The buzz-elect is all about Barack Obama’s various meetings with various groups of Beltway intellectuals in the past 24 hours: Last night he dined with conservative writers at George Will’s house, and today he met with the liberals. Here’s the post as it headlined Marc Ambinder’s blog at The Atlantic earlier this afternoon:
Wait a minute, who was that first name on the list? Could that really be Andrew Sullivan? As in “conservatism of doubt” Andrew Sullivan? Author of “The Conservative Soul” Andrew Sullivan? The same Andrew Sullivan whose strident advocacy for the Iraq war made him one of the most influential voices among the online conservative commentariat?
Who among us could ever have imagined the day would come when Andrew Sullivan would break with his ideological compatriots and move to the left? I find it hard to believe myself, but if there’s one source we should be able to trust for the ideological affiliation of a blogger at The Atlantic, shoouldn’t it be a reporter at The Atlantic?
Sullivan essentially is a two-bit populist in the mode of Bill O’Reilly and so forth. He’ll move right as soon as the money and spotlight returns there.
The Republicans and the right can count this as at least one bright spot.
Haha I bet Olbermann’s head exploded when Maddow got to go and not him.
Andrew Sullivan was once a “conservative”, and I was once an ivory-billed woodpecker.
Don’t worry, Tom, you’re still a pecker.
Sullivan ain’t liberal or conservative instead he really has only one issue and that is what policies best serve gays. If George Bush has been an ardent supporter of gay marriage, Sullivan might have supported him to the end. Who knows how long he will reside on the left?
This silly gotcha blog post is dispositive of nothing. Andrew Sullivan is what he is, and if you had an ounce of intellectual integrity you’d deal with his arguments and not declare victory based on a list of who was in his dinner group.
PS: Everybody knows who Andrew Sullivan is, and nobody knows who you are, because your ideas are of no consequence.
Yeah, Poodle… Just like you!
Sullivan only went because they said they were serving drinks and surf & turf, and he thought they said “Trig’s afterbirth.”
To believe Andrew Sullivan is a conservative, is to believe that pigs can fly and liberals have brains. It is utter and complete fantasy!
Sullivan endorsed that ardent conservative John Kerry, (who btw served in Vietnam), and that other right winger Barack Obama.
Only in an Orwellian world could Andrew Sullivan be described as “conservative.”
Sullivan is a bright guy and very good writer. You can’t beat that Oxford education. He’s a pragmatic conservative who realized some of his gods were false, most notably Bush and Iraq, and had the guts to say so whereas most conservative chose to deny reality and have paid an electoral price for it. I don’t agree with much of what he says, and he has obsessions like religion and gay rights, but at least he’s not wandering off into some alternate reality like most conservatives. Take a tour round the comments on “the dinner” in the conservative blogosphere and there’s clearly a full scale retreat in to mindless obstructionism going on. I’d say this is exactly where Obama wants the GOP positioned. It will be interesting to see this dynamic play out as “the activist base” of the party as represented by much of the blogosphere attempt to purge the RINO’S like Sullivan or try to force them to convert to the true faith. Interesting but not to the GOP’s electoral advantage I would have thought.
I love when non-conservatives like Otto presume to instruct the rest of us on what conservatism actually is–I imagine we’re now supposed to ’see the light’ and start worshipping the One, true, god like Sullivan.
But what is especially rich is his defense of the man that has obsessed about the paternity of the fifth child of the recent (R) VP candidate to the exclusoin of pretty much everything else, includling his sanity and the tattered remains of his credibility.
(Bush did what Sullivan wanted in Iraq, and only turned on the man when he didn’t support his radical gay agenda around the time of the ‘04 election, so let’s not imply that there was some other reason for the man’s not-remotely-recent flip to the nutty truther side of the political spectrum.)
I’m guessing if Andrew wasn’t there he would have omitted “center”. That’s his current perception by the fact that he’s an Obama supporter.