Hilariously Clueless Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

"I urge you to read the [Sam] Tanenhaus essay as well, and mull it over. I think Peter [Berkowitz]’s corrections – and philosophical defense of conservatism’s principle of limited government – are well taken. Maybe my English take on conservatism distorts my take – because Britain never had a third of its population under racist tyranny. But the GOP’s legacy on race since the 1950s has been painfully obtuse and many of the strains on today’s actual right are obviously influenced by [John C.] Calhoun. Some of the ugliness came simply from ignoring the existence of an actual civil rights movement, or the existence of African-Americans, period, other than through a prism of fear..." 

-- Andrew Sullivan, March 5, 2013

In retrospect I now realize that many Liberals (myself included) have made the same, huge tactical error year after year as we tried in vain to gently coax the attention of Conservatives like Mr. Sullivan in the general direction of the paranoia, rage and racism that has powered American Conservatism's Pretty Hate Machine since Conservatives like Mr. Sullivan were in short pants.

We forgot that Rules 1-3 in that process read something like, "1) Have a byline...2) In The New Republic...3) In 2013."

Silly Liberals: we thought being as right as we knew how to be as loudly and eloquently as we knew how to be in every venue that would let us near the rope line over and over and over and over and over and over again would eventually be enough.

This is not to take anything away from Mr. Tanenhaus's fine piece but seriously Andrew, even if you managed to avoid the din of hundreds of Liberals writing and speaking about this for decades, this issue has been pretty much around the block and back again over the last 30 years while you were proudly marching under the banner of American Conservatism.

In fact, at around the same time you were taking victory laps for shoving Slate magazine to the Right

SLATE LURCHES TO THE RIGHT: Amazing what a little joshing can do. Only days after I lambasted Tim Noah for running a blatantly pro-liberal feature called ‘Whopper of the Week,” he shows his unbiased credentials by going after Robert Rubin, former Clinton Treasury secretary. As Mickey Kaus would say, andrewsullivan.com gets results!

And touting your interview with Dick Fucking Morris:

LUNCH WITH DICK
JAN 10 2002 @ 7:51PM
I caught a late lunch with Dick Morris today. It was the first time I’d met him (we were instructed to meet by a memo direct from Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Headquarters). First off, he reminded me that I had trashed his last book for the New York Times Book Review. Still, he was immensely good-natured about it. I’d completely forgotten, of course. One reason I keep my social life to my non-political friends is that I’ve written so many tough words about fellow hacks that I usually spend cocktail parties hiding behind couches. Anyway, Morris struck me as a real original. When he’s right, he’s amazingly perceptive, even close to genius. When he’s wrong, he’s really wrong. He also struck me as very human, vulnerable, smart, emotional...

ONE LAST MORRISISM: Given my latest piece on Clinton’s record on terrorism, I asked Dick Morris if he thought Clinton would be worried right now about what September 11 was doing to his legacy. Could Clinton be remorseful? Or angry? Or reflective? Morris’s answer took a while, since he hasn’t spoken to Clinton in years. Here’s a short version of his answer: “The thing about Bill Clinton is that he never, ever, ever, ever, EVER, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER, blames himself.” 

And talking about the first time you and Tina Brown jumped into the media snuggle-sack together

MONEY TO BURN
JAN 11 2002 @ 1:48PM
Tina Brown’s Talk magazine has around the same number of subscribers per month that we have as visits. When you calculate our expenses and my free labor, we’re still well in the red but only in the thousands. We should make a profit this year, and I’m going to get my first little pay check next month. In just over two years, Brown has lost $55 million dollars. And people think that Internet media is an old story? It’s only just beginning.

And blaming Bill Clinton for 9/11

THE AWOL PRESIDENT
JAN 11 2002 @ 12:10PM
Any objective view of the Clinton legacy must now include the military, security and intelligence failure that made September 11 possible.

And taking the usual, tiresome, drive-by potshots at us Evil Liberals:

Can the New York Review be breaking ranks with the anti-Western leftism that has infected it for so long? ...  

Imagine, for a moment, that Al Gore was now president. Now stop shaking for a minute and think hard. ...

And defining Conservatism Sullivan-style

SQUARING THE CONSERVATIVE CIRCLE
JAN 4 2002 @ 1:32PM
Michael Barone clarifies things, as usual. How do you reconcile the conflict between “National Greatness” conservatism and “Leave Us Alone” conservatism? You do the national greatness stuff abroad and the small government agenda at home. Okay, sign me up.

And picking amazingly shrill, petty, Conservative nits over (I kid you not) non-existent "racial preferences" in the way the New York Times doles out honorifics in print:

 THOSE PESKY LABELS
JAN 16 2002 @ 1:52AM
National Review’s Jay Nordlinger asks an interesting question. Why does the New York Times, which routinely (and mercifully) only identifies PhDs as Mr,’s and Mrs.’s, always refer to Skip Gates and Cornel West as Dr. Gates and Dr. West? Larry Summers, despite his being a PhD and president of the actual university, merely gets called “Mr.” I wonder if there’s some ordinary explanation here in the copy department (that department has some wonderfully arcane ideas, as anyone who has ever written for the Times will attest.) Or is it a new rule that minorities get different honorifics than non-minorities? If it were a general principle, it wouldn’t be that far off affirmative action, anyway, would it? Part of the principle of racial preferences, after all, is to pretend that students with lower scores actually have the same scores as others, or even higher. So why not extend that to honorifics? They’re far less meaningful than grades. Maybe in future a non-minority with a PhD will be addressed as if he just got a masters; and a minority with a masters will get an automatic upgrade to PhD. Not so much grade inflation, as title inflation. And only for some races, not others. What’s not to like, Dr. West?

The rest of us were watching this

and this

and most emphatically this

being matter-of-factly enacted in our living rooms on one of the most popular and critically acclaimed shows on American bloody teevee.

As one long-forgotten Liberal wag once put it, all of your hard-won epiphanies, Mr. Sullivan, "amount to little more than the well-thumbed history and plainsong lore of our Fucked Up Modern Age as it has been long understood and passed down among those awful Liberals."  And so since the paranoia, rage and racism of the Modern Conservative movement has not exactly been in the witness protection program lo these many years, the question you should be asking yourself (and that everyone with an active email account should be asking you at andrew@andrewsullivan.com) is not "Is Modern Conservatism Inherently Racist?"...

...but rather how did Andrew Sullivan -- one of America's most vocal, ubiquitous and well-connected Conservative public intellectuals -- manage to spend almost his entire adult life in America blithely failing to notice this incredibly obvious thing that was staring him straight in the eye the whole time?