Andrew Sullivan can’t help himself

What a sick human being. 

On a night when the news of Steve Jobs’ passing and Sarah Palin’s announcement not to run for president take place within two hours of each other, he chimes in comparing the two:

It’s a fitting comparison: achievement versus resentment, creativity versus narcissism, hope versus fear. I know which one will get the bigger headlines tomorrow. And there is some comfort in knowing it will pain her.

Yeah, Steve Jobs will be getting the headlines tomorrow, Andrew.  The man just passed away after a life of changing the very fabric of our lives through technological innovations, the founder and leader of one of the most powerful companies in the world. 

Palin merely announced she wasn’t running for office.  One definitely takes precedent over the other in the news cycle.  This, despite the importance that you, yourself, and your psychotic, obsessive ramblings about Palin and her uterus have placed on her.

The weed and the meds take its toll on the normalcy of the brain, Andrew.  Stay classy.

When you’ve lost Andrew Sullivan…

Sullivan rips into the President and his new budget proposal:

The crisis is the cost of future entitlements and defense, about which Obama proposes nothing. Yes, there’s some blather. But Obama will not risk in any way any vulnerability on taxes to his right or entitlement spending to his left. He convened a deficit commission in order to throw it in the trash. If I were Alan Simpson or Erskine Bowles, I’d feel duped. And they wereduped. All of us who took Obama’s pitch as fiscally responsible were duped.

[...]

[I]n his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests.  Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal bullshit it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road.

On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.

To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you’re fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama’s cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down.

This is rough coming from Sullivan.  He’s been an Obama standard-bearer since it was cool and hip to do so, and now this is what it’s come down to.

I hate to keep kicking a dead horse, but can anyone explain how Barack Obama–as state senator and half-term US Senator– would be experienced and knowledgeable enough to make the tough decisions that Andrew Sullivan now–almost three years after the election–says he can’t make?

A senator who failed to come up with a single piece of considerable or substantive legislation during his time in that chamber?  A senator who literally voted present on the issues that came before him?  Someone who’s only qualifications to be President was that he was of age and was not George W. Bush?

Maybe Andrew Sullivan just answered that question.  But then again, I knew the answer all along.

[Hat Tip: Memeorandum]

UPDATE.   Allahpundit piles on in a must-read post:

On the seminal issue of his time, the long-term fiscal sustainability of the United States, [President Obama] has completely abdicated. In fact, I’m tempted to say that this, not ObamaCare, will be the cornerstone of his legacy, but that’s really a false choice.

[...]

Remember too that O once famously said he’d rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-termer. Today’s budget exposes that canard for the total fraud that it is. He could have dealt with Social Security and Medicare here but seniors won’t stand for that, and, well, there’s an election coming up and we all know how high turnout is among seniors…

Read the whole thing.

Breitbart FTW

I’ve mostly ignored the Dave Weigel flame wars rampaging over the blogosphere over the past few weeks.  To me, it’s a tiresome exercise about Ezra Klein’s private journo-list, the sanctity of which was betrayed by one of its participants.

Andrew Breitbart is offering $100,000 for the archives of that list, which led to the usual concern-trolling by the self-serving bloggers, with Andrew Sullivan leading the charge.

This will probably be my first and only post on this whole episode, and it’s worth it just to point to Breitbart’s smack-down of Andrew Sullivan’s insane obsession with Sarah Palin, and his glaring hypocrisy:

I needn’t be lectured by a so-called “conservative” who has aided and abetted in this perversion of the American political experiment. Sullivan’s disgusting, ends-justify-the-means obsession with the personal family life of Sarah Palin breached every ethical and journalistic boundary known to the cosmos. Between airing Palin’s hacked private emails and making a cottage industry out of challenging the maternity of her son, Trig, sometimes the word “irony” or “hypocrisy” is not descriptive enough.

To highlight the absurdity of Sullivan’s outrage, perhaps his submission entitled “The Palin Emails” can grant you insight into a demented mind. Before divulging them in at least five separate posts, he wrote: ”They’ve leaked, of course. And they’re not pretty.”

And they weren’t meant to be public either, Andy.

To think I was once his biggest advocate, but now he’s an incomprehensible ‘marm. In the transparent world of conservative journalism, conservatives admit their biases; in the world in which Sullivan now curries favor, he sidles up to the ends-justify-the-means left that exposed his sexual tastes in order to put him in his place. These are the Alinsky monsters whom I seek to flash a light on.

Breitbart really hits the nail on the head right there.  Sullivan has spent a good part of two years trying to invade the privacy of Sarah Palin’s person and family.  He’s violating the very standards that he pretends to uphold about the decency of media and of journalism.  In other words, a hypocrite.

Andrew Sullivan: Hey, these independent voters are extremists

It appears that Andrew Sullivan’s crush on President Obama is causing the blogger to morph from a mere shill for the President to borderline insanity.  The ramblings are almost unbearable to read any longer.  Of course being the glutton for punishment that I am, I must read.

His latest post on how the President must react to this week’s special election in Massachusetts and how it pertains to Obama’s agenda is all sorts of fail—major fail:

…[T]he ferocity of the campaign against Obama, the sheer dickishness of the GOP and its acolytes, the total oppositionism to everything he has done and indeed anything he might do… suggests that any hope for some kind of cooperation from this rump is impossible.

But the truth is that these forces have also been so passionate, so extreme, and so energized that in a country reeling from a recession, the narrative – a false, paranoid, nutty narrative – has taken root in the minds of some independents. Obama, under-estimating the extremism of his opponents, has focused on actually addressing the problems we face.

So let’s get this straight—the stupidity and ignorance of the right-wingers is so fierce and so dominant that it’s “taken root in the minds of some independents”?   Clearly this is a jab at the overwhelming support that Scott Brown received by non-affiliated voters who, by definition, are not the extremist lunatics that Sullivan implies.  It’s amazing to see the liberal/progressive blogosphere plus political observers in complete denial about the special election results earlier this week, and what a debilitating blow it is to Obama’s agenda. 

The people have spoken—that’s what elections are for—and Sullivan, looking through his sycophantic glasses—refuses to acknowledge that. 

And then, there’s this:

Look at what we are facing right now: a take-no-prisoners right, empowered by a massive new wave of corporate money unleashed by the Supreme Court, able to wield a 41 seat minority to oppose anything Obama wants, setting up a cycle of failure for a president whom they can then pillory at the polls…These forces cannot be appeased. They simply have to be confronted.

A “41 seat minority” that is opposing “anything Obama wants”?  What the hell?  The last I checked, this week was the one year anniversary of the President’s inauguration, not his coronation.  It is the minority party’s duty to oppose the President or his party, or both, if their beliefs contradict and if it means accomodating their constituents.  Isn’t that the nature of constitutional democracies that Sullivan holds so sacred?  Sullivan seems to be putting Obama’s agenda and legacy ahead of everyday Americans.   

And finally:

But it is absurd that one special election should upend a clear campaign promise, a year of work, and a necessary start on a critical reform without which we hurtle toward bankruptcy even more quickly.

“One special election”?  Apparently Sullivan is thinking with blinders on.  After a summer of bitter tea parties that Sullivan and liberals wrote off as outliers, the proverbial chickens came home to roost in November—-with GOP wins in New Jersey and Virginia—the former a blue state with an incumbent governor who embraced Obama and his policies every chance he could, the latter a southern state where Democrats were supposed to be making inroads.  For healthcare and Democrats, it was all downhill from there.   And then came Massachusetts.  The bluest of blue states was supposed to be a slam dunk for Democrats.  And healthcare was at the center of it all. 

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the American people saw slimy backroom deals, the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Christmas Eve Senate vote, the union tax exemption, and on and on.  People apparently got fed up with the politics as usual that Sullivan’s beloved Obama encourages in his government.   So it’s not just “one special election” in January, but more like the build-up of frustration on behalf of most Americans. 

Normally, I would say Sullivan needs to get a grip—but it looks like it’s way beyond that right now.  Sullivan has a crush that nothing can cure.