Something I Did Not Know

I have been warning people on the left not to fall too much in love with Andrew Sullivan just because he was disenchanted with the Republican Party. See he is still a flaming right winger who doesn't care much for folks on the low end of the totem pole, he just found a few issues to rail against the GOP about like torture and indefinite detention and he also wishes they packaged their bullshit up better but that's about it. Well I learned something else about Sully today that I hadn't been aware of till now:

Nine years ago Andrew Sullivan was caught up in a sex scandal when an anonymous personal ad he took out on a site called barebackcity.com was exposed by gay journalist and outing proponent Michelangelo Signorile. Sullivan claimed that he was a victim of "sexual McCarthyism" and sampling Clarence Thomas, called the whole incident the "high-tech lynching of an uppity homo." Back then, I defended Sullivan's right to sexual privacy. But I also noted that given the fact that Sullivan had made a career of lambasting the sexual promiscuity of fellow gay men (including analogizing unprotected oral sex with murder), as well as the peccadillos of our first "queer" president, Bill Clinton—Sullivan had opened himself up as a target. What he wanted was not sexual privacy (an ethic extending to all), but sexual secrecy for himself with the attendant hypocritical right to wag his finger at those whose secrets became hot public messes.

So here is Sully being the world's biggest hypocrite trolling a website for random sexual encounters while blasting other gay men for doing the exact same thing. And not only did he do this, he then when outed did not apologize but instead blasted the people who outed him.

See he was pretty sure he had a right to privacy in that matter. And I don't necessarily disagree.

But its amazing that a guy who could take that stance about his own private life would now be arguing that Elena Kagan should be made to answer on the record whether she is gay or not. Mind you I don't know if she is or she isn't and I truly couldn't care either way, but surely she should have the same expectation of privacy that Sully himself felt he should have been afforded don't you think?

And one has to wonder what kind of outrage Sully would evince should employers start requiring every worker to disclose their sexual orientation on applications and or in hiring interviews. Some how I doubt mightily that he would think that kosher, yet in the case of Kagan its paramount that we know.

Why?

The funny thing is if pressed on the issue he couldn't possibly come up with a good answer. Supreme Court justices are given the ultimate tenure, they have that job for life. So there is no way anybody could pressure her by threatening to out her should she be confirmed because at that point she would lose nothing if it came out. If somebody came out today and said Sam Alito was "teh ghey" it would have no bearing on his standing as a justice and even if some of us would point out the hypocrisy thats about the most we would get out of it. There is nothing about being a Supreme Court justice that would make her being gay a germane fact one way or another.

Unless...

Unless Sully is trying to say that gay people think different from the rest of us and all things being equal would interpret the law in a different way.

Is that REALLY the impression he wants to make? Is that REALLY a path he wants to go down? I sincerely doubt it. Rather I think as is usual with him he just found some silly ass cause to jump on and so he went at it feet first. One can only hope that this does not become a crusade for him like Sarah Palin's daughter did.

Then again once an obsessed asshole, always an obssessed asshole so I wouldn't expect anything less.

Even people on the left opposed to Kagan's nomination should be able to see how wrong it is for this to be a focus of her confirmation process. If not I am going to be very dissappointed in a lot of people because if Republicans/right wingers were to do it we for damn sure wouldn't think it was ok.

Now This Is Rich

Andrew Sullivan has taken to his blog to demand accountability in the form of Janet Napolitiano getting fired over the attempted bombing on Northwest flight 253 on Christmas. He can't actually come up with anything she did wrong but its his contention that SOMEONE must be fired in order for President Obama to prove he isn't like Bush. Mind you as far as is publicly known this was a failure of intelligence sharing which falls a lot more under DCI Dennis Blair's watch than it does Napolitano, but you don't see Mr Accountability Sullivan asking for HIS head.

Anybody with two brain cells can probably figure out that this is all about the bogus right wing framing of her out of context commments on Sunday but you will never get Mr. Acocountability Sullivan to admit that.

Just to remind you that Sully is basically the only blogger over at the Atlantic now who doesn't allow comments. They have a system where you have to register with the site just to leave a comment and you can be banned for inappropriate responses and yet he STILL will not allow comments. Its really ironic that a guy who won't subject himself to accountability by his own readers in the form of comments that he alone could control whether they were actually published or not, is now screaming at President Obama because he isn't being as reactionary, and in this case stupid, as he would like.

Gotta love it!

Cheney, Torture, And The Gestapo

For all of the fault that I find with many of Andrew Sullivan's positions on government spending, on torture he may "get it" more than any other blogger in the country. Or rather I should say he may "get it" and be able to explain it better than anybody else. This at the end of his post about torture in which he PWNED his colleague, Marc Ambinder, should be repeated all over the liberal and progressive blogosphere because its real, and it resonates.

Nonetheless, the US-run court ruled that Cheney-style EITs, deployed by the Gestapo with the same justification as Cheney, constituted prosecutable torture:

As extenuating circumstances, [accused torturer] Bruns had pleaded various incidents in which he had helped Norwegians, Schubert had pleaded difficulties at home, and Clemens had pointed to several hundred interrogations during which he had treated prisoners humanely.

The Court did not regard any of the above-mentioned circumstances as a sufficient reason for mitigating the punishment and found it necessary to act with the utmost severity. Each of the defendants was responsible for a series of incidents of torture, every one of which could, according to Art. 3 (a), (c) and (d) of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945, be punished by the death sentence.

And they were executed for war crimes.

The question Americans have to ask themselves is why they hold the former president and vice-president to lower moral and ethical standards than the United States once held the Gestapo. That's all. And that's everything, isn't it?

When he puts it in those terms I think its hard for most average people to support the torture that the Bush/Cheney Administration ordered no matter how many episodes of "24" they have watched.

Newsflash, We Don't Want You Either

So the New York Times' Caucus Blog comes up with this quote from President Obama's fundraiser purporting to be him acknowledging some Prop 8 protestors he saw on the way in.

“One of them said, “Obama keep your promise,’ ” the president said. “I thought that’s fair. I don’t know which promise he was talking about.”

Which lead Andrew Sullivan, normally an Obama fanboy, to post this.

But since he asked, how about an end to the HIV ban, an end to the military ban and a federal recognition of full civil equality for gay married couples? Three clear promises. After this quip, by the way, the NYT reports:

The people in the audience – who paid $30,400 per couple to attend – laughed as they ate a dinner of roasted tenderloin, grilled organic chicken and sun choke rosemary mashed potatoes.

And then I remember why I'm not a Democrat.

This seems to be a recurring theme where Sullivan takes up for President Obama on all things except for issues related to gay rights. So I guess its not all that suprising.

But the funny thing about that is Sully fashions himself a journalist. But I would think a real journalist might try to actually track down, ya know, footage of the actual quote.

"One of them started to chant, “Obama keep your promise,’ ” the president said. “I thought that’s fair. I don’t know which promise he was talking about. But I thought to myself, you know, I like that."

So in a situation where President Obama is in fact welcoming accountability, rather than cracking jokes on gays in California as the Caucus Blog tried to portray him as having done, Sully has decided that this is why he isn't a Democrat.

Well from his fucking overreaction I say we don't want your fickle ass anyway.

Why You Have To Be Careful When Reading Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan's blog "The Daily Dish"is nothing if not consistently entertaining pretty much on a daily basis. From his "obsession" with Sarah Palin's pregnancy to his firm stance against torture not a day goes by that he doesn't offer something that is either very informative or very funny or both. But there is a danger in reading Sully's blog for some liberals and progressives. And that danger is that at first glance he looks pretty progressive or at least moderately conservative. He is an advocate of gay rights and gay marriage, of course that is a personal cross for him but it still doesn't take away from his passionate advocacy. He was also firmly against John McCain for president. He has even spoken out against the war in Iraq. But then he posts something like this and you are reminded once again that once a conservative, always a conservative.

"Every time the government protects someone or some company from the consequences of their own economic profligacy, the chances of future profligacy increase. It's vital that the government let the Big Three automakers go down, and vital that only minimal help be given for those so greedy or so stupid that they took on loans they had no way to pay off."

So let me get this straight. The government should not intervene to help homeowners facing foreclosure not because it would be good for the economy (which it won't) but because to do so would encourage more bad behavior. Hmmm And he then goes on to smear anyone facing foreclosure as being either "greedy" or "stupid". Hmmm again.

A few thoughts:

It's amazing to me that Sullivan doesn't see the parallels between his reasons for opposing a homeowner bailout and the reasons many of his conservative bretheren oppose gay marriage. Isn't it always that the Social Conservatives don't have anything against teh gais but they think something like gay marriage will encourage further bad behavior like, I don't know, gay adoption, or maybe gay indoctrination in schools? But when that kind of framing is used against gay people Sullivan is all gung ho to lead the charge against it. But when he uses the same kind of framing, that human nature is such that if you help someone in need then you will encourage bad behavior, in this case the offense in question is having the nerve and the unmitigated gall to want to live the American dream and buy a home for you and your family, then I guess in his world thats different.

NEWSFLASH, unemployment rates are pushing towards double digits right now. Maybe, just MAYBE people can't pay their mortgages because they are being laid off in numbers not seen in over a generation. Maybe just MAYBE the fact that you and your conservative bretheren pushed so hard for deregultion of the financial system adverely affected very responsible people who took out very responsible mortgages but lost their jobs because of irresponsible assholes on Wall Street screwing up the financial system and THATS why they are in foreclosure.

Maybe just MAYBE there were people who wre fooled into signing for a mortgage that they could afford at the time that has subsequently reset to unmanageable levels.

Maybe just MAYBE there are people who are losing their home because they had to choose between paying the mortgage or paying for emergency health care.

Calling people who are losing their homes and being put out in the street, many of them with kids in tow, "greedy" or "stupid" is directly analogous IMHO to bigots blaming gay people because of their "depraved and deviant choices" when they get discriminated against.

As for letting the Big 3 fail, what exactly does he think that would do to our economy? Yeah lets let over 3 million people get shit canned so you can try to validate your irrational belief in the "free market" system. And then we can let those 3 million people lose their houses also since obviously they won't be able to pay their bills without a job right? I mean I guess they will fit neatly into your two categories of "greedy" or "stupid" for wanting to own a home and not forseeing that they would lose their jobs because some conservatives thought it was more important to live by princples that have never ever worked than to actually help the people who need helping and proactively help get our economy back on track.

Sullivan is very good on some issues but its obvious to me that he should definitely leave financial matters to the experts and shut his frikkin pie hole before people start to see him for the self righteous self centered ass that he REALLY is at his core.

Ok Im done ranting, and I feel a LOT better.