The progressively more twisted Andrew Sullivan continues his intellectually insane babblings between the postings of "reader email" that increasingly make up the bulk of his dubious output with: "This is a battle between barbarism and civilization. We cannot destroy our moral compass in order to save it."
This is the oft repeated position of this preening popinjay. Oft repeated simply because he no longer has the intellectual oomph to do more than roll out of bed, onto the floor, and engage the keyboard
with the lamest exercise in hunt and peck verbiage.
This Sullivan spew, which he just has to have on a macro, also seems to assume that Sullivan actually is in possession of a moral compass. Such an assertion is, if you read his limited selection of what once looked like ideas but more and more resemble old tape-loops from Studio 54's politics stalls, patently untrue. Sullivan possesses neither a compass nor morals. Instead, he's become a mere rubber bag on the back of the bathroom door waiting to filled and emptied of the same bile no matter what the occasion. No new insights, no new ideas, no new thinking.... just the same screeching chords played over and over with stumps.
I used to be irritated by Sullivan's constant pillaging of his email stack for "original blog content." I thought, "Andrew, you're getting a check to come to work and pretend to pluck the keyboard. You should at least give your readers an original paragraph or two to reward them for clicking over to you." Now, wherever I take leave of my senses and click over to Sullivan's black hole of cyberspace and actually read a few sentences of his stultified claptrap, I find myself begging for more of his "reader email." At the very least, his correspondents are actually showing up for work.
As for Sullivan's incessantly repeated, holier-than-anybody-since-Jesus "position" against torture, it is more and more seeming to me like a case of "The Lady Doth Protest Too Much." I'd like his predictable blather a lot better if he'd just fess up and attach a sound file that played, in heavy rotation, Leonard Cohen's The Future
Give me back my broken night
My mirrored room,
My secret life
Its lonely here,
There's no one
Left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
Thats an order!
Andrew Sullivan, intellectually insane. Too bad. He once had some nice ideals.
Posted by Vanderleun at June 20, 2006 11:05 PM
Whew! Don't sugar coat it!
But I agree, mostly, except for the part that I still care -- er, read, I mean. I don't anymore.
M
Posted by: Mark Alger at June 21, 2006 5:36 AMI never thought I'd see a poetic way to call someone a douchebag, but I should have known Gerard would find a way. I gave up on Sullivan years ago when he went on hiatus after a pledge drive. I'm glad I didn't have to watch his intellectual decline.
Posted by: Uncle Mikey at June 21, 2006 1:53 PMAMEN.
Sullivan used to be bookmarked in my browser.
He hasn't been since 2003.
Posted by: Doug at June 21, 2006 8:36 PMAnother AMEN. Mr. Sullivan became so tedious in his attempts to justify some posted nonsense that it simply didn't matter; nobody cares, Andrew. Nobody.
Posted by: Gnawbone Jack at June 22, 2006 4:44 AMIn a strange way, Sullivan actually views "us" as saints, and holds us to a standard that he doesn't expect the little brown people to even attempt, lest they hurt themselves.
Our only moral responsibility in this sort of conflict is to be better than the enemy - not to be perfect.
When it becomes possible to imagine Rumsfeld or Bush, or any high official in an American administration personally torturing, then slaughtering captives, then openly bragging about it and distributing video to eager Americans, then I will worry about our moral compass.
As it is, with the periodic misstep in a conflict with a gruesomely sadistic enemy investigated and the perpetrators tried and punished, while American officials fall all over themselves to apologize, I am not yet ready to panic.
Posted by: Randall at June 22, 2006 6:08 AMI'm a bit confused here...
As for Sullivan's incessantly repeated, holier-than-anybody-since-Jesus "position" against torture,
So... you're for torture? That anyone who is against torture is some sort of self-righteous jerk?
To be clear I have nothing but disdain for Sullivan, (I've always disliked him, I've noticed however for some former fans the dislike dovetails with Andy's shifting opinion on Iraq and Bush, a coincidence no doubt) but being against torture strikes me as the correct position and one of the few things Andy is consistent on.
Posted by: salvage at June 22, 2006 7:49 AM"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper
Posted by: Gerard Van der Leun at June 22, 2006 1:26 PMIt's tempting to look at torture as a black and white thing. And indeed in the case of Geneva-convention qualified combatants we have a guideline, if not a gospel, to go by. But as we can understand from - among many other good sources - an editorial in today's WSJ, the terrorists do not qualify. The real question, then, is how do we feel about treatment on the margins of torture - sleep deprivation, psychological intimidation, etc.
As a mother of several boys and one who was a seriously difficult case to civilize, I was no doubt guilty of treatment some might call torture. If Sullivan thinks he can manage the war on terror, or even the conversion of willful defiant teens, without harsh methods, he should stop with the accusations and give us some specifics. And if he can't do that and point to some real world examples and proof, well, Gerard has said what needed to be said about his apparently increasing dementia.
Posted by: askmom at June 22, 2006 2:02 PMIt is Sullivan himself and the left in general that have debased the term "torture" by using it to describe Abu Ghraib or Gitmo. If torture meant what they think it does, we'd all be heaving a sigh of relief that our two soldiers in Iraq were "only" tortured, instead of experiencing unspeakable horror and heartbreak. We now have to invent a new word for what happened to them. The left desacralizes everthing it touches, which includes the removal of the demonic element from torture.
I am quite morally comfortable in saying that there is no common word that can be used to describe an evil person who sadistically tortures a good person, and a good person who attempts to extract information from an evil person by any means necessary, depending on the circumstance. To use the same word to describe both situations is moral pereversion. It results from, and leads to, the absolute inability to distinguish between good and evil. Which defines the left. As Dennis Prager says, you cannot understand evil and remain on the left.
Posted by: Gagdad Bob at June 23, 2006 8:22 AM
Somewhere Martin Luther is wishing he'd had a better intellectual property lawyer
Posted by: Fausta at June 23, 2006 11:41 AMWell said Gagdad. I just wish you'd stop reading my mind and posting my thoughts, only so much more elegantly phrased than I could ever make them. Gerard does that also.
Humbling, you both are, and wonderful.
Posted by: askmom at June 23, 2006 10:24 PM
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