Andrew Sullivan: America's left surrenders itself to the giant sulk

The Sunday Times (U.K.) ^ | 03/31/2002 | Andrew Sullivan

[rockfish59]

f**k the lefties!!

[3catsanadog]

Michael Moore is a Big Fat Idiot. Wish Al Franken would write THAT book.

[lainde]

pingaling!

[liberallarry]

Once again you score big on a post Pokey. I wish I could read and write like some of these guys - Andrew Sullivan, for example.

[harry palmer]

Together, the two pieces offer a simply stunning opportunity for "compare and contrast"...

lol- Got that right.

Sullivan-- Moore is a paranoid, subliterate cynical bitter-monger who hates successful white people, car owners, the work ethic and, quite simply, America in general

Rich-- Moore is a "best-selling populist."

An oldie from Salon

[baltoga]

What poor Andrew Sullivan doesn't realize is Moore's book "Stupid White Men" was delayed for months because of 9/11. Andrew seems to believe that Moore has guts *not*. He sulked and waited.

[Benrand]

Does Moore ride in a Lincoln or Caddy limo? Or does he have a team of Clydesdale's to pull his bloated ass around?

Poor limos.

[VietVet]

"Who buys this garbage?"

The 'best-seller' lists are calculated from the sales of books to *bookstores*, not readers. They often miscalculate, which is where the bargin Book Warehouse chains get their books cheap, and where "remaindered" books come from.

[Slehn]

America's left surrenders itself to the giant sulk

So do the whining wimps who can't hack the new FR format! Some folks don't deserve to be on a conservative web site.

[sell_propaganda]

"Alongside this theological zeal goes a general belief in the idiocy and indolence of most Americans..." not exactly a defining and differentiating characteristic

[Mia T]

There is also barely a mention in Moore's book about the current war on terrorism. You can understand why. It raises questions the left simply doesn't want to answer. Was the American intervention in Afghanistan, which many leftists opposed, a liberating mission after all? How can leftists bemoan the removal of an oppressive, sexist, homophobic tyranny? But how at the same time could they support a war conducted by a president inimical to their beliefs and interests? On the opposite side of the spectrum between reason and unreason, the eminent liberal political theorist Michael Walzer has just written an essay worrying about exactly this kind of leftist surrealism. Unlike Moore, he's less concerned with a form of purist performance art than how the left can actually change America, if it hates her so.

"The truth is," Walzer writes, "the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left's reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally got what it deserved."

This anti-American nihilism is exactly what some parts of the left sought refuge in as terrorists killed thousands of their fellow citizens. In one gesture, such leftists both showed how far gone they were and also how unhinged from most Americans they had become.

Walzer sees the deeper problem as an inheritance from the new left of the 1960s, a left that still cannot see religious motives for terror, for example, preferring to view Islamofascism with some kind of Marxist subtext, to the point of misreading the nature of the terrorist threat altogether. And he sees the endless legacy of defeat for the American left as a debilitatingly alienating experience: "Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as a surrender to jingoism. That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed."

Andrew Sullivan: America's left surrenders itself to the giant sulk

The Sunday Times (U.K.)

Why was the World Trade Center destroyed by kamikaze-style Islamic terrorist airline hijackers?

Why did 5,000 American perish Sept. 11?

Why was the Pentagon attacked?

To hear former President Bill Clinton explain it, the United States of America is "paying a price today" for its past sins of slavery and for looking "the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed."

That's what he told 1,000 students at Georgetown University Wednesday evening, according to news reports.

"This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human," Clinton said. "And we're still paying the price today."

Clinton blames America

IT IS OBVIOUS

By Mia T, 3-3-02

 

It is obvious to anyone who bothers to remove his political blinders. It is so patently obvious that even those whose political blinders are a permanently fixed fashion statement -- that is to say, even Hollywood -- can see it. (Just ask Whoopie Goldberg...) Bush's poll numbers are a reflection of this self-evident truth.

What is manifestly obvious and confirmed on a daily basis is the plain fact that Democrats are, by definition, constitutionally unfit to navigate the ship of state through these troubled, terrorist waters. Democrats were unfit pre-9/11, but few could see it then. It was 9/11 and its aftermath that made this truth crystal clear even to the most simpleminded among us.

The unwashed masses, the uninformed, the disinformed can see it now. All America can see it now. Self-preservation is kicking in, trumping petty politics at every turn.

And this is why Democrat demagoguery and stupidity and sedition are achieving new lows...

We are witnessing the last gasp of a political relic. The Democrat party is not merely obsolete. As 9/11 and clinton-clinton-Daschle action and inaction have demonstrated, the Democrat party is very dangerous.

We must now make sure that this fact, too, is obvious to all...

That Joe Klein still thinks he can, post-9/11, credibly argue that clinton ran "a serious, disciplined, responsible presidency" is testament to leftist self-delusion, indeed, to the left's utter unfitness to govern.

JOE KLEIN STRIKES OUT. . . AGAIN

JOE KLEIN UNDERMINES OWN THESIS

 

Admits to Hannity: "clinton was weak on terrorism"

 

 

 

 

 

by Mia T, Mar. 14, 2002

 

 

 

  

 

n Hannity & Colmes last night, Joe Klein undermined the central thesis of his most recent clinton hagiography, "The Natural," that clinton ran "a serious, disciplined, responsible presidency."

 

Klein exposed the absurdity of his own reasoning by admitting that "clinton was weak on terrorism," (a position, BTW, that is not inconsistent with the more enlightened current leftist dogma).

 

But only in a deluded liberal's mind could such an utter failure as a president be considered a successful president...

 

The clintons' failure to confront terrorism -- the clintons' failure even to recognize the critical need to confront terrorism -- indeed, the clintons' aiding and abetting of the terrorists -- must necessarily be the defining moment of the clintons' --uh -- presidency, trumping even the systematic deconstructing of our society as a democracy by clinton corruption. . .

 

And all of this, BTW, ultimately renders "sleaze, the sequel" unelectable, clinton "infrastructure" notwithstanding.

 

 

They ARE space aliens

reckless rodham-clinton-gore reinvention-of-government schemata

KNOWNOTHING VICTIMS RODHAM/CLINTON REVISITED

^{Q ERTY2} "There isn't a shred of evidence."

HILLARY, YOU KNOW, ^{KnowNothing Victim} Q ERTY4 ^{double bagel},

W I D E B O D Y. _{low-center-of-gravity} Dim Bulb, _{Congenital Bottom Feeder}

_{Q ERTY3} ^{zipper-hoisted}

clinton zipper vitiated by obvious spilth

_{Humpty Dummies}

Q ERTY6 _{utter failure} ^{4th-Estate Malfeasance} (DEATH BY MISREPORT)

_{rodham-clinton} ^{reality-check} BUMP!

[Mia T]

"Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as a surrender to jingoism. That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed."

Michael Walzer

Why was the World Trade Center destroyed by kamikaze-style Islamic terrorist airline hijackers?

Why did 5,000 American perish Sept. 11?

Why was the Pentagon attacked?

To hear former President Bill Clinton explain it, the United States of America is "paying a price today" for its past sins of slavery and for looking "the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed."

That's what he told 1,000 students at Georgetown University Wednesday evening, according to news reports.

"This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human," Clinton said. "And we're still paying the price today."

Clinton blames America

 

 

The only way they can win is to convince people that we're space aliens.

--bill clinton

 

 

 

 

 

June 9, 1999

 

Peggy Noonan's excellent piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal is really the story of the death of democracy. At its core it is the description of the human double helix gone terribly awry, of a denatured protein grotesquely twisted, of two mutant, tangled strands of DNA, the basest imaginable of base pairs linked permanently, as firmly as guanine to cytosine, bill inexorably to hillary and conversely, doing what they do best, and doing it relentlessly.

 

Killing.

Killing insidiously.

Killing as they pose and pander and feel our pain.

 

My only complaint is with Peggy Noonan's title.

The Mad Boomer, doesn't begin to capture candidate clinton considered separately or even taken as the self-anointed "twofer," permanently conjoined at that cavity conspicuously empty except for ego, that place where brain and soul and guts and heart normally reside.

 

This is not to say that she -- that they -- are not both quite mad and of that self-indulgent, arrogantly, ignorantly solipsistic age sandwiched flatly between yesterday's innocence and tomorrow's insouciance. Rather, it is that their madness and their boomerism don't even begin to explain their noxious influence: The cloying, internally inconsistent clinton calculus. The unspoken clinton threats. They permeate the atmosphere like a coiling miasma, choking off all freedom.

 

Even in New York.

Especially in New York.

When she wrote "The New Colossus," Emma Lazarus hardly had in mind this pair of mutant, deadly, twisted aliens.

 

So forget Arkansas-Illinois carpetbaggery and standard issue muckraking. The clintons are aliens of quite another sort. They are extrinsic, not of this world. They are inhuman. They are dehumanizing.

 

You may recall that the first act of this story of two degenerates maintained by iterating idiots, farce of farce ad infinitum, was generated quite by accident by iterated AlGoreRhythm, who, it should be noted, is now himself the object of iterated calculation by said degenerates who want iteration 2004 all for themselves.

 

And thus the odd bit of bloody Gore in Act II: The ugly sight of a corrupt, bottom-heavy hillary self-impaled on the horns of a Treason-Dilemma- masquerading-as-a-Third-Term-Dilemma-masquerading-as-a-Senate-stampede, for example, or bill's recent unsolicited, underwhelming Times interview on the Gore candidacy.

 

Act I was called "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Ostensibly the tale of the wife of a bloodthirsty crime boss who finds romance with a bland bookseller between courses at her husband's restaurant, it was in fact the Thyestean and moveable -- yet unmoving -- feast of hillary clinton at her husband's sham restitution. (Note the reciprocity. The sham restitution in Act II is all hillary's.)

 

Food, color coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism were the exotic (if mostly horizontal) fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern memoir which passed as ancient fable about nouveau riche rapacity.

Not for the faint at heart, Purple Hearts or queazy stomachs, this depiction of the gross debasement of America was heavily peppered with irony and dark humor throughout.

 

Although she baked no cookies, didn't do illicit land or cattle deals and stood by no man, hillary clinton starred in the triple role of the Cook, the Thief and his Wife. Her lover was played at once vaporously and in workmanlike fashion by the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt, with Janet Reno, between her stints rendering intermittent injustice for the Husband, as the reliable stand-in. Sidney Blumenthal was the stand-in for the Cook and Craig Livingstone the stand-in for the Thief. The last-minute addition of Christopher Hitchens as the snitch was a stroke of absolute genius notwithstanding its cerebral accident, its predictable-if-perfect pitch and its facile alliteration.

 

Although Act I had no rating, the new clinton soccer-mom directive will require a photo ID for any viewer without independent proof of illegal alien DNC or DNA sequencing.

 

 

In Act II, rabid anti-clinton voters, roughly 33% of the U.S. populace according to as-yet-unpodded pollsters, become increasingly aware that they are disappearing in droves and being replaced by alien pod replicas which have their physical attributes but lack all anti-clinton affect.

 

If Act I was a thinly veiled allegory about naked clintonism, then Act II is a parable about the plan for world domination by the Establishment, aged hippies in pinstripes all, with their infantile, solipsistic world view amazingly untouched by time.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

 

[kk22tt]

From IncPen:
Or, as my father used to say, "The liberal's reward is self-disgust."
This is really good.

[Stallone]

Andrew Sullivan is an American

Michael Moore is a moron and a traitor. And extremely ugly, by the way. Yes. Michael Moore is a toad.

[ODDITHER]

The left is far less interested in their agenda being carried forward as they are with the person carrying the agenda forward. This is quite interesting to watch because their value system used to be able to be described as "The ends justifies the means." Their current philosophy is the "The means justifies the ends." It is much more important to ensure that the person carrying their water bucket is a leftist than it is for the bucket of water to arrive safely. Their bucket could be empty or filled with poisoned water, and they would defend the water carrier. They would rather die of thurst or poison than allow a non-leftist to carry the bucket. If a non-leftist takes hold of the bucket on his own and carries it, the leftists will scream that they are dieing of thurst or are being poisoned rather than take a drink from the bucket.

[baseballmom]

Another winner by Andrew. I saw Moore on O'Reilly recently, and he just spews venom. He told O'Reilly that the gov't should be taking 70% tax from the rich. I wonder if he really and truly believes that stuff he spouts. What a maroon.

Okie, thanks for the link to Rich's essay. He is another blowhard. Had some very interesting observations about the weeny Rats - and still managed to get in the requisite slaps at President Bush.

[Draco]

Re #3; thanks, LarryLied, for that on point rejoinder to an otherwise excellent article.