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.

Angry, left-wing rhetoric: Hey, let’s punch Paul Ryan in the face for being “stupid”

Matt Yglesisas writes a post on Paul Ryan, criticizing the congressman’s comments at a recent congressional hearing.

Some violent left-wing rhetoric intelligent and learned thoughts , those that only progressives are capable of, ensue in the comments:

Clearly,  “TL Jackson” is a moron who really needs to be punched in the face.  And I’m waiting with bated breath for Yglesias to call out his commenters for singling out public officials and advocating violence against them. 

Hypocrites.

Left-wingers astroturfing a smear campaign

It was just a matter of time before the whole thing got really, really ugly.

Democrats, with an abysmal track record to show for the last 20 months of full government control, are about to hit the panic button–with an all out assault of crap mud:

Democratic candidates across the country are opening a fierce offensive of negative advertisements against Republicans, using lawsuits, tax filings, reports from the Better Business Bureau and even divorce proceedings to try to discredit their opponents and save their Congressional majority.

Opposition research and attack advertising are used in almost every election, but these biting ads are coming far earlier than ever before, according to party strategists. The campaign has intensified in the last two weeks as early voting begins in several states and as vulnerable incumbents try to fight off an onslaught of influences by outside groups.

As they struggle to break through with economic messages, many Democrats are deploying the fruits of a yearlong investigation into the business and personal histories of Republican candidates in an effort to plant doubts about them and avoid having races become a national referendum on the performance of President Obama and his party.

Aren’t these Democrats a petty bunch?

Apparently, the pettiness morphs into seediness.  Byron York reports:

Onlookers were startled last Thursday when a man with a video camera approached House Minority Leader John Boehner after the event in Sterling, Virginia at which GOP lawmakers outlined their “Pledge to America” for this November’s elections. The event had been open only to credentialed press, but as Boehner left, he saw a group of Tea Partiers standing across the street and went to speak with them. That’s when the man with the camera moved in. “Speaker Boehner [sic], have you been cheating with Lisbeth Lyons, the lobbyist for the American Printing Association?” the man asked. “Have you been sleeping with Lisbeth Lyons?” Boehner walked silently past the man and never acknowledged his presence.

[…]

The man was a left-wing blogger and provocateur named Mike Stark, who has made a career of trying to publicize sensational charges against Republican politicians. A few hours after his encounter with Boehner, Stark posted video of the moment on the left-wing Daily Kos website as well as his own website, StarkReports.com.

[…]

Prior to Stark’s confrontation with Boehner, no one had publicly suggested that the Minority Leader was having an affair with Lyons, or with anyone else, for that matter. (Boehner’s office says the accusation is completely false.)

[…]

The incident in Sterling was reminiscent of another Stark operation in 2006 that targeted George Allen, the Republican senator from Virginia who was running for re-election against Democrat James Webb. At the time, Stark wrote on his then-website, callingallwingnuts.com, that he wanted to put his “guerilla tactics to use where it matters: winning elections.”

[…]

It was a big success for Stark; he had taken a rumor on the left-wing blogs and pushed it into the mainstream media. Now, he’s trying to do the same thing with Boehner.

Read York’s entire post.

So much for your “principled” left-wing blogosphere, concerned only with issues and policy and the like, to win elections.

See, when Democrat politicians lie about cheating on their wives, getting oral sex in the Oval Office and lying about it to Federal juries, it’s all good.  Who cares, right?  It’s his private life (despite being in government) they say.

When Republicans are merely accused of doing it and in order to satisfy some loser’s unilateral wet dream do it, it must be dug up, reported and all interviews and correspondence and all the rest must be made viral in one big, hypocritical smear campaign across the moonbat blogosphere. Because the American people need to know.

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.