Quote of the Day: Being Woke

 

“The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke.” – Andrew Sullivan

I know it is Andrew Sullivan. And he helped build the culture he is decrying in this quote. But a true statement is a true statement. If you are woke, you are a bigot. Even Andrew Sullivan realizes that.

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  1. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    Sully being who he is, having said all the halfwitted and cravenly, pleadingly weak things he’s said, I’m left to think that being woke must have no correlation to bigotry at all.

    • #1
  2. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Just as the left never forgave Hillary Clinton for her Iraq vote in 2003 (or for that matter, for not setting Bill’s bed on fire while he was sleeping back in ’96 for not vetoing welfare reform), so the same people on the left have never totally re-embraced Andrew Sullivan over his support for the War of Terror in the 2001-04 period. Even after his anger at DOMA caused him to turn against Bush in ’04 and then become Sarah Palin’s womb inspector in ’08, the left sort of treated him about like they treat Max Boot today, as someone they could quote when needed, but who remained more of a source of disdain and mockery.

    Not being of The Body with the left’s probably spared Sullivan from being absorbed by the hive mind, and he can actually see where the current woke SJW culture is taking the left, and how it’s going to come back and bite the various special interest groups there, many of whom already are battling it out for which group is the Alpha-victim and therefore can tell everyone else what to do. And while it’s nice to see Andrew waking up over the past 12-18 month to the dangers of woke culture, you have to wonder how long the current shift back towards the center (if not to the right) is going to last, the next time some GOP proposal comes down the pike that annoys him (i.e. — part of the complaints 15 years ago that led to DOMA was the demands for rights weren’t simply going to stop at the recognition of same-sex marriage, which,  whatever you think of same-sex marriage, turned out to be accurate. But that’s probably not a point Sullivan’s going to be willing to concede, as far are there being a direct line between that and 2019’s special interest group demands).

    • #2
  3. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Jon1979 (View Comment):
    and then become Sarah Palin’s womb inspector in ’08

    Worth the price of a Ricochet membership.

    • #3
  4. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    Jon1979 (View Comment):
    people on the left have never totally re-embraced Andrew Sullivan over his support for the War of Terror in the 2001-04 period.

    Jon1979 (View Comment):
    Not being of The Body with the left’s probably spared Sullivan from being absorbed by the hive mind, and he can actually see where the current woke SJW culture is taking the left

    It’s not that he can see, it’s just that he’s stuck on the outside therefore he feels a little differently than most of the left. Sully doesn’t think, at least not the way a person of the right thinks of thinking.

    BTW, “womb inspector” is good but “being of The Body” is rhetorical gold. +5.

    • #4
  5. Vectorman Inactive
    Vectorman
    @Vectorman

    Jon1979 (View Comment):
    And while it’s nice to see Andrew waking up over the past 12-18 month to the dangers of woke culture, you have to wonder how long the current shift back towards the center (if not to the right) is going to last…

    Andrew reminds me of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a thoughtful and mostly reasonable Democrat, who made appearances on Buckley’s Firing Line. His report The Negro Family: The Case For National Action had many common sense arguments on how to fix welfare. But in the end, Moynihan always came back to the Democrats, as I expect Andrew Sullivan will too.


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    • #5
  6. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Vectorman (View Comment):

    Jon1979 (View Comment):
    And while it’s nice to see Andrew waking up over the past 12-18 month to the dangers of woke culture, you have to wonder how long the current shift back towards the center (if not to the right) is going to last…

    Andrew reminds me of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a thoughtful and mostly reasonable Democrat, who made appearances on Buckley’s Firing Line. His report The Negro Family: The Case For National Action had many common sense arguments on how to fix welfare. But in the end, Moynihan always came back to the Democrats, as I expect Andrew Sullivan will too.


    The Quote of the Day series is the easiest way to start a fun conversation on Ricochet. There are only 3 open days left on the November Signup Sheet, We even include tips for finding great quotes, so choose your favorite quote and sign up today!

    DPM also coined the phrases “Boob Bait for Bubbas” to explain what the Clinton Administration was trying to pull on Flyover Country voters, as well as “Defining Deviancy Down” to explain the coarsening of society over the same time period. He was great at giving Republicans talking points, but then not only would he vote with the Democrats on all their actions in the Senate that contributed to those problems, he then endorsed Hillary to take his place when he retired in 2000. Totally maddening because you knew he knew better, but he just couldn’t bring himself to break with the Democrats, no matter which way they were going.

    • #6
  7. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Sullivan was never “woke”. This is not a change in his position. Same sex marriage? Being pro-gay doesn’t make him woke. He’s a homo himself and always been pro-gay rights, sure. So? I don’t see too many Christians around here apologizing for being pro-Christian. In both cases, I’d kind of expect them to defend the home team. 

    A key turning point for Sullivan was when he was convinced that he’d been conned into supporting the Iraq war, and he was far from unique about that opinion. Few of today’s conservatives defend the decision to go to war in 2003 anymore, least of all one DJT at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Like David Frum (a Canadian), Sullivan is a genuine conservative but only in the British mould, which is the equivalent of what used to be a moderate, relatively sane liberal in American terms. If people hate him for being anti-Trump, that’s their right, and I’d guess he’d regard it as a badge of honor. But wokeness? Never his particular sin.  

    • #7
  8. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    My recollection of 2004 was that Andrew was so angered by the passage of DOMA and Bush’s signing of it that he flipped like a light switch to Team Kerry, even before there was serious Iraq War skepticism. My thought at the moment was “Where did this come from?“, while four years later it was more “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?” over his Trig Palin birtherism — Palin hatred on the left was through the roof between 2008 and 2012 in large part out of the fear that sometime in the future she might take away the Democrats’ ability to have the first woman president and to anoint that person with Absolute Moral Authority (wait ’till you see what they do to Nikki Haley in the run-up to 2024 if Liz Warren doesn’t  win next year). But Sullivan’s efforts to prove that Palin was Trig’s grandmother was just bizarre on multiple levels.

    As Palin’s star started fading by 2013 or so, Andrew didn’t seem to want to wade into the same weeds as some other Obama supporters and later  Hillary backers, as far as supporting intimidation attempts against their opponents with either use of government or woke SJW tactics. With the current president, he’s somewhere to the right of Bill Kristol  when it comes to Trump and seeing what he wants to see in things like the Mueller Report, but he still thought Trump should be impeached because of that, and is all-in on the current Democrat tactic of impeaching on the Ukraine information, which may put him to the left of some current House Democrats, let alone Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema over in the Senate (the second link to his NY Mag column provides a contrast in Andrew’s thinking, in that his “Impeach Trump Now!” section is followed by one lamenting the federal court upholding Harvard’s discrimination law on Asian student admissions. It’s on things like diversity quotas where he breaks from the Democrats’ angry woke types).

    • #8
  9. GFHandle Member
    GFHandle
    @GFHandle

    As I recall, years ago Sullivan argued for gay marriage because he opposed gays’ getting special status. He rejected the idea that gays should get preferential treatment (as minorities and women were demanding) and argued simply for full civil rights (marriage, military service) like any other citizen. I would call that a liberal position, not a woke or radical one.  So I am not the least surprised by his current position: it is consistent with what he argued (coherently) years ago.

    After that period, though, he seemed to go off the rails as noted above and I have not been following his thought.

    • #9
  10. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    My recollection of 2004 was that Andrew was so angered by the passage of DOMA and Bush’s signing of it that he flipped like a light switch to Team Kerry, even before there was serious Iraq War skepticism.

    He was pissed off about DOMA, no question about it. The prevailing mood after 9/11 was amazingly unified, for a while. Dennis Miller said he was no champion of gay marriage, but if Al Qaeda was going to try to disrupt one, he’d fight them to the death. But serious Iraq war skepticism was always there, and 2004 was the year of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the year it became lethally obvious that Mission was far from Accomplished, and above all the year of the big retreat on WMD. Bush needn’t have made WMD so important to the Invade Iraq decision, but he did, because it looked like a sure bet. That was a crucial political mistake. But Karl Rove, called “The Architect” by many including Sean Hannity, decided that SSM gave the Republicans an eternally popular issue that would resonate forever. National Review was part of the cheering squad. It seemed to me like a big bet that the GOP would lose eventually, and they did, quicker than they or I thought.

    My thought at the moment was “Where did this come from?“, while four years later it was more “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?” over his Trig Palin birtherism — Palin hated on the left was through the roof between 2008 and 2012 in large part out of the fear that sometime in the future she might take away the Democrats’ ability to have the first woman president and to anoint that person with Absolute Moral Authority (wait ’till you see what they do to Nikki Haley in the run-up to 2024 if Liz Warren doesn’t win next year). But Sullivan’s efforts to prove that Palin was Trig’s grandmother was just bizarre on multiple levels.

    Yeah, that was awful. But there were lots of reasons why Palin was unpopular, some suggested by  less hot-headed critics.

    As Palin’s star started fading by 2013 or so, Andrew didn’t seem to want to wade into the same weeds as some other Obama supporters and later Hillary backers, as far as supporting intimidation attempts against their opponents with either use of government or woke SJW tactics….It’s on things like diversity quotas where he breaks from the Democrats’ angry woke types).

    He’s never supported intimidation tactics, so I agree.

    • #10
  11. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Seawriter: I know it is Andrew Sullivan. And he helped build the culture he is decrying in this quote. But a true statement is a true statement. If you are woke, you are a bigot. Even Andrew Sullivan realizes that.

    Sea,

    Yep, Sullivan, no matter who he is or what he’s done has defined “woke” perfectly.

    Regards,

    Jim

     

    • #11
  12. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    My thought at the moment was “Where did this come from?“, while four years later it was more “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?” over his Trig Palin birtherism — Palin hated on the left was through the roof between 2008 and 2012 in large part out of the fear that sometime in the future she might take away the Democrats’ ability to have the first woman president and to anoint that person with Absolute Moral Authority (wait ’till you see what they do to Nikki Haley in the run-up to 2024 if Liz Warren doesn’t win next year). But Sullivan’s efforts to prove that Palin was Trig’s grandmother was just bizarre on multiple levels.

    Yeah, that was awful. But there were lots of reasons why Palin was unpopular, some suggested by less hot-headed critics.

    As Palin’s star started fading by 2013 or so, Andrew didn’t seem to want to wade into the same weeds as some other Obama supporters and later Hillary backers, as far as supporting intimidation attempts against their opponents with either use of government or woke SJW tactics….It’s on things like diversity quotas where he breaks from the Democrats’ angry woke types).

    He’s never supported intimidation tactics, so I agree.

    Palin lacked the desire to get past the talking head talking points in terms of being a serious candidate for president  — she took Bernard Goldberg’s ‘Lamestream Media’ line and pretty much made it her mantra on Fox News and elsewhere between 2009 and 2012. Palin  definitely had grounds to attack the media, but there was no effort to build out from that, and because she wasn’t known to the public outside of politics, she couldn’t run any campaign by key phrases as Trump was able to do four years later.

    That would have been a substantive place to root Palin criticism from the center-left. But Andrew was obsessed in catching her in a birth mother lie to destroy her career. I never did understand that line of thinking.

    • #12
  13. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    My thought at the moment was “Where did this come from?“, while four years later it was more “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?” over his Trig Palin birtherism — Palin hated on the left was through the roof between 2008 and 2012 in large part out of the fear that sometime in the future she might take away the Democrats’ ability to have the first woman president and to anoint that person with Absolute Moral Authority (wait ’till you see what they do to Nikki Haley in the run-up to 2024 if Liz Warren doesn’t win next year). But Sullivan’s efforts to prove that Palin was Trig’s grandmother was just bizarre on multiple levels.

    Yeah, that was awful. But there were lots of reasons why Palin was unpopular, some suggested by less hot-headed critics.

    As Palin’s star started fading by 2013 or so, Andrew didn’t seem to want to wade into the same weeds as some other Obama supporters and later Hillary backers, as far as supporting intimidation attempts against their opponents with either use of government or woke SJW tactics….It’s on things like diversity quotas where he breaks from the Democrats’ angry woke types).

    He’s never supported intimidation tactics, so I agree.

    Palin lacked the desire to get past the talking head talking points in terms of being a serious candidate for president — she took Bernard Goldberg’s ‘Lamestream Media’ line and pretty much made it her mantra on Fox News and elsewhere between 2009 and 2012. Palin definitely had grounds to attack the media, but there was no effort to build out from that, and because she wasn’t known to the public outside of politics, she couldn’t run any campaign by key phrases as Trump was able to do four years later.

    That would have been a substantive place to root Palin criticism from the center-left. But Andrew was obsessed in catching her in a birth mother lie to destroy her career. I never did understand that line of thinking.

    Neither did I. It was moronic. To be sure, Obama “birtherism” was moronic too, but not at first, only after the horse had been thoroughly beaten to death. Palin/Trig was (for me) the low point of Sullivan’s career. 

    Somewhat similarly, despite disagreements with David Frum I’ve respected his intelligence. But a low point for him was the death of Andrew Breitbart. All Frum could see was the gleeful political rascal, so his reaction wasn’t exactly “good, he’s dead”, but a grudging “he won’t be missed”. Whatever you think of the web site, Breitbart was a brilliant and magnetic person. He had a wife and children. He wasn’t a cartoon right wing villain. This might be partly explained by the fact of Frum being on the east coast. Out here, Andrew was popular even with non-conservatives. 

    • #13
  14. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    Palin lacked the desire to get past the talking head talking points in terms of being a serious candidate for president — she took Bernard Goldberg’s ‘Lamestream Media’ line and pretty much made it her mantra on Fox News and elsewhere between 2009 and 2012. Palin definitely had grounds to attack the media, but there was no effort to build out from that, and because she wasn’t known to the public outside of politics, she couldn’t run any campaign by key phrases as Trump was able to do four years later.

    That would have been a substantive place to root Palin criticism from the center-left. But Andrew was obsessed in catching her in a birth mother lie to destroy her career. I never did understand that line of thinking.

    Neither did I. It was moronic. To be sure, Obama “birtherism” was moronic too, but not at first, only after the horse had been thoroughly beaten to death. Palin/Trig was (for me) the low point of Sullivan’s career.

    Somewhat similarly, despite disagreements with David Frum I’ve respected his intelligence. But a low point for him was the death of Andrew Breitbart. All Frum could see was the gleeful political rascal, so his reaction wasn’t exactly “good, he’s dead”, but a grudging “he won’t be missed”. Whatever you think of the web site, Breitbart was a brilliant and magnetic person. He had a wife and children. He wasn’t a cartoon right wing villain. This might be partly explained by the fact of Frum being on the east coast. Out here, Andrew was popular even with non-conservatives.

    Frum seemed to get really angry at conservatives after Obama’s 2008 win, when they wouldn’t take his advice and move left — he seemed to believe the nation had shifted permanently to the left, and the GOP had to adjust their messaging. The response of both Breitbart and the Tea Party movement in its original form were like fingernails on a blackboard to him.

    • #14
  15. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    My thought at the moment was “Where did this come from?“, while four years later it was more “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?” over his Trig Palin birtherism — Palin hated on the left was through the roof between 2008 and 2012 in large part out of the fear that sometime in the future she might take away the Democrats’ ability to have the first woman president and to anoint that person with Absolute Moral Authority (wait ’till you see what they do to Nikki Haley in the run-up to 2024 if Liz Warren doesn’t win next year). But Sullivan’s efforts to prove that Palin was Trig’s grandmother was just bizarre on multiple levels.

    Yeah, that was awful. But there were lots of reasons why Palin was unpopular, some suggested by less hot-headed critics.

    As Palin’s star started fading by 2013 or so, Andrew didn’t seem to want to wade into the same weeds as some other Obama supporters and later Hillary backers, as far as supporting intimidation attempts against their opponents with either use of government or woke SJW tactics….It’s on things like diversity quotas where he breaks from the Democrats’ angry woke types).

    He’s never supported intimidation tactics, so I agree.

    Palin lacked the desire to get past the talking head talking points in terms of being a serious candidate for president — she took Bernard Goldberg’s ‘Lamestream Media’ line and pretty much made it her mantra on Fox News and elsewhere between 2009 and 2012. Palin definitely had grounds to attack the media, but there was no effort to build out from that, and because she wasn’t known to the public outside of politics, she couldn’t run any campaign by key phrases as Trump was able to do four years later.

    That would have been a substantive place to root Palin criticism from the center-left. But Andrew was obsessed in catching her in a birth mother lie to destroy her career. I never did understand that line of thinking.

    Palin was par for the Veep course, but the reaction against her was out-sized and a little shocking, particularly coming from a party purporting to promote female empowerment. 

    • #15
  16. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Agreed. This was back in the days when most people’s opinions of Obama were formed by moments like his “there is no red America, there is no blue America, there is only the United States of America” speech in 2004. There was a hope that he’d be Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, the kindly but firm teacher who just might resolve many of the country’s lingering racial issues. Frum fell for it, hook, line and sinker. He wasn’t alone. 

    • #16
  17. Steve C. Member
    Steve C.
    @user_531302

    The Reticulator (View Comment):

    Jon1979 (View Comment):
    and then become Sarah Palin’s womb inspector in ’08

    Worth the price of a Ricochet membership.

    Come for the highly informative commentary and….

    stay for the snark!

    • #17
  18. Steve C. Member
    Steve C.
    @user_531302

    Barfly (View Comment):
    BTW, “womb inspector” is good but “being of The Body” is rhetorical gold. +5.

    Only if you were born before 1959.

    • #18
  19. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Agreed. This was back in the days when most people’s opinions of Obama were formed by moments like his “there is no red America, there is no blue America, there is only the United States of America” speech in 2004. There was a hope that he’d be Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, the kindly but firm teacher who just might resolve many of the country’s lingering racial issues. Frum fell for it, hook, line and sinker. He wasn’t alone.

    I  fell for it for about two days, early in the campaign. Fortunately I didn’t go public with my early, transient impressions, as I did with Bill Clinton. I’ve regretted those ever since.

    • #19
  20. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    The Reticulator (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Agreed. This was back in the days when most people’s opinions of Obama were formed by moments like his “there is no red America, there is no blue America, there is only the United States of America” speech in 2004. There was a hope that he’d be Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, the kindly but firm teacher who just might resolve many of the country’s lingering racial issues. Frum fell for it, hook, line and sinker. He wasn’t alone.

    I fell for it for about two days, early in the campaign. Fortunately I didn’t go public with my early, transient impressions, as I did with Bill Clinton. I’ve regretted those ever since.

    My annoyance with some of the pundits 11 years ago was that they either openly or all but endorsed Obama, and then when things started falling apart didn’t have the courage to go the William Safire route.

    Safire endorsed Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush in his New York Times column in 1992, but then did a mea culpa in his Times column for that endorsement two years later (I think in the same column where he branded Hillary as a ‘congenital liar’). The pundits who endorsed Obama never owned up to their misjudgment, and for the most part simply plowed ahead as though they had done no such thing (though I’m not quite sure if David Brooks ever regretted his Obama endorsement, even with Mitt on the ballot in 2012). And the same general group of pundits who lacked Obama skepticism in 2008 have been among the most skeptical of Trump during the past four years, which makes me think style counts more than substance, and being a progressive with decorum has greater acceptability than being a crude loutish bore who’s  getting some (but not all) of the conservative agenda enacted.

     

    • #20
  21. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    The Reticulator (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Agreed. This was back in the days when most people’s opinions of Obama were formed by moments like his “there is no red America, there is no blue America, there is only the United States of America” speech in 2004. There was a hope that he’d be Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, the kindly but firm teacher who just might resolve many of the country’s lingering racial issues. Frum fell for it, hook, line and sinker. He wasn’t alone.

    I fell for it for about two days, early in the campaign. Fortunately I didn’t go public with my early, transient impressions, as I did with Bill Clinton. I’ve regretted those ever since.

    My annoyance with some of the pundits 11 years ago was that they either openly or all but endorsed Obama, and then when things started falling apart didn’t have the courage to go the William Safire route.

    Safire endorsed Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush in his New York Times column in 1992, but then did a mea culpa in his Times column for that endorsement two years later (I think in the same column where he branded Hillary as a ‘congenital liar’). The pundits who endorsed Obama never owned up to their misjudgment, and for the most part simply plowed ahead as though they had done no such thing (though I’m not quite sure if David Brooks ever regretted his Obama endorsement, even with Mitt on the ballot in 2012). And the same general group of pundits who lacked Obama skepticism in 2008 have been among the most skeptical of Trump during the past four years, which makes me think style counts more than substance, and being a progressive with decorum has greater acceptability than being a crude loutish bore who’s getting some (but not all) of the conservative agenda enacted.

    Why we have Trump.

    • #21
  22. Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu Inactive
    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu
    @YehoshuaBenEliyahu

    Seawriter:

    “The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke.” – Andrew Sullivan

    I know it is Andrew Sullivan. And he helped build the culture he is decrying in this quote. But a true statement is a true statement. If you are woke, you are a bigot. Even Andrew Sullivan realizes that.

    I always suspect people who say things that contradict their past.  Are they just seeking notoriety, which usually entails financial gain, by their pronouncements?  As in Max Boot or Arianna Huffington or many others who were entrenched conservatives and then all of a sudden were not.  The flip flop can go either way, however, since journalists tend not to have much of a belief system or any ultimate value in their lives other than self-promotion.

    • #22
  23. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu (View Comment):

    Seawriter:

    “The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke.” – Andrew Sullivan

    I know it is Andrew Sullivan. And he helped build the culture he is decrying in this quote. But a true statement is a true statement. If you are woke, you are a bigot. Even Andrew Sullivan realizes that.

    I always suspect people who say things that contradict their past. Are they just seeking notoriety, which usually entails financial gain, by their pronouncements? As in Max Boot or Arianna Huffington or many others who were entrnched conservatives and then all of a sudden were not.

    Arianna seemed to be someone who was miffed by the end of Clinton’s second term that she had not been elevated to the position of ideological thought leader of the Republican Party and decided to try to gain influence elsewhere — specifically with Warren Beatty and other politically active Hollywood liberals, with a brief stop along the way as an ‘unaffiliated’ pundit during the 2000 election cycle.

    IIRC, Michael Reagan said he actually voted for DiFi in the ’94 California Senate election because he was so enraged by Michael Huffington and his wife over how they ran their campaign. Which expanded out to other GOPers in the state, could explain why she never gained much respect as a strategist/pundit, despite half a decade of trying. After that it was simply going where people would listen to her, and financially, it definitely paid off with her eventual multi-million-dollar sale of the Huffington Post (if David Frum wanted to be mad at Andrew Breitbart about anything, it should have been about being the brains behind the start-up of the HuffPo, where about the only thing there for conservatives after the first year or so was Gutfeld sneaking in under the radar to skew the liberals on the site with his posts).

    • #23
  24. James Lileks Contributor
    James Lileks
    @jameslileks

    Andrew Sullivan will end up the Hitchens of the Twenty-teens. Perhaps forgive where he was and encourage where he’s headed? 

    • #24
  25. Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu Inactive
    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu
    @YehoshuaBenEliyahu

    James Lileks (View Comment):

    Andrew Sullivan will end up the Hitchens of the Twenty-teens. Perhaps forgive where he was and encourage where he’s headed?

    On the subject of animosity towards Israel, Sullivan has no peer, perhaps taking his cues from Hitchens.  Then again, those seeking notoriety, down through the ages, have often targeted Jews and the nation of Israel.

    • #25
  26. aardo vozz Member
    aardo vozz
    @aardovozz

    Steve C. (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):
    BTW, “womb inspector” is good but “being of The Body” is rhetorical gold. +5.

    Only if you were born before 1959.

    Hey! I was born after 1959 and I got it.🙂

    • #26
  27. Doctor Robert Member
    Doctor Robert
    @DoctorRobert

    GFHandle (View Comment):
    He rejected the idea that gays should get preferential treatment (as minorities and women were demanding) and argued simply for full civil rights (marriage, military service) like any other citizen. I would call that a liberal position, not a woke or radical one

    I would call that a deeply conservative position.  Everyone gets treated the same.  No special rights, no special obligations, no special treatments based on your skin color, your sex, or whom you prefer to f*ck.

    • #27
  28. Steve C. Member
    Steve C.
    @user_531302

    Doctor Robert (View Comment):

    GFHandle (View Comment):
    He rejected the idea that gays should get preferential treatment (as minorities and women were demanding) and argued simply for full civil rights (marriage, military service) like any other citizen. I would call that a liberal position, not a woke or radical one

    I would call that a deeply conservative position. Everyone gets treated the same. No special rights, no special obligations, no special treatments based on your skin color, your sex, or whom you prefer to f*ck.

    I would call that a classically American position. Defending it is conservative. 

    • #28
  29. Steve C. Member
    Steve C.
    @user_531302

    aardo vozz (View Comment):

    Steve C. (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):
    BTW, “womb inspector” is good but “being of The Body” is rhetorical gold. +5.

    Only if you were born before 1959.

    Hey! I was born after 1959 and I got it.🙂

    Like all generalizations, it fails at the margins.

    • #29
  30. Skyler Coolidge
    Skyler
    @Skyler

    Andrew Sullivan appears to have mastered the technique of getting attention by appearing to defect from one camp and then flipping again to another.  That is what is happening here, again.

    He started as a homosexual who favored conservatives.  Oh, my!  The conservatives loved him because he was a homosexual that should normally be a liberal.  Oh my, the conservatives loved him.

    Once he had the conservative bona fides, he flipped.  Now he became a conservative that didn’t like Sarah Palin.  Oh, my!  The democrats loved him.  He was a conservative and even he knew that Sarah Palin was a monster that lied about giving birth to her grandchild.

    And now perhaps Andrew Sullivan is flipping again.  Oh, my!   He’s a liberal homosexual and even he thinks the liberals have gone too far!  Oh, my, conservatives are going to pay attention to him because now he agrees with them!

    I don’t like his games.  I never much liked him.  He doesn’t have anything new to say, he just markets himself as a continuous traitor.  People fall all over themselves to confirm their own opinions.  If a liberal/conservative now speaks out against conservatism/liberalism well, then, gosh darn it, my conservative/liberal opinions just HAVE to be correct.

    A pox on him and his cynical manipulations.

    • #30
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