Poseur Alert -- UPDATE *

"My core position is that a writer's core loyalty must be to the truth as best as he can discern it.
...

"In my mind, I regard my work as a writer as existing in a different mode than my everyday living. I am writing not with respect to any individual but for the general public - which I envision stripped of its particular racial, gender, religious or whatever identities. If the truth hurts, so be it. In my role as a truth-seeker - and it is a role not my being - compassion and empathy are irrelevant.

"Except they aren't.

"The abstraction of the disinterested writer in pursuit of truth is an abstraction. And as a human being, I do not live in an abstract world. That I have wounded someone - like Ta-Nehisi - whom I revere as a writer and care about as a human being distresses me greatly.
...

"It seems to be in my nature - a querulous, insistent curiosity that sometimes relishes the hostility it often provokes. What I remain committed to is a constant re-evaluation of these arguments and complete openness to new data. But the hurt remains."

Andrew Sullivan on how he sometimes breaks your precious Tea Cups of Hidebound Thinking in your Hutch of Conventionality in your China Shoppe of Parochialism when he gets his Throbbing Hard-On for Truth swinging 'round and round real good.

Man!

Or something.

First, and foremost, given the amount of energy Mr. Sullivan and his Conservative pals devote to avoiding any unpleasantly truth-seeky discussion of the real and ugly history of Conservatism in America, this is just hilarious.

Second, I find myself reminded irresistibly of Newt Gingrich's novel, narcissistic-personality-disorder-explanation for why his extreme patriotism caused him to put his pee-pee into women to whom he was not married.

Third, it's no fair competing in your own contests, Andrew.

*UPDATE: However much it may tempt me to shut down comments forever for the good of humanity :-), commentor Matt makes a fair point, so I have included more of Mr. Sullivan's original post above.

Also, to be clear, I am keenly aware of the price one pays for writing with "clean hands and composure" about whatever truth one is trying to tackle; a sentiment which no one has expressed better than William Faulkner in 1958:

"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can't get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."

But my critique of Mr. Sullivan remains unchanged: his view of himself -- a bold seeker-after-truth who sometimes reluctantly or inadvertently hurts others in course of his bold truth-seeking -- is so flatly belied by his pathological unwillingness to be truthful about the ugly history of the Movement to which he owes his career that it smothers his bold-seeker-after-truth claim in its cradle.