Sadly, even pathetically, I've become fixated on Andrew Sullivan's increasing hackiness. I know I shouldn't give him more relevance by devoting diary space to him, but it really annoys me that an out gay man still believes that he could possibly support Republicans on the federal level and has as much hostility as he does for the Democratic Party, especially when the few consideratons we gays and lesbians have been given in politics have come just about exclusively from the Democrats. Lately I've noticed that Sullivan will try to pick issues to denounce the Democrats in an effort to prove his conservative credentials. Nearly each and everytime, such efforts seem empty, petty, and wrongheaded.
Lately, Sullivan has had his knifes out for Howard Dean. So it was particularly satisfying to see him fall on his face trying to denounce Dean when he relied on a Drudge scoop that turned out to be bogus and required Drudge to retract his claims.
Let's start with Drudge's hit piece on Dean. I would link to it, but Drudge seems to have taken the piece down. What he claimed was that Dean had directed the DNC to secretly support Mitch Landrieu over Ray Nagin in the New Orleans mayoral election. Drudge splashed this across his website in large black letters. Problem is, Drudge provided nothing to substantiate his claim.
This didn't stop Sullivan from using Drudge's attempt to pit blacks against whites to fume at Dean:
How much more damage can Howard Dean do to the Democrats before someone finally pulls the plug?
Why does Sullivan think Dean is doing "damage"? Well, his most recent reasons for disliking Dean has to do with the same accusations John Aravois has lodge at Dean: that Dean fired the DNC's gay liason, Donald Hitchcock, to retailiate against Hitchcock's boyfriend's criticism of the DNC for not being pro-gay enough. In the same passage denouncing Dean for the firing, Sullivan wrote:
I don't trust Dean for a second. He's an angry, petty man, whose support for gay people has always been transparently opportunistic.
Let's forget whether this claim about Hitchcock's firing is true or not (that's still up for debate). Let's instead consider his calling Dean "an angry, petty man, whose support for gay people has always been transparently opportunistic." This comes from the man who wrote recently of John McCain:
A reader writes:
These commencement speeches also seem to have begun the process of lancing a pair of boils: that McCain is too old and too hotheaded to be President. By stressing his half century of service and the manner in which age has matured and moderated his views and tempered his conceit of himself, he presents himself as the wise old man of politics, blessed with experience and the ability to put matters into their proper perspective...
Whether he can win with this strategy remains to be seen of course. It would be nice to think he could though, no?
Yes, it would. And if he continues in this vein, I'll do what I can to support him. And I have a feeling I won't be alone.
He calls Dean "angry" and "petty"? What about McCain's response to his reception at the New School?
"I've got to say that maybe the students at the New School could learn a lesson in courtesy from the students at Liberty University," he said...
"I was saddened that these young people live in such a dull world that they don't want to hear the views of someone who disagrees with them," he said.
And even if Dean is "transparently opportunistic" when it comes to gay rights -- which I'm not agreeing with, but let's hypothetically say that's the case -- isn't Dean's record far more desirable than McCain's? While McCain says he would oppose the FMA, he would vote for a state amendment to ban gay marriage in Arizona. Nevertheless, Sullivan continues to throw MCCain butterfly kisses.
Anyway, back to Drudge's slander against Dean. As it turns out, Drudge had to retract his previous claim. If what Dan Balz of the WaPo wrote is true, what drove him to do so -- since he rarely will correct his misinformation -- is threat by the DNC to sue Drudge for such slander.
And what exactly is Sullivan's response to the retraction? Well, I give him credit for pointing to Drudge's retraction. But his comment is: "Dean survives." Problem is: what was Dean supposedly surviving? If Dean stayed put after such revelations were shown to be true, perhaps such a statement would make sense. Otherwise, it was at best a poor attempt to laugh off his complicity in spreading such slander.
In my mind, what it shows is a gay man who would try to prove his supposedly "conservative" bona fides by echoing the traditiobal mischaracterizations of a gay friendly Democrat.
To put it more succinctly, it proves Sullivan is still a hack.