Arthur Silber frets that too many are giving too much credit to, and are taking much too seriously, Andrew Sullivan's recent blogging.
He shouldn't worry. Pretty much everyone knows better than to believe that Andrew Sullivan has really reformed. Sure, if some newbie -- ignorant of the context of Sullivan's history and the awesome badness of his oeuvre -- comes across a recent Sullivan anti-torture post, he's likely to be moderately impressed. But that newbie will soon learn that Sully has been at best a useful idiot for the Bushies, and is even more appropriately considered as being complicit in the whole fucking mess that Republicanism has wrought over the last 10 years: Iraq, the culture war, fiscal stupidity, rampant corruption, all of it.
Not that Silber doesn't make some good points, especially the one of relativity: that Sullivan may now seem decent to innocent eyes is not a testament to any recent self-reinvention much less reformation on his part, but is, rather, merely an indication of the amount of fanaticism in rest of the rightwing.
Yeah, that's good stuff.
However, a nice irony is that in Silber's making of this point, it is partly at his expense.
Well-meaning anti-Bush people should take Sullivan, no matter his latest stance, with a certain grain of salt. And I think most do exactly that. But then well-meaning anti-Bush folks should take a similar attitude to the moral pronouncements of a nominally deactivated Randroid like ...Arthur Silber. I can't speak for others, but that's exactly my habit.
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 9:33 PM
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