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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / He’s Actively Taunting Me Now

He’s Actively Taunting Me Now

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As many of you know, I quit Sullivan cold turkey a while back, but I have to admit that I fell off the wagon when he returned from his most recent vacation. I just can’t help myself. He may drive me insane at times, but he runs a damned good blog. This, however, was definitely designed give the front pagers here fits:

I need help.

Reader Interactions

99Comments

  1. 1.

    beltane

    Were any Burkean Bells rung during the course of this interview?

    Damn, I should’ve read the tags first.

  6. 6.

    Cat Lady

    Sully’s a hot mess, and I wandered back recently also too. The rest of the Daily Dipshit he writes for can bite me though.

  9. 9.

    fasteddie9318

    Somebody please tell Sullivan that the hairpiece is supposed to go on top of his head, not on his chin.

  11. 11.

    schrodinger's cat

    I know that Oakeshott was the topic of Sully’s dissertation but I haven’t heard of him outside of the Daily Dish. Who the hell was he and was he really that important?

  13. 13.

    schrodinger's cat

    John Cole@ top
    Why don’t you run a similar feature yourself? I have many questions to ask you, most of them regarding Tunch.

  15. 15.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Yutsano: I guess he is trying to disprove the conventional wisdom that gay people have great fashion sense and are always put together, dapper and well turned out.

  21. 21.

    Warren Terra

    @Alexandra:

    Whatever you do, please don’t grow a beard, John.

    How would we know? I think he posted a picture of him in his army days, engaging in some light foreplay, and a contemporary picture of his leg with a dog on it. Other than that, he could look like anything from Leonardo Di Caprio to Brian Blessed for all we know. I’m not sure any of the other front pagers have ever even met him, or seen him.

    Although, if he did grow a beard long enough to be visible when he shows us a pic of his leg with a dog on it, that would be awesome.

  22. 22.

    Sentient Puddle

    Is it too early to start drinking? I’ma hand the mic over to Holder:

    Today, the Department of Justice is announcing charges against two people who allegedly attempted to carry out a deadly plot that was directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign ambassador here in the United States.

    Said ambassador is from Saudi Arabia. There’s going to be a diplomatic shitstorm soon.

  24. 24.

    cleek

    Oakeshott… was he the guy who came up with the idea that “conservatism” should be the radical defense of the wealthy elite dressed up as religious populism ?

  26. 26.

    EconWatcher

    FYI, for those of you in Virginia:

    I just called Senator Webb’s office. I was told he has not yet decided on whether he will vote for the jobs bill. I asked to be counted in favor.

    I’m disappointed with his vacillation, but calls right now could matter.

  27. 27.

    slag

    As many of you know, I quit Sullivan cold turkey a while back

    Which may be one source of your recent malaise. Sullivan is your muse. Just embrace him and be done with it.

  28. 28.

    BGinCHI

    Is he wearing eyeliner?

    Also, what’s the over/under for the number of birds nesting in his face shrubbery?

  30. 30.

    taylormattd

    So what does he say in the horrifying video, for those of us unable to access it right now?

  32. 32.

    soyaki

    It was very irresponsible for this website to use MS Paint in order to draw a pretend fantastical Ewok-beard onto the image of Mr. Sullivan. An apology is owed, I think.

  33. 33.

    patroclus

    What do you mean – who is Michael Oakeshott??!! He squared the circle and provided the epistemological underpinnings of modern conservatism’s constant struggle with liberal modernity. He’s sort of like God! Meaningful sensient life did not begin until Oakeshott; he is the very epitome of enlightened conservatism – the paradigmatic paragon of political philosophy. From the time of the ancients, men and women have wondered about the meaning of life. Thankfully, Oakeshott’s mere existence has resolved all these questions. Oakeshott’s very being is diametrically counterpoised against the teleologically-based meaning of history. To read Oakeshott is like touching the hand of the Almighty!

  34. 34.

    schrodinger's cat

    @soyaki: To the Ewok, right? BTW I just now realized that the Beast in the Daily Beast has crawled on Sullivan’s face.

  36. 36.

    Judas Escargot

    Sullivan is useful as a canary: Whenever anything interesting happens, he’ll default to the moderate-conservative position. Should that prove to be objectively wrong, though, he does tend to slowly inch over to the side of Reason, over time (more often than not).

    Example: If AS ever throws himself fully into the OWS cause, you will know that OWS has “won” the dialog.

    It’s also unhealthy to read only blogs one agrees with all the time. But Sullivan is one of the few remaining conservatives I can read these days without feeling nausea, anger or disgust.

  38. 38.

    Captain Howdy

    What exactly is so “damn good” about Sullivan’s blog? The only thing I can think of is that he has several posts up every day, so one keeps going back for a look (no matter how insipid the last three posts were). I hear people say how interesting the topics are, but … really?

  39. 39.

    superking

    What do you mean when you say that he runs a damn good blog? Honestly, I don’t understand the appeal. No comments, just him acting lordly, and then trying to make things interesting by putting up pictures of people’s windows. And the occasional complaint about how Trig really isn’t Sarah Palin’s kid. Um, what?

    There really isn’t much there.

  40. 40.

    nancydarling

    Was that a crock of doo doo or what? I’m no wiser or better informed after listening to it. Maybe one needs to study political science at Harvard to be in on the jargon.

  43. 43.

    Legalize

    Unless anyone can GUARANTEE me that somewhere in that clip, birds poke their heads out of Sully’s beard, and start chirping adorably, followed by 1 or more cats attacking said birds, beard, and Sully – I’m not getting out of the boat.

  44. 44.

    Kola Noscopy

    My god, that stupid fucking beard…I see he’s gone back to dyeing it. He looks like a garden gnome.

    I am proud to say I have not clicked on that motherfucker’s blog for five months now, and I was a daily reader from 2000 on, even after I knew he was fucking nuts.

    I disagree however; he does NOT run a great blog. Way too much extraneous stupid bullshit, and way too much narcisistic beard and body function crap (literally). And of course, HE is still there, so that’s a problem.

  45. 45.

    danimal

    I read and sometimes enjoy Sully’s blog. But fergawdsake, why not just skip over the Ask Andrew postings? I can’t imagine any reason why those would be interesting to anyone. None.

  47. 47.

    Loneoak

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I’m not sure if bravery has much to do with not having comment sections. It’s not like anything useful comes out of this one and it’s one of the better ones in the leftosphere. I’m pretty sure most of Sully’s would just be people calling him a fag.

  48. 48.

    piratedan

    Sullivan? Isn’t he like the Rand Paul of bloggers? a couple of glimmers of sanity awash in a sea of muck? I guess its okay if you’re into flotsam and jetsam.

  50. 50.

    Kola Noscopy

    I think he’s dyeing his eyebrows now too, to match the hilarious beard.

    OMG, what a unself aware douche.

    This is, however, sort of what I always pictured General Stuck looking like.

  56. 56.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Loneoak: Well he can moderate them. I think he is a bit pretentious, considers himself a bit above us unwashed masses, handing out awards from his lofty perch.

  58. 58.

    eemom

    You know what you people are? You’re ENABLERS, that’s what.

    Poor Cole turns to us for help in overcoming this grotesque addiction — and what do you do? You feed his habit with MORE fucking arguments about whether or not Sullivan’s blog is worth reading.

    Who in their right mind thinks there is ANYTHING the fuck to say about Sullivan that hasn’t already been said?

  59. 59.

    fasteddie9318

    You guys don’t know anything about Oakeshott.

    Michael Oakeshott was never late for anything. Instead, time would speed up to try to get the fuck away from him because he scared it so much.

    Michael Oakeshott never had kidney stones, because his kidneys would grind them to dust.

    When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night he checks his closet for Michael Oakeshott.

    A blind man once stepped on Michael Oakeshott’s foot. Oakeshott said, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Michael Oakeshott!” The mere mention of his name cured the man’s blindness. Sadly the first, last, and only thing the man ever saw was Michael Oakeshott’s fist coming at his face.

    If you want a list of Michael Oakeshott’s enemies, just check the extinct species list.

  61. 61.

    Bruce S

    I have to admit that with that video he’s finally found some bullshit that reaches the level of pretension of his affect and delivery. And for me, that was an eye-opener.

  66. 66.

    Uncle Clarence Thomas

    .
    .

    he runs a damned good blog

    He does not. He is a damned bad person, a damned bad speaker, a damned bad writer, and he runs a damned bad blog.
    .
    .

  67. 67.

    wrb

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I found this Gopnick discussion of Oakeshott interesting enough that I bought a couple of Oakeshott’s books, which I haven’t read.

    Oakeshott is almost universally accepted by academics as the most important conservative political philosopher of the century, and, in an English-speaking world where conservatism remains the one political movement with real edge, fervor, and consequence, this fact alone should make him a household name. But Oakeshott’s kind of conservatism is so hard to categorize that it hasn’t crossed over yet, even to the more eggneaded Republicans. In fact, it has begun to have a vogue among liberals, though you have the feeling Cambridge University-educated Oakeshott is becoming the liberals’ favorite conservative philosopher for the same reason that John Anderson was the liberals’ favorite conservative Republican, or St. Francis the liberals’ favorite Christian saint–he seems nicer than the normal run of the type. He spent most of his life mocking, battling, and deprecating the liberals’ penchant for imposing tidy schemes on an untidy world–what he called “rationalism”–and his challenge to their pieties remains startling. But he doesn’t offer much comfort to American conservatives, either, since his kind of conservatism would make much of what passes for conservative thought in “The New Criterion” or “The American Spectator” look even shallower and more oafish than it already does. Oakeshott’s aim was to overthrow the blueprint theory of politics. That is the theory, so widespread that by now it is almost part of the air we breathe, that political life begins with a foundation–a social contract, a plan, a platform. In the press, the blueprint often takes the more romantic form of a “vision”… Gives as an example of blueprint thinking ladies bicycle bloomers from the 19th century… It’s not just that the world is a corrupted place where the bullshit and the angels come at you together. It’s that any hope of separating authentic ideals and underlying purposes from the way people actually do things–of putting angels on one side and the bullshit on another–is doomed. Politics descends to us from the world of ritual, not reason. If politics is a conversation, it’s a useful, even an indispensable, conversation, because ritualizing the argument gives it form, makes it part of a public idiom… Politics is much more often a conversation among people of remarkably similar temperament who make ineffectual, sympathetic noises while waiting until the last possible moment to make unavoidable changes. We are generally taught that this is what makes politics frustrating, unresponsive, disappointing, and fraudulent. Oakeshott’s lesson is that this is what makes it politics. What distinguishes Oakeshott from organic folk conservatives is that he has not a trace of sentiment or nostalgia for an old, authentic order. Oakeshott gave to the old British preference for the specifics of experience over the abstractions of argument an almost ethical, life-encompassing dimension, and the dimension of philosophical value that he gave to this practical preference ended by making him a wise guide to the world as it is.

    Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/10/21/1996_10_21_194_TNY_CARDS_000377666#ixzz1aVKUP6Yp

  68. 68.

    patroclus

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    What??!! Jack Bauer can’t hold a candle to the dystopian dynamism that Michael Oakeshott delightfully demonstrated daily. Bauer’s ersatz epistemology is egregiously infantile when compared to the seminal skepticism that Oakeshott superciliously showered on his sycophantic students. The cause of modern conservatism has been forever transformed due to Oakeshott and we all owe him so much!

  70. 70.

    FoxinSocks

    @EconWatcher

    Not that I live in Virginia, but I volunteered for Webb’s campaign so I just called his office. I was told he was undecided as well.

  72. 72.

    scav

    The traditional description comes to mind “A Face made for Radio” only the march of technology has proven treacherous to him.

  73. 73.

    handy

    What’s up with the rotoscope look in the photo? Did Sully appear in some lost footage from A Scanner Darkly or something?

  74. 74.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Well look at it this way, in 2004 you were probably mainlining FOX News, so, you know. One day at a time.

    Andrew Sullivan, methadone of the conservative blogosphere.

  75. 75.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @taylormattd:

    So what does he say in the horrifying video, for those of us unable unwilling to access it right now ever?

    Fixed for my use.

  76. 76.

    catclub

    @Legalize: lol.
    Gouts of blood erupting from beneath his ears as the cats hit his jugular _would_get me to try those tasty mangoes.

    Otherwise, not so much.

  78. 78.

    Sasha

    From what I understand Oakeshott advocated conservatism, which he defined as a philosophy grounded in practicality and rational consideration (i.e., modern day liberalism).

  82. 82.

    Bruce S

    #62 – schrodinger’s cat

    If I want to hear somebody who I know is a lot smarter than me spouting what I also know is utterly wrong-headed or facile bullshit with a British accent, I’ll take Christopher Hitchens. He’s the real deal in elegantly brilliant AND foolish assholes…

  83. 83.

    wrb

    @wrb:

    btw: that is the abstract in front of the New Yorker’s pay wall, apparently summarized for $1/article by one of the thousands homeschooled 10-year-olds they crash-hired to write abstracts of the thousands of articles in their archive when they decided on the pay-wall.

    Gopnick’s article is more coherent.

  84. 84.

    scav

    Working past the fake fur, now I’m getting hints of Jeff Gannon, shit I’m needing the intervention too at this point and I haven’t even clicked, I just keep getting pulled back to this page like velcro with a bad case of static electricity or possibly the strong nuclear force. Aii!

  87. 87.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Christopher Hitchens. He’s the real deal in elegantly brilliant AND foolish

    Hitchens writes prose so overstuffed and flowery that reading him is like being smothered by being stuffed into the space between the cushions of a Victorian couch. I’m amazed Americans seem to be so impressed with that stuff, even while thinking he’s essentially an idiot. Which he is.

    It was his “Novak didn’t out Valerie Wilson because he read her name in Who’s Who” column that made me realize he really is just a verbose imbecile. I hated his writing style long before that though.

  89. 89.

    Bruce S

    #87 – I’m sort of an idiot and didn’t go to college, but I enjoy Hitchens’ literary essays. Admittedly, I often don’t have a clue regarding the subject. His political writing is just bizarre – I never thought much of his politics even before he jumped off that Iraq cliff. His Clinton fetish was sick, and I am not a fan of Bill Clinton’s. (Although there was a period when some of Hitchen’s Nation colleagues and the Chomsky types were driving me nuts regarding the initial response to 9/11 where I was sort of on his side. Or thought I was. Didn’t last long, as Iraq became the main event.)

  91. 91.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @jeffreyw: ZOMG – want! perhaps they could wrestle that creature off Sullivan’s jaw. And they might enjoy it.

  92. 92.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Bruce S: Here’s a new one I saw the other day: In a review of David Mamet’s book about becoming a right wing conservative, while Hitchens pans it in general as “irritating”, he also writes this:

    Once or twice, as when he attacks feminists for their silence on Bill Clinton’s sleazy sex life, or points out how sinister it is that we use the word “czar” as a positive term for a political problem-solver, he is unquestionably right, or at least making a solid case.

    What’s important here is that Mamet, who claims to have been converted by listening to Glenn Beck, is ranting about “czars” in his book as a sinister aspect of the Obama administration. As many have pointed out, there are in fact no czars in the Obama administration, none whatsoever. It’s a term the press uses, and has used for decades, referring to Republican as well as Democratic administrations, for people whose official titles are things like “Director” or “Coordinator” and so on.

    No one with half a functioning brain cell should need this to be explained of course. Hitchens being critical of a book written by someone who admires Glenn Freaking Beck is to his credit I suppose, but his falling for this most imbecilic of memes with the czar business is sadly typical. He’s not a very intelligent person.

  94. 94.

    Ruckus

    John
    Admit the problem. Step one. Done.
    Let go of the mouse. Step Away from the computer. That’s the second step.
    Only 10 more to go.
    Who is your sponsor? If you are still imbibing AS then you probably need to get another. And none of that I don’t need a sponsor crap. You need someone to bust you every time you stray.

  95. 95.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @Legalize:

    Unless anyone can GUARANTEE me that somewhere in that clip, birds poke their heads out of Sully’s beard, and start chirping adorably, followed by 1 or more cats attacking said birds, beard, and Sully – I’m not getting out of the boat.

    Here ya go.

  98. 98.

    Bruce S

    #92 – that’s completely crazy and disgusting, but I don’t actually consider a Hitchens review of that Mamet screed a “literary essay.” Mamet has proven himself capable of writing great literature for the stage, but also of serially saying dumb stuff in the persona of the drunk at the end of the bar. That’s the Mamet who wrote his latest book. Just saying. I’ve found that I appreciate Hitchens writing the more I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. I guess that’s a pattern I should consider problematic.

  99. 99.

    Hurm

    Ron Paul says things I agree with too sometimes, but neither asshole is reliable enough for me to proudly say i support the man.

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