scold. And Marty Peretz went and inflicted him on the rest of us.
Gus diZerega
@harokin:
In this context I have to wonder what you are smoking. It must be pretty good.
de stijl
@different church-lady:
I’ve always liked “Infinity to the infinitieth power.”
M. Bouffant
@alwhite:
I’ve seen Ms. Hamsher on MSNBC several times in the last two wks.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Anne Laurie: Well, again, the beauty of this blog is that I can jump in wherever I want and say pretty close to whatever it is I want to say in close to real time (as long as I don’t get kicked to moderation through the mention of boner pills or whatnot.)
I congratulate my fellow commenters for Sully having deigned to enshrine their thoughts in his “A reader writes” bits, but while I enjoy parts of the man’s blog, I’d never write him just in the slim hope that I’d “win his lottery” and have my counterpoint posted there somewhere. Why waste my time on something that random and uncertain when I can come here and just post?
Dollared
@Citizen Alan: this. Absolutely. And if Obama were to replace DOMA with legal gay marriage, Sullivan would celebrate for a week and then the rest of Obama’s term he would oppose everything he says and does, and (reluctantly and with great fanfare) declare that Democrats are really Leninists in disguise.
maye
Sullivan, if you’re reading this, I love you.
snarkyspice
I agree with almost all the criticisms of Sullivan here – nearly every one – but I still think he’s a truly gifted writer, a blog pioneer, an honest guy, and actually someone I just personally like. Even when I want to slap him. A bit like family really.
I miss him when he’s gone and I wish he could see that Conor whatever-his-name-is is not even close to being a decent substitute. I am loyal to my employees too, so I sympathize, but the blog was so much more interesting when he had Weigel subbing.
Oh and add me to the list of people who think the world would be a better place with Kristol dead.
snarkyspice
@stuckinred:
Actually, you are. You really are.
Dollared
@Barb (formerly Gex): I love your comment but must disagree. If he weren’t gay, he couldn’t play the sycophant to the Galtian overlords in the same way. Being gay makes him somewhat like a palace eunuch, welcome in the palace despite his lowborn origin due to the fact that he poses no threat and entertains with his ample cleverness.
snarkyspice
@alwhite:
I can’t seem to turn on my TV without seeing Jane Hamsher.
SiubhanDuinne
@alwhite: Really? On my teevee, Jane Hamsher is on *all the fucking time*
Richard Rorty's Chins
I haven’t been able to read Sullivan’s blog for months. I don’t know if what changed was in me or in it, but I just can’t bring myself to read the thing.
reid
Pardon my ignorance, but why is Kos blacklisted from NBC? It wasn’t until I read that that I realized I hadn’t seen him on MSNBC in a long time. Did he give Joe Scarborough a wedgie or something?
RIpley
The Dish consists of filler, biding time until close-up shots of the latest botched face transplant recipient and/or burn victim. Sully’s a royally fucked-up dude.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@reid:
The twit twitted a remark about that twat (Scarface) and his dead intern that offended those at MSNBC who love their little conservaturd.
Bill Section 147
@stuckinred: Amazing that he is “elevated” by right-wing hysteria to be pushed as a spokesman for leftists. To have someone actually reference something he said about 9/11 as if it had merit or value and was indicitive of “mainstream” liberal thought is nutty but then to use his statements as the excuse that liberals are (fill in the blank). Limited scope and limited influence but he proves academia hates real america.
Bill Section 147
@El Cid: The very fact that most of us had to find out who he was illustrates why he is “equivalent” to voices in the media we can not avoid even when we try. Stuckinreds comment was the very first thing about him that I read from someone who knew who he was before he became infamous for his 9/11 rant.
BTD
@John Cole:
It amazes me to this day that this blog continues to act as if Andrew Sullivan is not a repulsive figure.
He has never ever ver retracted his support of the racist Bell Curve or his Fifth Colum remarks.
He is a younger Marty Peretz.
Jaim
Lo and behold, Tbogg is drinking the Dish’s ever-loving milkshake.
He runs circles around Sullivan and his D-listers. Not at all surprising.
And Sullivan himself? He has no principle other than trying to align himself with the next American power shift. I eagerly await him telling us what a “serious” and “centrist” and “necessary” person Mitt Romney or John Thune is.
Uriel
@Bill E Pilgrim: That’s pretty damned good, what you did there.
cay
This is the moment when John Cole looks at the butterfly and lotus flower and practices yoga breath. Sully’s minions are rubes.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Anne Laurie: Ah, but he has developed their editorial and curatorial minds. They are part of the borg, so he doesn’t have to worry.
Montanareddog
@Zifnab:
“So we’ve got a bunch of violent lunatics lining up for their conservative awards”
Proxy- violent lunatics
Pat
Andrew Sullivan is a pompous ass. I cannot stand these British “subjects” who decide they want to become American citizens, only to turn around and make their money insulting natural born American citizens, like Michael Moore for example.
The only thing I ever liked about Sullivan’s blog was when he was doing random “views from window” when people from all over submitted pics. When he stopped that, I stopped checking out his blog.
Like I said, he is a pompous transplanted British ass.
bob h
Perhaps it would have been better to say that the world would be a better place if Bill Kristol had never been adopted by Irving Kristol. The world would not know he exists.
matoko_chan
wallah, how. dare. you?
Sully is doing THE EXACT SAME FUCKING THING YOU DID when you imposed Token Kain on your commentariat…….deperately seeking sanity on the right.
those fuckers are ALL either toxic ideological whores or batshit ratfucking crazy.
or both.
matoko_chan
i mean……SRSLY.
Sully himself just makes a token headfake towards reason on Palin and (non-altruistic) gayrights and then goes RIGHT FUCKING BACK to pimping Creeper Douthat, Moron McMegan, the supreme evil of the boyfuckering catholic church and oakeshottian/burkian/hayekian dead-white-guy failosophy.
SULLY IS A FUCKING CONSERVATIVE SHILL!
so are all the borg.
do we relly need another weepy plea from friedersdorf for divided government?
these people FUCKED UP OUR COUNTRY, THEY CANT ADMIT IT, AND THEY WOULD DO ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING FOR ANOTHER CHANCE TO DO IT ALL AGAIN.
they are reavers– they have no consciences and no souls.
they would cheerfully rape us to death, patch their clothes with our skin and cook and eat us in the name of White Plastic Jesus and ‘Murrican Exceptionalism.
what don’t you understand about this?
STOP PRETENDING WE ARE ALL THE SAME AS LONG AS THEY USE PROPER GRAMMER AND PUNCTUATION.
stupid fucking cattle.
you never learn.
matoko_chan
@BTD: amg you retard.
the bell curve is not racist.
it is mathematicist…the bell curve just means gaussian or normal distribution.
why do you dumb cudlips continue to obsess over a 16-yr-old book by a political scientist?
THE
Conservatism is not going to disappear though.
THE
@matoko:
Cultures do evolve though, and what defines “radical” and “conservative”, varies with time and place.
For instance.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
Wouldn’t the only sane, rational response to all this be to wish Sully dead?
It’d be irresponsible not to…
joeyess
I just found this amusing:
Ending the post with 5, count ’em, 5 “Do they understands” then calling them clowns is being disrespectful of clowns.
I think the appropriate word for them is obtuse.
stormhit
@dogwood:
I’m sorry, but that’s just a ridiculous theory. Writing about issues you care about is a sign you aren’t growing up? That just makes no sense.
Repack Rider
Too bad Sully doesn’t permit comments. He might learn something…
Nahh.
neil
Sully – If you’re reading this, I think you’re a pseudo-intellectual fucktard.
DPirate
You are moving up, man. They are telling you to toe the line.
Tim Connor
Saying you love Sullivan is like saying you love drugs. So what? It’s still a dangerous habit.
marks
How about the false equivalence between Michelle Malkin and Michael Moore?
When Sullivan was cheerleading the Iraq war, Michael Moore was presenting the truth about it in Fahrenheit 911. When Sullivan was heaping praise on the American health care system, Michael Moore showed us its victims in Sicko. Sullivan then changed his mind on both subjects, following the intellectual path that Michael Moore had laid down for him. It is therefore nothing less than shameful for Andrew Sullivan to be sponsoring a sarcastic “award” in the name of Michael Moore.
john b
and patrick appel is getting defensive.
get the guy a fainting couch already
Kevin
I think Appel had a point when he said there are about 10 times as many Malkin/Hewitt awards as there are Moore awards. There are “false equivalencies” out there to be sure, and yeah Sully can be lame, but IN THIS CASE I think you are the one being defensive, not Appel or Dish folks. I say that in love, btw.
cinesimon
It’ as if Sullivan’s ‘under-bloggers’ have decided to outright ignore any discussion on the charge of over the top use of false equivalence, in favor of yet more false equivalences – it’s like watching a childish right wing commenter justify their previous ridiculous comments by simply pretending that those with who they’re supposedly responding to didn’t say what they said – instead, only the cherry picked bits(and very little at that).
Like any good right wing soldier, they don’t seem to give a flying hoot that the point of Andrew Sullivan’s blog for many of his readers is honest debate.
For them to completely ignore the point clearly discussed by John Cole is something I hope Sullivan himself addresses.
I, too have noticed a huge discrepancy not only in quality(it’s not that bad) but in politics and leanings, in the use of such false equivalences to fake the ‘both sides’ argument(apparently it’s just “this year” that the right has been worse than the left in violent, divisive and hate-ridden rhetoric – from their leadership!) – all things I always thought Sullivan was very much against.
As for my fellow Social Dem-types questioning why any of us would so enjoy The Dish: it’s because Andrew Sullivan represents the kind of conservative I really wish existed in America, as they do in every other western nation on the planet(possibly excepting Israel now) – that is: they are actually honest about their reasons why they’re against certain policies we are for, and about why they are for certain policies we are against. Also, people’s motivations aren’t viciously attacked(certainly on both sides, but it’s not tolerated by the vast majority of actual leaders on the left)
Yes, I agree with Sully’s civil rights standpoints, but mostly oppose him on fiscal policy – but he’s honest, he’s civil, and he’s not accusing us of wanting to destroy America, ‘democracy’, ‘capitalism’, ‘freedom’ etc etc etc.
For a majority of the leadership of the right to be able to do that in America, there’d probably have to be a 2nd revolution.
That is why I as a lefty like Sully’s blog.(my apologies John C, but many people here seemed to be proffering some rather silly, teabag-ish motivations as to why any lefty would want to read The Dish).
cinesimon
Kevin,
It matters little that there are ten times as many nominees for the Malkin Award.
There will be one winner. And one winner of the Moore award.
Which is really a very handy way of keeping to the apparently required media narrative that ‘both sides’ are just as bad, regardless that one side is represented by actual leaders in media, and political office, while the other side is represented by a few bloggers with, as already mentioned no institutional or even demographical relevance(power.
If John is being defensive at all, it’s on behalf of the entire left(not of himself or the nomination), who’re being painted as just as bad as the right in an obviously unbalanced way.
For the Dish underbloggers to basically ignore this clear issue in their response today, and simply reinforce their use of false equivalence, should be beneath The Dish.
Apparently not, when Andrew is absent.
Disgusted Beyond Belief
I agree that the awards smack of false equivalency. First, there should be a separate category for the powerful and really no reason to have a category for the powerless. It frankly doesn’t matter what people who are not on the levers of power (or in the movement) say or do.
But even more importantly, the fact that there will be exactly one Moore winner and one Malkin winner will give a false sense of equivalency. There are ten times as many Malkin nominees. Why not have a ten-way tie for the winner? That would show things in perspective and show the truth that there is far more right-wing vitriol, all from powerful right-wing figures who get to get on the airwaves 24/7.
It isn’t about excusing or pretending that the left doesn’t have its blowhards, but instead showing the reality that the right-wing is far more pervasive with them – and lies far far far more often. Part of the right-wing strategy is the whole false equivalence. I hope Andrew doesn’t feed into it.
cinesimon
I’ve gotta say, reading some of these comments is no different to reading the comments at RedState or FoxNation.
All one needs to do is change the relevant political terms, and you have the same insubstantial drivel based not on real world debates or political differences, but really nothing more than venting frustration. The target could be anyone.
I mean, attacking Sullivan because he was born British? Yeah that’s relevant.
Calling him childish names like conservative shill, conservative fucktard? Yeah that’s also really substantive, kids.
Please!
Though I’m all for different philosophies, opinions and debating styles, this type of nonsense is nothing more than childish ranting – and represents liberal values as much as the average teabagger rant does.
Harouet
Dammit, you caught me.
I’m just another Sullivan dittohead.
A man with a heart larger than life, like the Walt Whitman of our time.
I forgive him his past transgressions, as he forgives others.
I like the underbloggers too, they are fine.
When Hitchens is gone, we will have no one left but Sully.
Yet, it is hard to contest what John Cole wrote, no?
Kevin
Well…I can see your points cinesimon and DBB, but there are actually TWO right-wing “awards” — Hewitt and Malkin…and ONE left-wing “award” — Moore. So it’s 2 to 1. But whatever…feel free to further discuss…even if it WERE 1 left-wing and 1 right-wing award, it just seems like WAY too much debate and hand-wringing over under-bloggers and snarky “awards.”
cinesimon
I agree with you Kevin, almost/for the most part etc etc.
But I’m sure(I hope) you understand that this is really an extension of a much larger issue plaguing comparisons between the ‘right and the ‘left’ – with the media trying extraordinarily hard to paint us as just as bad as the right wing, and somehow also pretending that if a blogger – or even a commenter like me – says something outrageous, that is just as bad as say John Boehner saying it.
The fact that the Dish not only does it with it’s awards, but refuses to have an intelligent & honest debate about it(as their response to John Cole’s initial post shows), is to me a sign that this is a problem that will persist for a long, long time.
I understand Andrew himself has done some wonderful commentary(‘The Big Lie’ article comes to mind), but the fact that out of all those who work at the Dish, only Andrew seems to get it, is to me a real sign or the times: false equivalence reigns.
I understand your point about the two awards, but even then, it’s still a false equivalence. Especially given it’s named after Moore in the first place. Fact is, while his antics are a bit boorish, his honesty and integrity are very difficult to tarnish if we’re being honest. After all: Sullivan himself agrees with almost all of the main points to Moore’s documentaries now – yet he still somehow equates him with Hewitt and Malkin?
Anyway, again: really, this is all not really about The Dish – for me, anyway. Their complicity just makes it worse, and shows just how easily Americans are fooled by very simple and prejudice-driven false equivalence.
That The Dish, a highly respected ‘moderate’conservative blog also does it, just rubs it in.
Anyway I’ll stop repeating myself – time for sleep!
Disgusted Beyond Belief
Kevin – this isn’t exactly a lot of hand wringing. It was a short blog post followed by 200 comments (not a lot by internet standards).
In one sense, you are right, it isn’t that much to get all that excited about – but as noted above, people really haven’t gotten all that bent out of shape by it (by internet standards). But on the other hand, it is frustrating because it is like the straw that broke the camel’s back. It is also just a small part of the overall right-wing strategy of false equivalence that the right gets away with every day, all over the place.
As someone else noted, some anonymous commenter gets the same attention as John Boehner, but of course only to show how “both sides do it” – when the reality is, no, really only one side does it. Anonymous commentators and small time, non-media affiliated bloggers simply don’t count and can’t be used to compare to what actual sitting politicians in office say or what commentators on Fox News (a major network, really THE major networK) say.
And so it really rankles to see what generally seems to be a voice of reason on the right (Andrew Sullivan) contributing, perhaps unwittingly, into the same bullshit false equivalence.
I’d have a lot more respect for the “awards” if they only included nominees who were either regulars on TV or sitting (or former) elected officials or party officials. Not because bloggers don’t matter, but because the faces in power and on TV get much more exposure and do much more damage and frankly, an award that includes non-media, non-powerful people is open to bullshit comparisons of Bohener to t_boner_annonymous42. And that gives a false equivalence.
The reality is that the right-wing politicians are the ONLY ones making inflamatory rhetoric like this. They are the ones who lie. That is a simple fact.
So the categories should not include a “right” and a “left” – there should just be ONE category, for lying poltician, one for inflamatory rehetoric. And then when you see that there is a 10-way tie between GOP politicians and zero Democratic winners, that shows the true state of things.
When it shows on the MSM side, a 10 way tie between right-wing TV “journalists” and no left-wing journalists (or maybe just Olbermann), it shows the true state of things.
Given how strongly the false equivalence is broadcast and used, it will take quite a lot of truth to counteract it and get it heard. Subtlety won’t work.
Phoenix Woman
@El Cid:
Dammit! He’s on to us!