No Facts Please, We're British

You know that thing where Andrew Sullivan flamboyantly Fails To Notice he has finally, grudgingly, been dragged-kicking-and-screaming to exactly where I have been telling him for years he has always been?

Well, it happened again. 

A British Tory Is An American Democrat

NOV 7 2014 @ 3:38PM

Here’s an indication of just how far to the right the American political discourse is, compared with Britain – the developed country most in tune with American neo-liberalism...

That’s why David Cameron and Barack Obama have long had such an easy relationship. Either one could fit easily into the other’s cabinet. And maybe it does help explain why I still consider myself a conservative. I am, as a Brit.

...

Minus all my swears and any scintilla of self-awareness, notice how Mr. Sullivan ideological midlife crisis lands in the dead center of what I wrote back in 2009:

...

So it turns out that virtually all of Mr. Sullivan's hard-won epiphanies 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 when I see statements like this -- "Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not." -- what I see is a man who might want to distance himself from the appalling actions and despicable outcomes of his former allies, but still wants to continue honoring their idiotic parameters and debased vocabulary.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

But then again, if Mr. Sullivan simply outed himself as a Liberal, he would instantly lose his place in the food-chain, wouldn't he? Because like that microscopic number of self-loathing black Conservatives who make their daily bread by serving the interests of the Southern Bigot Party, more than any other single factor, it was always the sheer gawking, oddballness of the brazen self-delusion inherent in being the gay champion of the Christopath Homophobe Party that put Mr. Sullivan in the spotlight.

That was what gave him his unique and lucrative cache.

After all, Liberal gay political writers are a dime a dozen, and so in a strange way we find Andrew Sullivan locked in the same kind of mortal combat over labels -- and for exactly the same reasons -- as Roy Cohn's character in "Angels In America" as he adamantly insisted -- even as he was dying of AIDS -- that he was not a "ho-mo-sex-shall".

(Not Safe For Work)

Because, Cohn reasoned, homosexuals were nobodies; losers who had zero clout and “in 15 years cannot pass a pissant anti-discrimination bill from City Council.” And since Roy Cohn could get the President of the United States (or his wife) on the phone -- could take the man he was fucking to the White House and make Ronald Reagan smile at him and shakes his hand -- it therefore followed that Roy Cohn could not possibly be a homosexual.

That unlike every other person in his position on Earth, Roy Cohn was a heterosexual man, who fucked around with guys.

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.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like a Halley Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?

And -- minus the swears and even an iota of self-awareness -- it only took Mr. Sullivan until November 7th in the Year of our Lord 2014 to ferret out this elusive truth.

Well, isn't that special.

Sorry, Andrew, but the "No Facts Please, Were British" dodge is too precious by half.

You've been over here since your dorm-days at college.  You have been writing about and constantly asserting your authority on the subject of American culture and politics for 30 fucking years. You have been living in Washington D.C. almost your entire adult life.

Unlike us regular, corn-fed Liberal peons out here in flyover country, you parlayed your "Gay Conservative" creds into a very cushy spot among our nation's movers and machers.  It permitted you to work for and hang out with the captains of the publishing industry.  It allowed you to become a fixture on political teevee. It has made it possible for you count among your peers, the writers, editors and owners of most of major American newspapers and magazines of note.  You have partied the leading wingnuts of your generation and crashed on Don Rumsfeld's couch:

“The son of one of Rumsfeld’s closest friends was a friend of mine,” Sullivan says. “We met in a gay bar. That’s how I came to have dinner with Rummy and stay at his house in Taos. He liked to rag me about the blog: ‘You’ve done this for years and made no money. When will you make money?’ And we fought about gays in the military. But when it came to war in Iraq, I was more bellicose than he was.”

But only now is it starting to fucking dawn on you that, for the last 30 years, the Liberals who you have been slagging all along were right all along.

That -- hey! -- Murrican Conservatives really ain't like British Conservatives.

At.

All.

And since this is undeniably true, one of two other things must be true also,

Either you really are the stupidest fuck in Christendom for the simple reasons that the one subject on which you have built your entire career turns out to be the one subject about which you have been completely and utterly ass-backwards wrong since the Age of Reagan.

Or, as I have posited many times, at some point this just became a cold-eyed ROI calculation. You cannot fail to have noticed that Liberals are pariahs this country who are not paid oodles of money to tinker words together, who mostly live and die on tiny, self-funded blogs and on a few, scattered radio stations around the country, and are virtually never invited to share their views on the teevee.

As a Liberal, no matter how right you are, you always go to the back of the line.  And the line never moves,

But Conservatives?

Conservatives, have all the money and clout and media in the world.  Hell, meatsticks like Neil Cavuto and Sean Hannity have gotten rich peddling Reagan-flavored paint thinner to mouthbreathers, so how hard can it be to be?

And a Gay Conservative?  Willing to lend his credibility to the Party of homophobes and bigots Ben Carson-style?

Shit-fire, that man can name his own price.

And he did.

But again, as I said, maybe you're just a moron.