Andrew Sullivan has gone too far.

Is there a club for people utterly disgusted with Andrew Sullivan? If so, please count me in.

Now, I know many conservatives dislike him because of his wacko campaign on behalf of Obama. I’m no conservative. And I know Sullivan claims to be a libertarian, as do I, but I also know that Sullivan claims lots of things that just aren’t so. But his hatred for Sarah Palin is so rabid and irrational that I have to wonder the cause -- a stroke perhaps?

Sullivan was a major source spreading the demonstrably false claim that Palin had faked her recent pregnancy in order to deceive the public. This wacko theory argued that the baby actually belonged to her daughter. That is physically impossible as the daughter is pregnant now and sufficiently pregnant to have been in that condition when the baby was born in April. In other words, for Sullivan’s bullshit theory to have been accurate the girl would have to be pregnant with two infants simultaneously, conceived months apart. But Sullivan is into virgin births so maybe this sort of “miracle” makes sense to him.

The people at Reason magazine had been friendly with Sullivan in the past. They had him speak at a conference they put on in Amsterdam which I attended. But Reason rips into Sullivan for his irrational bout with fringe theories and his snipping manner. The Reason article notes that Sullivan pushed his theory without a shred of “compelling evidence.”

Narcissistic Andrew went so far as demanding that Palin release her medical records to prove she had actually given birth to her son. In another post he demanded that the McCain campaign put an end to the rumors, which he was helping spread, by releasing the medical records. He bitched: “So let’s have them. And then we can move on.”

This is typical Sullivan who is convinced that the sun shines out of his ass. Sullivan spreads a false rumor with no hard evidence to back up his wacko theory. He then demands that others cater to his demands to prove him wrong. And he whines that their refusal to obey him is preventing us from moving on.

Reason was amazed that Sullivan couldn’t “move on” from his petty gossiping even after it was shown to have been impossible for the infant to belong to Palin’s daughter. “Even after Palin announced that her daughter was pregnant, Sullivan couldn't exactly move on, and despite the chronological impossibility—to which he was previously so attentive—of the child actually belonging to the governor's daughter, Sullivan proclaimed: ‘Now all we need is confirmation from the obstetrician who delivered Sarah's baby, Trig.’”

I started out liking some of what Sullivan was saying. I got his book on conservatism and found some of it correct but much of it just nonsense. And I listened to his speech in Amsterdam, which I thought was badly organized, disjointed and poorly delivered. His arguments were weak there as well. I personally think he ripped off the Reason people and took a free trip to Amsterdam on them without delivering the goods. The high point of the evening when Sullivan spoke was when Tom Palmer, from Cato, very aptly and accurately pointed out the errors and mistakes Sullivan had made in his speech. Sullivan basically stuttered a bit, tried to respond without responding, and then ignored the response.

And in recent months it has become clear to me that Sullivan is actually a sad little man. He isn’t stupid but I suspect he may be lazy. He is not doing the research to back us his positions. He basically makes decisions and then twists evidence to fit them. He is absolutely convinced that he is correct and therefore the evidence must fit his theory. To make it more boring he is entirely self-absorbed constantly informing us about his personal life, as if we care, or trying to promote his own importance in the grand scheme of things.

I have to wonder if Mr. Sullivan, having been afflicted with decades of self-loathing inflicted on him by his Catholicism and the closet, has never actually made peace with himself. He appears to literally think that he is the center of the universe. And I find myself reading less and less of his tiresome blog at The Atlantic. In fact I only checked it today after reading the Reason article to see if he responded. After all it is a chance to make himself a topic of conversation again.

What I found on today’s blog was mind-boggling. It was a full page of attacks on Palin. I counted 31 different posts, most consecutively, attacking Palin. Really, if Andrew has such a hard-on for Obama he really shouldn’t be so obvious.

Now Sullivan is stooping to a new low and trying to paint Palin as an anti-Semite. We saw how Obama’s people were trying to claim that she was friends with a “Nazi-sympathizer” because she attended a local campaign meeting where Pat Buchanan spoke. Sullivan pushed that as well even though Palin was on record as supporting Steve Forbes not Buchanan!

The proof that Sullivan offers is as pathetic as normal for him. Palin attends an evangelical church. At that church a representative from Jews for Jesus spoke. Jews for Jesus are converts to Christianity who attempt to convert other Jews. There you have it! Anti-semite. This is pathetic.

Evangelicals try to convert everyone! That means Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Hindus, Anglicans, etc. While I have no sympathy for evangelicalism in particular, or religion in general, it is the height of absurdity to try to paint this sort of evangelism as anti-Semitism. That is the nature of the evangelical. If anything, the evangelical tends to be overly pro-Israel taking the view that Israel can do no wrong. And Sullivan’s own much loved Catholic Church, has a long history of real anti-Semitism that makes the Evangelicals look like amateurs. As far as I know Evangelicals have never burned a Jew at the stake the way Sullivan’s own Church has.

What is even more astounding is Sullivan’s open double-standard on such things. When Obama was crtiticized for attending a church where his pastor said things considered anti-American he was defended by Sullivan. After all you can’t really hold him responsible for a sermon he heard. But Palin, well, she’s a different matter. His constant looking for dirt with which to smear Palin is even more bizarre when we consider his own sleazy record.

In this blogger’s view Andrew Sullivan has just become more than I can stand. His moralistic, hypocrisy, while being firmly rooted in his rampant Catholicism, is too much to endure. Add in his exaggerated sense of his own importance and the mixture is entirely stomach-turning. This blog has often given out a “moron of the week” award. But we have been reticent to award an “asshole of the week” award because I find the term rather offensive in general. But as I try to grapple with an apt description of Andrew Sullivan it is the only term that I find that really fits him perfect -- so we award Andrew Sullivan our first Asshole of the Week award -- no, at the very least it ought to be Asshole of the Month. It’s only September but so far he is our lead candidate for the annual award as well.

One wag has suggested that Mr. Sullivan suffers from AIDS dementia. However, he notes that this rumor could be cleared up immediately if Mr. Sullivan will just release his medical records to the public. Quoting Mr. Sullivan himself, I say: "So let's have them. And then we can move on." What about it Andrew? Will you prove with your medical records you are not suffering dementia?

Gracious in victory.

Over the years I have read Paul Krugman on the far left and Andrew Sullivan on the right. I have frequently disagreed with Sullivan who I thought had liberal tendencies but was still a conservative at heart.

Krugman, however, I found it hard to enjoy anything he wrote. Even when I agreed with his basic conclusion I found him atrocious. I always got the impression that there was something rather unpleasant about him. His writing always had a nasty tone to it.

On a few occasions, very few, he is right. But even when he manages that he usually gets the reasoning wrong and almost always had an unpleasant demeanour about the whole issue. He struck me as someone who enjoyed being unpleasant.

Two areas where Krugman got it right, but for all the wrong reasons, was the US invasion of Iraq and his appraisal of the Bush debacle. Sullivan mainly got it wrong on the same two issues.

But Sullivan learned his lesson and he learned it some years ago. He endorsed John Kerry in the last election, not because of Kerry’s brilliance, but because of the disastrous consequences of a second term for Bush.

And recently Sullivan was one of two speakers at a forum held at the Cato Institute which dissected the Bush disaster. Now you would think that Paul Krugman would find Sullivan’s critique of Bush as something to welcome.


But he doesn’t. Instead he gets nasty about it. Sullivan admits he rallied behind Bush after 9/11. Sullivan is, of course unhappy with the attack. He says Krugman accused him of being “a ‘born-again’ Bush-basher.” But Sullivan notes that his criticism of Bush goes back several years. His presentation at Cato was not a recent dip in the pool of criticism for Bush.

And Sullivan is correct. A read of his daily blog reveals many such criticisms. And sure there are lots of things one can debate from a classical liberal perspective. Sullivan is not a classical liberal. He is a conservative. And one gets the impression that he’d be far more conservative than he is if it weren’t for the matter of him being gay.

So what is the lesson from all of this for classical liberals? We really can’t learn anything from Krugman. Even in his own field of economics the man is amazingly bad. We can admire that Sullivan has recognized some of his errors regarding Bush and wonder why he took as long as he did.

Bush didn’t have anything to offer classical liberals going into the first election except that he wasn’t Al Gore. And soon after his election it became obvious to all but the most blind that he was not an advocate of individual rights or limited government. His policies have been a mixture of Lincoln’s belief in executive power, Johnson’s Great Society and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Add in a touch of Wilsonian illusions about remaking the world and you have a man who is the opposite of almost everything for which liberalism stands.

If Reagan wanted to end the era of big government then Bush has plunged the nation back into that statist abyss. Not only plunged back in but taken the country to new depths.

The Krugman/Sullivan feud does have lessons for us liberals however. And the main one is that when an intellectual opponent concedes a position one should not gloat about it.

It is clear that Sullivan feels insulted by Krugman. And Krugman’s writing is often nasty as I said so this doesn’t surprise me. But what kind of lesson is Krugman trying to teach Sullivan?

He basically punishes Sullivan when Sullivan is wrong and punishes him when he’s right. If someone moves closer to a good position, and if we want to see continued progress, we ought not bash them over the head for their movement.

It is said that one should be gracious in defeat. Untrue. It is far more important to be gracious in victory. When an intellectual opponent shifts his views it is not inappropriate to mention it. But only in a supportive way. Unless, of course, what you want to do is stifle all movement on their part. If you want people to stagnate and cling to bad positions then bash them when they move and accept good positions.

I remember a debate I had in print with an elected official. This politician was all over the place on a specific issue and I wanted to see a principled liberal position being taken. The politician finally replied to my essay by conceding the position. Some supporters of mine were anxious for my final response where I could gloat and do a little victory dance. I did not reply at all and let the debate end.

I did so because I did not want this official to be humiliated by the concession. I didn’t want intellectual movement to stop. I did not want to punish someone by humiliating them because they did something right. All I would have done was reinforce the idea that, even when you know you are wrong, you should still cling to bad view because shifting views is too costly.

It comes back to some economics. There are always costs and benefits. When we shift our views in public there are costs to this. One cost is the embarrassment of having been wrong. None of us like being wrong. And that is one reason a lot of people cling to wrong positions even when they know they are wrong. To them emotional costs of changing their position is too great.

Now when costs go up the demand for something goes down. (Though I suspect Paul Krugman would deny this.) When you raise the cost of an opponent changing their mind you reduce the likelihood that they will change their mind. To gloat or chastise them after such a concession is like a tax that is being added. They already paid the cost of publicly changing positions and now you add this tax on top of the price they paid making it even more expensive. By driving up the costs you guarantee that next time they are faced with this option they will be less likely to change their stance.

Far better to be gracious. If you must say anything at all you can restate their new view, endorse it and applaud their courage in changing their minds. Paul Krugman should have repeated Sullivan’s critique and said how brave it is for one so public to change their position. He should have recognized the good character traits needed for someone to do this. That he didn’t makes Krugman, the victor in a sense, look small, petty and unpleasant.

To see Sullivan’s presentation at the Cato forum go here:
http://cato.org/event.php?eventid=2710

To read Sullivan’s blog go to:
http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/

I can not direct you to Krugman as the New York Times has made him “premium” content that one must pay for to read on-line. Somehow calling Krugman’s columns “premium content” seems grossly inappropriate.