Sullivan defending Ron Paul.
One might ask: which current Republican candidate has not been “part of coalition who saw bigotry as a potent political force”?
So, um, don’t vote Republican.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.
Let there be snark.
Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.
You cannot love your country only when you win.
One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.
People are complicated. Love is not.
Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.
In my day, never was longer.
SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.
Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.
Let me file that under fuck it.
Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.
Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.
Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll
Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)
Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.
If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.
Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.
Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.
Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.
Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.
Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.
“But what about the lurkers?”
If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.
You are here: Home / Please, for the love of Oakeshott, stop digging
Mnemosyne
Sully, if all of the other kids jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?
El Cid
But, but Democrats are racist against Real America!
Johannes
Talk about a vomiitatiously low bar!
schrodinger's cat
Don’t worry Tim. F. Sully cannot vote in this election.
Villago Delenda Est
Sully is the poster boy for the intellectual and moral abyss that our national political discourse has debased itself to.
taylormattd
One wonders whether Paul may well mount a fifth column if he doesn’t get the nomination.
El Cid
@taylormattd: Columns are un-Constushul and were invested by the Fedrul Reserve.
Senyordave
Let me get this straight. Ron Paul allowed someone to publish a newsletter spouting hard-core racist shit, made a lot of money off it, and is now being grilled about it and Sullivan seems to think its unfair? Paul is now the frontrunner in Iowa! And he’s a fucking lunatic, just a different type of lunatic than the others in the clown car.
Sullivan really is a fuckwad. He’d fair really well under a Paul presidency.
Zifnab
@taylormattd: Gary Johnson already picked up the mantel of Libertarian Party presidential nominee. If Paul ran as an independent, it would be a lesson in why First Past the Post voting sucks so much.
dmsilev
None of them, of course. Generalizing this to the overall state of the Republican Party is left as an exercise for the overly-gullible pundit.
gbear
Actually, it’s a perfectly legitimate point to make – if he wasn’t making it in defense of Paul.
lacp
Oh, Andrew, you’re so contrarian!
Villago Delenda Est
@Senyordave:
I’ve always held the opinion that Sullivan’s secret wish is to be a Kapo in Pat Robertson’s Vernichtungslager for fags.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@taylormattd:
Paul is a purity troll. A third party race would be him doing something. Purity trolls don’t do things.
Frankensteinbeck
@Senyordave:
Paul is the frontrunner in Iowa frequently. His fans are rabid and really great at packing polls. If anybody thinks Paul could actually win the pot here, it’s only a testament to how much the base absolutely does not want to vote for Romney.
pragmatism
dear sully, you can’t turn the gopers into tories. the end.
Baud
Speaking of Ron Paul, the Hill just posted this:
Zifnab
In all fairness, though, if you are asking the question “Which Republican should I vote for in the primary” it seems a bit silly to go with “Don’t vote Republican” as an answer.
If you are worried about electing a racist politician, you probably left the GOP a while ago. So waving off Paul’s racist newsletter with “Everyone else is doing it” is actually not a terrible defense given the context of Paul’s opponents.
MattF
Sullivan is turning into a troll. Or, maybe he’s always been one– but now conservatism is at low tide and we can note his lack of pants.
Liz
I’ve had to stop reading Sully. Between the Hitch posts (not bad but sooooo many of them!) and the Paul love, I can’t bear it.
Boo
Wait, I think sullivan is endorsing Paul for the nomination, not the general election. And all he is saying that rather than judging Paul on these newsletters from 20 years ago, we should judge him on the positions he has taken in this campaign – defending civil liberties, not demonizing muslims etc.
4tehlulz
@Baud: That wasn’t the real Ron Paul, that was a Jewish plant.
Warren Terra
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
You may have missed the signal there.:
I’m not aware that Sullivan has ever made a meaningful or insightful apology for these remarks, which he made more than once, nor to individuals he speficically mentioned.
p.a.
haven’t seen much smacking around of Sully here for a while. has he been on vacation? or digging further into the Trigg ‘scandal”? one of my pet theories is that JCole has brought in so many front pagers just so he won’t have to comment on Sully anymore. for a while he was as addicted to commenting on him as Levenson (never again will I comment on a McArdle article… no this time I really mean it!… aaaarrrgh, have you seen what she published today…) is with McMeagan.
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
Giving a serious answer to “Which Republican should I vote for?” is like giving a serious answer to, “Which is a better way to commit suicide, shooting myself in the head or drinking Drano?” A serious answer is not going to solve the root problem.
Villago Delenda Est
OK, I’ve got a comment upthread that’s in moderation hell, apparently for using a bad word. I think I know what the word is, but I won’t change it. Besides, FYWP doesn’t care if you edit the bad word, you’re still in moderation.
schrodinger's cat
@pragmatism: Are the Tories much better than the GOP. They seem to be quite similar with the austerity BS. I don’t know about their other stances.
Villago Delenda Est
@p.a.:
ROFLMAO
El Cid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: He ran as a Libertarian in 1988.
pragmatism
@schrodinger’s cat: they’re marginally different. but to sully, its all the difference in the world. like how the tea partiers were branded as not the goper base.
MikeJ
@schrodinger’s cat: The tories do have explicitly racist parties to their right (ukip, bnp), so they can let racism play out in their policy and don’t have to say it out loud.
Lev
@Warren Terra: I’m pretty sure he has apologized for it–he did a Bloggingheads.com with Bob Wright talking about it. In all fairness.
But Sullivan has been off my Reader ever since he lionized Paul Ryan, and it’s been great. Literally the best internet-based decision I ever made. Sully combines often extreme gullibility where his own passions are concerned with an incredibly stubborn inability to give up on dumb crusades (Trig birtherism, Ryan Plan, Ron Paul) until much after the fact. I eventually tired of the self-righteousness and flightiness, and I do think the internet has ruined him. His book from the 1990s on the politics of homosexuality is probably the most thoughtful and thorough treatment of the subject I’ve ever read.
Norwonk
Doth mine eyes deceive me, or did Sullivan just admit that he used to support a party of bigots, and knew it all along, but chose not to care?
Tsk, tsk. What would Niebuhr say?
fasteddie9318
No, no, no, that can’t be it. There must be some other way.
RD
Rachel Maddow has defended Ron Paul.
Her context was appropriate…and it still made me uncomfortable.
Baud
@fasteddie9318:
You have successfully encapsulated the last 40 years of American politics.
Valdivia
just said this on the other Paul thread but he now has posted a letter from a reader saying Paul is better for African Americans than Obama. Kid you not.
Comrade Dread
Hey, it was the ’90’s. Everyone was saying shit that would be considered racist by our modern standards today.
What’s that? The 1990’s? Not the 18-?
Nevermind.
Now, for a full confession, the reason why I’m still sympathetic towards Paul is because he is the only candidate that is reliably consistent in his anti-war stance.
That wouldn’t make me vote for him, mostly because now I find his brand of “every man for himself” Austrian economics to be a heinous blight on our nation.
Mnemosyne
I will say this about Ron Paul: at least he’s open about being batshit insane rather than trying to disguise his complete and total batshit insanity like the other Republican candidates. But I still don’t see that as a reason to vote for him. It’s like getting to decide between Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy as your candidate — which one found it easier to disguise in public the fact that he was murdering people for giggles?
Waldo
@Baud: Heh-heh. Funny in a sad way.
Kerry Reid
The guy who published “The Bell Curve” defending a racist old coot? I’m shocked, SHOCKED!
middlewest
Maybe Sully feels sympathy with Paul because he accidentally let some idiot publish racist crap defending the Bell Curve under his name for over a decade.
Bitter Scribe
Andrew Sullivan is a flake. If he doesn’t watch it, he’ll turn into that Gay Patriot guy.
r€nato
Sully thinks that if he sucks up to Big GOP Daddy on every other issue, then someday Daddy will finally love him just as he is and stop beating him.
This has never worked in all of the history of mankind. Bullies only show you the respect you deserve when you pop them in the nose good and hard.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Valdivia:
I thought the notion that black folks are addicted to government programs and need a new Emancipation Proclamation was a bedrock Republican principle?
eemom
This calls for a lenthy discussion about why Sullivan does/does not suck, including (1)each minutia of each issue as to which Sullivan does/does not suck, (2) the personal history of each person who has ever read or commented on this blog with respect to the reading/not reading of Sullivan, including (3) current status of reading Sullivan, exact date of having sworn off reading Sullivan (where applicable), each subsequent instance of “falling off the wagon,” and detailed description of each specific Sullivan piece involved including analysis of how it relates to the ways in which Sullivan does/does not suck.
Someguy
Sully is right. Ron Paul wasn’t part of a coalition that used bigotry as a political force.
Dr. Paul doesn’t hold with coalitions, collation, alliances, dalliances, conspiracies, combinations or any other agreements or other messy human entanglements that force one person to rely on another to get stuff done. That wouldn’t be Ayn-ian. (Being an Ayn-ian is like being a Rand-ian, except more purer).
Thus he’s a strong believer in using a lone wolf, stand-alone method of using bigotry as a political force.
Midnight Marauder
@eemom:
In retrospect, one of the great travesties of this blog is that it took as long as it did for Andrew Sullivan to be reclassified under the “Blogs We Monitor And Mock As Needed” category.
ericblair
@Mnemosyne:
I think that’s because he doesn’t understand he’s batshit insane.
wrb
@eemom:
Ahh ummm.
No, I won’t touch that. I won’t.
Calouste
@schrodinger’s cat:
Economically, the Tories are pretty bad. Socially, they are a lot better than the GOP, although they do have a lunatic fringe, but that tends to be stamped on pretty hard by the party leadership when they get out of line. For example, two weeks ago a photo emerged of a young Tory MP at a stag party with someone dressed in a Nazi-uniform. He was sacked as parliamentary private secretary (a minor government position, roughly the same level as a committee post in the US house), pending investigations. Can’t see the GOP doing that. The current Tory-led coalition is also planning to legalize gay marriage in the UK (they already have civil partnerships) before the next elections in 2015.
Downpuppy
Chasing through the links to a page that nearly crashed my machine, was Chait unaware that Larry Flynt ran against Reagan in 1984?
Granted, it was no more serious than Trump’s campaign.
harlana
honestogod, you read that stuff, you guys are heros
RD
@eemom:
Sure. Followed shortly by a similar exercise involving Glenn Greenwald.
boss bitch
@Boo:
What sense does this make? He’ll nominate him to run in the general but won’t vote for him come election day? How does that work?
Schlemizel
And yet people here still read L’il Andy – why?
Seriously. Why?
He is rarely right and then more often by accident than by reasoning.
When called out he is a horrible tap dancer who ends up pissing on the people who correctly call him out and/or pretending he didn’t mean what he actually said.
.
I mean its great if you want to spend your days enraged over the blathering of some dime store intellectual who finds comfort in defending the people who would turn him into soap if allowed to but outrage gets old after a while.
Schlemizel
As far as his excuse-a-thon for Rep. Paul is it that hard to picture L’il Andy, sitting at the Party Office in Berlin, look of horror on his doughy face, plaintive whine in his voice” “Surley you don’t expect ME to wear this pink triangle, do you?“
Jason
I remember his 2004 editorial, “Well, George Bush has attacked the gay community by coming out against gay marriage, but that’s OK, because after all, what Republican hans’t attacked the gay community?”
Wait, not I didn’t. I remember the queen of narcissistic butthurt getting all butthurt-y and practically screaming about feeling “betrayed”, even though Bush had never promised Sullivan or gays a damn thing.
Pure narcissist. Andrew Sullivan’s arguments coincide exactly with the criterion, “Is it good for Andrew Sullivan.” Sometimes this intersects with a genuine principle, as on the gay marriage issue, mostly, it doesn’t.
Oh, and given that Sullivan still defends his embrace of “The Bell Curve”, a really honest Sullivan would just say, “Ron Paul is simply right– them niggers really are stupid and lazy.”
harlana
Andrew Sullivan can blow it out his English ass. He is insulting the intelligence of his readers with this horseshit. I don’t know why anybody reads his blog.
But you just made me do it. Damn you.
Schlemizel
Is it just a coincidence that my browser is suddenly overrun with ads about STDs when I got on this thread?
Valdivia
@Shawn in ShowMe:
I think his point was more that because of his drug legalization ideas he is better and more aligned with the AA community. I really couldn’t read past the first sentence it made my head explode.
Tomjones
@Senyordave: Well, in Sully’s defense, he does think it fair that Ron Paul’s newsletters be questioned and “vetted,” to use a word he holds dear.
Sully, however, having made his endorsement, now apparently feels he must go to ridiculous lengths to excuse Paul of any wrongdoing.
That is where Sully’s fault lies here.
Zifnab
Ron Paul is the best conservative that the Republican Party can produce right now. Think on that and despair.
harlana
@Schlemizel: Sullivan is so full of shit. I stopped reading him and Hitchens after they embraced the Iraq war with such fervor. That’s when my “full of shit” detector went off.
Calouste
Bigotry, in Sullivan’s world, only applies to gays. Not to women, African-Americans, Hispanics or the poor, all of which Paul has shown plenty of bigotry against.
Calouste
@Zifnab:
Well, it’s who’s willing to run. Note that the GOP candidates consist of one candidate who’s never been elected (now suspended), one candidate who worked for the Democratic President, three candidates who haven’t held an office for at least 5 years, two outcast Representatives and a brain-dead, late entry governor.
Anyone in the GOP who actually has to deal with Obama on a regular basis and has some prospects in their political career decided not to run. No current Senators, no senior House members. You wonder why.
Schlemizel
@harlana:
The problem with both of them is that they pretend(ed) to be intellectuals thinking deeply and generating great thoughts when they are(were) just run of the mill gas bags who picked a position and then browbeat all comers who dared to disagree. Even when proven to be wrong they are(were) incapable of processing that information and admitting their error.
That is not the hallmark of a thinker. I quit some time ago. Even when I agreed with their position I found them to be intellectually dishonest, petty, vulgar bullies. The fact that they had a quick wit and a sharp mind actually made it worse.
I’d like to propose a quota system, no FP can post more than 6 L’il Andy rants a year and there can never be more than one in any calendar month.
harlana
@Calouste: This is what pisses me off about people like Sullivan. If you do indeed consider yourself an oppressed minority, how is it that you, in good conscience, have no concern for other oppressed minorities? How do you just write them off? Is your minority status superior to the others?
gwangung
@harlana:
Actually, I find this quite common. For example, white activists often treat the concerns of people of color within their own activism as trivial and not worthy of consideration.
Quite a few people have this lack of self awareness.
Tonybrown74
@harlana:
It’s called I’ve got (or want) mine! Fuck you!
It’s explains his disdain for women. Very similar to Hitchens if you think about it.
jim filyaw
its no accident this little twerp steadfastly refuses to post comments on his,…work. his fascination with paul reminds me of the light in the loafers barkeep in ‘good morning vietnam’ who had a thing for nude pics of walter brennan. his occasional reasonableness is no more than a product of his orientation. had he been straight, he’d be in a threesome with ann coulter and jennifer rubin.
Kerry Reid
@middlewest: Hah! Jinx! You owe me ice cream! Or I owe you ice cream. Great minds, anyway.
Calouste
@harlana:
Well, obviously your minority is superior because you are a member of it. AKA IGMFY. You can’t underestimate the egocentrism and lack of empathy of these people.
The Thin Black Duke
Ah, I loathe the smell of white privilege in the morning.
LosGatosCA
Ron Paul, Andrew Sullivan.
Talk about falling into a black hole.
No truth, no light emanating from that.
harlana
@Tonybrown74: yep, he has that cushy job noodling on his keyboard at the Daily Beast and hanging out with “elites” and rich, privileged people
hells littlest angel
Right-wing humility:
Who among us has not raped a child or slaughtered a village of peasants?
JGabriel
Sully:
You know, I’ve asking that question for 30 years, and it only ever got me called a “dirty commie libtard Keynesian”.
.
DMcK
I tend to think Sullivan simply lacks the cultural awareness to truly understand the importance of racial politics in the USA. When, as a white American, I read one of TNC’s eloquent, thoughtful, authoritative posts on the subject, it provokes me to reflect on some of my own preconceptions, and consequently on my relationship to the politics and culture of American society, simply because I’m very much aware of the significance of race in this, my country. Lacking this awareness, however, Sully simply debates and dismisses such arguments as inconsequential to some central point that he has become personally invested in. Applied to women’s issues, it’s the same sort of blind spot that allows him to equate the relatively benign practice of circumcision with female genital mutilation in the Sudan. It’s sort of fascinating to watch him navigate through these things without a map.
Silver
@DMcK:
Perhaps, but I’m a Canadian living in the United States for the last 10 years, and I notice racism everywhere I turn around. More so than most Americans, I think. It’s still pretty jarring, how casual it is. And I grew up in Alberta, which is like Texas with healthcare…
Sullivan, for some reason, sees things differently. Given his history, I’d guess it’s because he thinks black people on average are pretty stupid.
Lojasmo
@Boo:
-Ron Paul, 2011.
I can go on.
Samara Morgan
@Villago Delenda Est: one of the most disturbing things to me about Sully is his continued attachment to “the White Man’s Burden”.
i guess its terribly british.
slightly_peeved
@DMcK:
Australian here. As an Aussie, I obviously won’t get some particular aspects of US racial politics, much as Americans won’t get certain aspects of Australian racial politics. But when I’m in a different culture, I’ll assume my knowledge is incomplete, just as I’d try and explain aspects of my culture to a visitor. When I read TNC’s column, I took it as a chance to learn more about US racial politics. Sully could do the same. He just chooses not to.
EDIT: Also, racism has its different targets and its slight variations, but Sully would have seen plenty of racism vs. a range of groups before he moved over to the US.
johnsmith1882
hey, everybody was publishing racist diatribes in the 90’s man. it was like, the zeitgeist, you know.
sullivan is a punk. am i supposed to be impressed that he thinks torture is wrong or that sarah palin is retarded? ooh, a ‘thinking man’s conservative!’
johnsmith1882
@Silver: that, and because he lives up high in the crystal palace, sipping champagne out of conor friedersdorf’s slipper. the man has no connection with reality because reality is for the hoi polloi below.
AxelFoley
@Calouste:
This.
jnc
He’s right. On average, black people are pretty stupid.
So are white people.
Plantsmantx
@Valdivia:
What makes him (or anyone else) think that the majority of black people favor the legalization of drugs? I think a lot of people have told themselves that that’s the case because it’s what they want.
intelligentdasein
@Plantsmantx
This isn’t an argument against the racism of the drug war. If you don’t distinguish between people who are personally racist and those who uphold racist institutions, you’re pretty much absolving Tomming. Read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and you’ll immediately see that the trend of mass incarceration caused by the drug war since the 80s is turning African-Americans and other ethnic minorities into second class citizens. Simply put, the drug war and the immense power given to law enforcement, the latter of which has become even worse under the Obama administration, is always going to hit African-Americans first. And the only people who are doing anything about the issue are radical leftists and libertarians outside the Democratic party. The fact that Obama can’t do anything about this, even though he’s intimated that something must done (“drugs are not a crime problem but a health problem), the fact that a racist like Ron Paul is the most progressive candidate on this issue says more about the Democratic party than about libertarians. And this is one of the reasons why a non-negligible amount of leftists perform the passage à l’acte of voting for people like Nader, going libertarian, or not voting at all. Without some kind of outside intervention, either from OWS or the freak occurrence of Ron Paul becoming a general election candidate, the Democratic Party is dead. And with it any prospects of preserving liberal democracy in this country.
Like seriously, when are any of you going to do anything about the fact that Obama has pretty much given away our habeas corpus rights? Or that he has refused to do anything about the massive fraud in banking, which might render property rights pretty much meaningless? We’re not even heading towards a worse capitalist state, we’re heading towards a feudal one. And Democrats are doing nothing to stop it.
Plantsmantx
I’m not against the idea of a war on drugs. I’m against the war on drugs being used as a pretense to wage a war on black communities.Take away that pretense, and there will be another. Drug legalization is a cop out. It’s also more than a little offensive when someone talks about legalization as a panacea for the war on black communities without taking the opinions of actual black people into account.
Ron Paul? Please, his advocacy of legalization out of feigned concerned for black people is a con game…bullshitting. Most of the black people in prison on drug charges are serving time in state prisons after being convicted of violations of state drug laws. You think he’s going to go against his “states’ rights” “principles” and force states to legalize drugs any more than he would have forced states to repeal their Jim Crow laws? Hell, no.
Paul at Predictable Funk
I had the rare honor of telling Tim F. personally once: he does pithy better than any one else. This post is the best example.
Paul at Predictable Funk
I had the rare honor of telling Tim F. personally once: he does pithy better than any one else. This post is the best example.