This Week In Fringe Leftist Heresy Becoming Serious Conservative Orthodoxy: Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan is a professional blogger who flamboyantly quit blogging never to return and then returned several month later as the paid writer of an electronic, online, but definitely-not-a-blog for NY Magazine.  Andrew Sullivan is also a True Conservative whose opinions line up 96.2% Liberal but cannot abide Liberals because campus speech codes and also Hillary and also being tagged as a Liberal would reduce his asking price in the Marketplace of Ideas by five significant digits.

And Mr. Sullivan has checked in today to inform his vast readership of the following:

Donald Trump is dangerously insane.

Which brings us to Trump’s mental illness, by which I mean simply that he would not pass a clinical psych test for any other job in the country. Yesterday morning, the mad king tweeted...

The Republican party that spawned Donald Trump is a husk full of lunatics, demagogues and con men.

And this is more potentially lethal to our democracy than Watergate because today’s Republican Party is utterly different than Nixon’s. It has been taken over by a mass movement led by a cult idol and there are no Republicans of any stature or heft who are prepared to stand up to him, as some once famously did with Nixon. Hence the spectacle of Newt Gingrich.
...
There will never be 18 Republican senators who will vote against the leader in this Congress or any other. We will have a criminal in the White House indefinitely, utterly impervious to sanction, and emboldened even further. And he will have brought almost half the country along with him, digging deeper in with every news cycle.

Conservative media is a shitpile of sycophants and mad men.

The right-wing media chorus is also instantly on fleek.

And, on the subject of "The Gay", that even dear Conservative fundamentals friends will end up stabbing you in the back with a Bible because Holy Joes before 'Mos is just how they roll.

I’m usually pretty good at staying calm under assault from the religious right. My own Christianity gives me an insight into where some are coming from, I guess, and, besides, their arguments against gay equality have always been beyond weak in civil, rather than Biblical, terms. But this latest post by my friend Rod Dreher deeply upset me. Titled “Born That Way? Really?” it accuses those of us who have long argued that homosexuality is involuntary or innate of being cynical liars...

Yes, over the years Andrew Sullivan has indeed generally remained unperturbed as yahoos from his side of the political spectrum have worked to turn us into the United Stated of Gilead.  And yet this same Andrew Sullivan went absolutely ape-shit when Alec Baldwin used a few loud, crude, penis-related insults familiar to any denizen of any large city in America to brush back a paparazzi who was trying to get at Mr. Baldwin's newborn child.

From me, back in the day...

What infuriates Andrew Sullivan most about Alec Baldwin?

It's the double standard!

...there is a glaring double standard here. It seems to me that this double standard cannot stand any more. And this raging, violent bigot cannot be defended any longer.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan really, really, bitterly detests those goddamn double standards:

...
What a bunch of hypocrites and phonies on that propaganda network [MSNBC]. They’re almost as bad as GLAAD, which has finally – finally – criticized the bigot. But, of course, they haven’t called on MSNBC to fire him...

There will be no consequences. With liberal homophobes, there never are. If you’re a conservative and are caught yelling these slurs at random people, you’d be fired pronto or buried in an avalanche of gay protest. If you’re a self-entitled liberal, you’re fine. What, I wonder, will MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Thomas Roberts and Jonathan Capehart say about this? Nothing, I’ll bet you.

Which is why, when it's Alec Baldwin yelling something stupid over his shoulder (and thereby single-handedly destroying New York's hard-earned reputation as a G-rated, family-friendly Disneyland-on-the-Hudson), Mr. Sullivan absolutely revels in his firing:

I just believe that explicitly homophobic slurs directed at actual human beings as a way to degrade them doesn’t have a “but-he’s-a-liberal” exception. It’s ugly and would not be tolerated if directed against any other minority group. MSNBC did the right thing.

And yet...

And yet...

And yet...when it's Andrew Sullivan's friend Niall Ferguson writing something much more deliberately and premeditatedly destructive, well, hey, let's not get crazy here (emphasis added to attract the eye):

Niall defends his article and, on the CBO Obamacare numbers, claims that I don't "understand the issue that well." He says that none of the critics have addressed the substance of the piece - and that it's all a liberal lynch mob. That's insane. He's right that calls for him to be fired are egregious and over-the-top. But the criticism we've run on the Dish is entirely devoted to data.

Likewise, when the stupid thing Alec Baldwin yelled over his shoulder at a paparazzi stalking his wife and child might also have been anti-gay, obviously all mitigating factors are irrelevant, any attempts at an apology are a ruse and his character witnesses are a joke:

...my post was motivated above all by a sense that Baldwin’s public support of gay equality is somehow reflexively used by him and other liberals to excuse this classic homophobic behavior. It wasn’t him so much as his liberal enablers that got my goat as I wrote at the time.

...

Subsequently dragging his gay hairdresser out in front of the paparazzi he supposedly disdains doesn’t help either. Nor does making cringe-inducing jokes about his love for another man in public.

And yet...

And yet...

And yet...when a deliberately and premeditatedly destructive thing Andrew Sullivan's friend Niall Ferguson says is viciously anti-gay, obviously all mitigating factors should weigh heavily in his favor, his apologies are sincere and Mr. Sullivan is only too happy to personally stand in as a character witness:

I am obviously an interested party to this. I’ve known Niall as a friend since we studied history together at Oxford. This has not deterred me from criticizing his public arguments on the merits, so I’m not a suck-up. But I have known the man closely for many years – even read Corinthians at his recent wedding – and have never seen or heard or felt an iota of homophobia from him. He has supported me in all aspects of my life – and embraced my husband and my marriage. He said a horribly offensive thing – yes, it profoundly offended me – but he has responded swiftly with an unqualified apology. He cannot unsay something ugly. But he has done everything short of that. I am biased, but that closes the matter for me.

What is there left to add...

...but this by Mr. Andrew Sullivan?

...there is a glaring double standard here. It seems to me that this double standard cannot stand any more. And this raging, violent bigot cannot be defended any longer.

For the record, having spent the last six years building a career out of borrowing the entire Liberal critique of the Right, filing off the serial numbers and re-marketing it all as "Real Conservatism", Alec Baldwin remains virtually the only Liberal Mr. Sullivan ever writes about.

And now, back to the great American pastime...

Where were we?

Oh yes, that scathing thing that Mr. Sullivan wrote today about Trump.

And fundies.

And the debauched Conservative media.

And the depraved Republican Party.

That scathing thing in which Mr. Sullivan once again fails to mention that it was the Left  that was warning about the rise of the fundies while while True Conservatives were busy quibbling over how many Burkes can dance on the head of a pin, It was the Left who were warning about the depravity Republican Party.  It was the Left who were warning about smirking perversion of the Conservative media.

In other words, the Left was right about the Right all along.