Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Today In Conservative Detachment Disorder: Andrew Sullivan




For some reason, Conservative Andrew Sullivan is still being paid to assemble words into sentences and paragraphs by a national publication.

Well good for him!

Longtime readers will not be surprised to learn that there is now zero distance between what we disreputable, unserious, pariah Liberals have warning about for decades and what True Conservative Andrew Sullivan is being paid to write today.
...
The degeneracy of conservatism – its descent into literally mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred – was on full display. You might also say the same about the religious right, the members of whom have eagerly embraced a racist, a nativist, a believer in war crimes, and a lover of the tyrants that conservatism once defined itself against. Their movement long lost any claim to a serious Christian conscience. But that they would so readily embrace such an unreconstructed pagan is indeed a revelation.

If you think of the conservative movement as beginning in 1964 and climaxing in the 1990s, then the era we are now in is suffering from a cancer of the mind and the soul. That the GOP has finally found a creature that can personify these urges to purge, a man for whom the word “shameless” could have been invented, a bully and a creep, a liar and cheat, a con man and wannabe tyrant, a dedicated loather of individual liberty, and an opponent of the pricelessly important conventions of liberal democracy is perhaps a fitting end.

This is the gutter, ladies and gentlemen, and it runs into a sewer. May what’s left of conservatism be carried out to sea.
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Just as longtime readers will not be surprised that, buried inside Mr. Sullivan's righteous jeremiad against all of these False Conservatives who have ruined his movement of course you will find the inevitable Both Siderist razor in the apple:
Thanks in part to the radicalized racial left – we now have merely one identity politics waging war against another. They have a terrible inter-relationship, these two illiberalisms. They foment each other.
After all, seven years ago after his "Tis a far, far better place I go" dramaturgy about how the Conservative movement had broken faith with it's truest son, I explained the how Mr. Sullivan was going to save his career by casting himself as "the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur."
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Likewise, even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.
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Once you start looking for the telltale signs of the Both Siderist plague, you see it everywhere, propping up every political coward and con man in the country who wants credit for finally noticing that the GOP has gone mad, but doesn't want to risk getting any career-killing Liberal stank on them.

At his invitation, I dropped Mr. Sullivan an email this morning that said the following:
What you are struggling not to say is...

...Liberals have been right about the Right all along.

Decades of being blasted by a massively well-funded Conservative denial and prevarication machine.

Decades of being slimed and slandered -- being called America-hating, terrorist-loving, fifth columnist Commies every fucking day -- for loving this country enough to try to warn Conservatives like you that you were playing with fire and a day of terrible reckoning would surely come.

Finally that day is here and you still don't have the guts to say those five, simple words: Liberals were right all along.
I do not expect a reply.

5 comments:

bowtiejack said...

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

John Kenneth Galbraith


Too bad it doesn't seem to be going well for them. Who couldah known?
Oh yeah, that drifty guy.

Habitat Vic said...

"I do not expect a reply" - Driftglass

Of course you won't get that reply. Probably not while Sullivan draws breath. Don't lose hope, though, I think I know of a good example.

Robert Bork, failed nominee for the Supreme Court by Reagan, spent his entire life being outraged - outraged I tells ya - that people/Dems/liberals/etc DARED to accuse him of being a self-serving quisling back during Watergate. Specifically, that in 1973 after Nixon couldn't get his AG or Deputy AG to fire the Special Prosecutor and stop the Watergate investigation in its track (both of those men resigned on the spot), Bork supposedly stepped up for a two level promotion to Attorney General and a promise that Nixon or a future Republican president would put him on the Supreme Court.

Slander! Dirty Fucking Liberals were impugning a God-fearing Conservative Republican! A man of honor! To this day, Republicans use the term "Borked" to signify groundless character destruction from The Left (and, of course, as a countervailing Both Sides example/argument/justification for slandering Dems).

Bork died in 2013, and denied the Watergate quid pro quo to his dying days. After his death, his lawyers published his memoir where - surprise! - he admitted that he was fucking bald-faced lying the last 40 years of his life.

Maybe Sullivan will have his estate send you an email after his death acknowledging that you were right all along. So you've (maybe) got that going for you. Which is nice.

Unknown said...

It will be OK -- Milo Yiannopoulos is there to take over the self-loathing homosexual British Conservative niche from Sully.

Unknown said...

Sullivan. The Innumerate Tory Douche. Stubbornly clinging to "true conservative" dogma in the face of overwhelming logic and evidence, until he risks harm to his career if he keeps holding out. Then, presto change-o, he repeats as epiphany things that liberals have been saying for 30 years! Amazing.

One of the things he's holding out on is the idea that Black Lives Matter are just as unmoored from reality as the Right Wing dolts who want to Jim Crow those uppity niCLANGs. Ooohh, there was a Harvard study finding that whites get shot by cops sometimes too! See, EXTREME LEFT!

He learns, but he NEVER FUCKING LEARNS too.

Lit3Bolt said...

Sullivan whining about Trump is like the Joker complaining about serial killers these days.

"No style! No panache! When we quoted Burke and Oakeshott defending structural racism and corporate feudalism, it was with wit and verve! And oh, the dog whistleswe crafted...you'd never seen or heard such dog whistles to white racial resentment. But Trump! He just gets up there and says he hates Muslims, blacks, and Hispanics, and wants them to suffer for no reason! If crime isn't fun, then what's the point of doing it?"