Sullivan had a longish media career, but was also one of the early bloggers. And after 9/11, General Sullivan enlisted in the Fighting 101st Keyboard Kommandos, otherwise known as the "warbloggers," whose primary mission was to fight America's most important enemy, the enemy at home known as "Americans."Andrew and all of you who believed the crap about WMD and yellowcake in Iraq, how could you?
And now Andrew is Atrios' choice as 2nd Runner Up WANKER OF THE DECADE. You know I don't usually use language quite that colorful, but I make an exception just to tell the story. I await with bated breath Atrios' announcement of his choices for 1st Runner Up and the No. 1 spot, the champ. See? I couldn't type the word again.
And I fear we may be sleepwalking our way into a war with Iran, which will be another disaster. You folks should be reading Juan Cole at Informed Comment who keeps up with events in the Middle East. He speaks and reads several of the languages and brings a perspective which is different from the media in the West.
Yeah, that sounds about right: Andrew IS a wanker.
ReplyDeleteIt's just that the USA has So Much Worse than mere wankers, that by comparison... O_o
JCF, you're right. We have much worse than Andrew in this country, and he has actually improved a bit over the years since his Fighting Keyboard Kommandos days
ReplyDeleteI didn't even know what a blog was back in 2001, happily immured in what I might call a little house on the prairie with my late husband and our baby dog, and equally happy to be ignorant of the doings of the big world and the chattering class. Not until after my husband's unexpected death in 2005 and the subsequent treatment I received at the hands of his family and friends and neighbors, good country people one and all, did I become what I might call radicalized: a sort of Damascus Road experience, which I've written about numerous times on my own blog.
ReplyDeleteSo I missed Andrew's Kommando days, and in the time I've been reading the Dish, he's mostly been pretty reasonable - from what I gather, the revelations about no WMD and torture and just plain crazed stupidity on the part of the Bush/Cheney regime opened his eyes too. And too, I do admire the fact that he is probably the most widely-read gay journalist in the country, something unthinkable just a decade or so ago. And since long before it got to be a popular thing, has advocated the cause of marriage equality.
Still, sometimes I just want to slap him because from where I stand he does seem a bit in love with hearing himself talk, and thrilled with his chumminess with People Who Matter. And especially since he left the Atlantic a year or two ago, his thought processes seem to me to be getting a little loose, if not unscrewed: as witness his support for the appalling Ron Paul.
It would do Andrew a world of good if he would lay down all that fame and glory of being A Big Name for a couple of years and come live as a nobody out in the middle of nowhere in a red state, and just experience life as Someone Who Doesn't Matter a Damn Bit.
But of course, he won't. And I feel the same way about a number of other journalists/authors, gay and straight. But the glittering temptatations of the bright lights and big city are just about too much for ordinary human nature to resist, once tasted. Which recalls to mind the verse:
How dreadful to be Somebody!
How public, like a frog --
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog.
I've been reading blogs since before the Gore-Bush election, and the bloggers were giving out more and better information than the media, especially about the election process in Florida when the Supremes elected the president and during the run-up to the Iraq war.
ReplyDeleteI'll say this for Sullivan: I read his book Virtually Norman which helped to open my eyes to what life must be like for a gay man. For several years, it seems to me that lesbians were hardly part of the game in the struggle for equality, but I could be remembering wrong.