Free Republic

On Monday night’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, Republican strategist Karl Rove explained why President Barack Obama’s new position on gay marriage isn’t all that it seems, particularly because of who is applauding it. Rove said Obama’s shift was a flip-flop and suggested it was one of convenience, at least in terms of fundraising. “The president has done himself some damage on the gay marriage issue, in part because he flip-flopped on it,” Rove said. “But also because of the way that he did it. Remember we’ve been told New York magazine had an article, and [Newsweek/Daily Beast columnist]...

Despite the fact Barack Obama is married with two children, Newsweek magazine is dubbing him “The First Gay President” on its latest cover, crowning him with a rainbow-colored halo. The cover comes in the wake of Obama’s newly declared support for homosexual marriage in America. The edition, which hits newsstands Monday, features a column by Andrew Sullivan, an openly homosexual self-titled conservative political pundit. “When you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work,” Sullivan...

In this week’s Rolling Stone, President Obama takes the cover story … again. The piece is a long interview, and it’s a gushing profile of Obama. This time, however, he steps in it by endorsing Trig Palin birther and The Atlantic columnist Andrew Sullivan: I read all of the New York Times columnists. Krugman's obviously one of the smartest economic reporters out there, but I also read some of the conservative columnists, just to get a sense of where those arguments are going. There are a handful of blogs, Andrew Sullivan's on the Daily Beast being an example, that combine...

The current cover of a "news" magazine. I guess the left has now given up on eradicating Christianity in totality and now hope to subvert followers to their "reading" of the gospels. And note Foreheads article about SCOTUS betrayal. The Enquier has more integrity.

According to the Washington Post, the Obama White House invited 362 people to its state dinner for the United Kingdom. One familiar face will be gracing the red carpet: Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast. For those who don’t remember, Andrew Sullivan is the once-conservative columnist who shifted dramatically to the left over the past few years – and reserved a special hatred in his heart for Sarah Palin and her special needs son Trig. Early on in the campaign, Sullivan suggested that Trig was not actually Sarah Palin’s son – he was Bristol’s son, and Sarah had claimed him...

Newt Gingrich‘s family values have been the subject of much attention during the GOP primary race, and on his show today, Chris Matthews highlighted a poll which showed roughly half of the respondents rated Gingrich’s personal standards poorly. Mathews asked panelist Andrew Sullivan if the GOP establishment still retained enough clout to heavily influence the race going forward, given the concerns they have about a Gingrich candidacy. Sullivan argued the establishment has lost control of its “tiger,” or rather, its populist religious base, and they’re worried that the tiger will end up turning on them this time. Time‘s Mike Duffy...

After reading Andrew Sullivan's Newsweek essay about President Obama, his critics, and his re-election bid, I implore him to ponder just one question. How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

Newsweek, headed by Brit import and gossip girl Tina Brown, is trying in vain to reestablish itself as a print-on-a-rag that you might want to buy. Newsweek was so dumbly managed and edited that after eons of existence, it could only be sold for $1.00 to some beasts on the left (that's what they call themselves - The Daily Beast). Desperate for attention, former conservative, Andrew Sullivan, attempts to offer some limp wristed reasoning as to why "Obama's Critics Are Dumb" in his latest Newsweek cover story. This is the same Newsweek which covered Michelle Bachmann as a raging, crazy-eyed...

Newsweek accomplished at least one thing by running a cover story calling the country’s critics of President Obama “dumb” — they awoke the mama grizzly. [SNIP] Directing her message to “@Newsweek,” Palin wrote, “Know what’s truly ‘dumb’? Giving a cover story to the TrigTruther conspiracy kook writer who thinks I didn’t give birth to my son.”

“Why Are Obama’ Critics So Dumb?” That’s the question posed by Andrew Sullivan in the cover story of this week’s Newsweek. But you’d have to be stupid, fanatical, and dishonest to argue–as Trig Truther Sullivan does–that Barack Obama’s failures are part of an ingenious “long game” that is destined to succeed. If this is the best Obama’s supporters can do, Obama’s only hope for re-election is the weak Republican field. Sullivan, who claims to care about national debt, begins by arguing, contrary to reality, that Obama’s massive $787 billion stimulus (actually, $862 billion) turned the economy around. He offers no...

...given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

...given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.

...I thought Huntsman would be my ideal candidate. And indeed, his tax reform proposals--modeled on Bowles-Simpson--are dead-on.... On foreign policy, Huntsman also favors a more realist correction to neocon excess, and would build on Obama's remarkable successes.... And his sanity on climate change--certainty that it is man-made but real skepticism about how to tackle it--is, in my view, the conservative position. And, almost alone among the Republicans, he acknowledges that gay people exist and that our committed relationships merit recognition in the law. So why not Huntsman? The sad truth is: he simply hasn't connected with the voters, generates little...

Many readers are scratching their heads over my endorsement of Ron Paul last week. One writes: Let me add a few more reasons to vote for Ron Paul: If you want all federal student aid eliminated, vote Paul. If you want the Department of Energy, Commerce, Interior, Education and Housing & Urban Development eliminated, vote Paul. If you want the department of Transportation Security Administration eliminated (meaning security is the sole responsibility of private property owners), vote Paul. You can't just ignore Paul's "nuttier policy proposals". These proposals are Paul. If you endorse Ron Paul, you're endorsing his proposals. There...

Political blogger Andrew Sullivan has made an endorsement among this year’s ever-thinning field crop of GOP presidential contenders, and it’s none other than Ron Paul. On his Daily Beast blog “The Dish,” Sullivan writes that, initially, he had his eye on Jon Huntsman, praising for the former governor of Utah’s tax reform proposals and his experience with foreign relations (particularly where China is concerned, as well as his level-headed approach and — as Sullivan puts it — his “conservative position” when it comes to global warming. However, Sullivan has been less than enthused with what he describes as Huntsman’s “mediocre...

Silver doesn’t quite go so far as to say that it makes a brokered convention or a late-breaking establishment candidate likely, but I’m willing to go that far. There’s just no way the Republican establishment lets Gingrich become their nominee. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out today, you’re already seeing the anti-Gingrich mobilization among conservative thought leaders: Here’s George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Tom Coburn and Ann Coulter, just for starters. There’s this Politico story about all the Washington Republicans who hate Gingrich. Now, I think it’s more likely that this mobilization leads to a Romney win then...

When Rick Perry announced he was running for president the very same day Michele Bachmann won the Ames straw poll in Iowa -- and then proceeded to chat up Republicans in her hometown of Waterloo -- some saw it as a genius move. Others saw it as a dick move. But it looks like Perry has a record of stomping all over everyone else's dress on her big day. In 2008, the Texan literally grabbed Sarah Palin by the arm and yanked her out of the spotlight. The Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan highlights this video from a Republican Governors Association...

This from the scribe who's devoted an inordinate amount of time over the last three years to indulging a bizarre conspiratorial obsession with Sarah Palin's uterus. His new admonition: Be careful what you wish for, wingnuts -- an Obama loss in 2012 could trigger a neo Civil War. Scary, right? We'll tackle this conclusion in a moment, but first, Sully sets the table with some (now familiar) anti-religious sociological psychobabble: "...The GOP, deep down, is behaving as a religious movement, not as a political party, and a radical religious movement at that. Lofgren sees the "Prosperity Gospel" as a divine...

In liberals’ frenzy to elect Barack Obama in 2008, no one was quite as far out to sea as Andrew Sullivan, a respected columnist for the Atlantic website. He served up his “Daily Dish” by the plateful. Here’s perhaps the hottest example of his rhetoric—quoted endlessly around the blogosphere--back then: “A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and...

Last week, Eli Lake of the Washington Times reported that “[t]he White House is pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to publicly adopt President Obama’s view that Israel’s pre-1967 borders should be the basis for future peace talks.” As Lake explained, “Mr. Obama’s position would effectively reopen border negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that had been mostly settled in the last round of peace talks that ended in 2008.” While the Obama administration has given Israel an ultimatum — negotiate with the Palestinians on the basis of the 1967 borders as a starting point - Andrew Sullivan cites...

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, the liberal website Wonkette has lost a significant number of advertisers following its disgraceful article about former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's handicapped son Trig. The Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan, who for years has claimed like so many Trig Truthers that Bristol Palin is the child's real mother, expressed disappointment Saturday that companies pulled their ads as a result of this piece: "I feel as queasy about this flexing of Palinite muscle as I do about the original, disgusting, asinine story. In some ways, I see a legitimate come-uppance for a tacky site that published a simply...

Trig Trutherism, the surprisingly resilient conspiracy theory that Sarah Palin is not actually the mother of 3-year-old Trig Palin, is experiencing a boomlet thanks to a new academic paper that endorses the concept. Long pursued by the blogger Andrew Sullivan and a significant segment of the Palin-hating left, Trig Trutherism holds that Trig's real mother is either Bristol Palin or some third party, and that Sarah Palin herself faked the pregnancy to avoid embarrassment for her daughter or for political gain or some combination of reasons. In light of the recent attention this subject has received and the considerable passion...

It was noon in Washington, D.C., when the shooting began in Tucson. Across the country, reporters and media executives rushed to cover the story of the gunman, the Congresswoman he shot at close range, and the 14 other victims. But the news couldn’t reach one of the Internet’s most important writers. For Andrew Sullivan, M.P.A. ’86, Ph.D. ’90, the editor of a blog called TheDish.com, the weekend is a time for rest, and having teed up on Friday afternoon a half-dozen evergreen posts for Saturday, he had turned off his communication devices and was sleeping in. Sullivan had been lightly...

Andrew Sullivan, who more or less invented the sort of incremental, obsessive blogging you see here and in a thousand other places, is moving from The Atlantic to the Daily Beast/Newsweek hybrid. Sullivan writes that he's excited about the moment and the skilled new management at the NewsBeast, and proud of his work on the Atlantic's revival, which make sense, but to me the key line in his announcement is this one: "Now we will ride a new Beast into a new decade." One of the things Sullivan pioneered was the split between journalist and institution, and though he's been...

Hard hitting analysis from Andrew Sullivan on how the right is being hypocritical on the unrest in the middle east. There is, of course, great potential for bad as well as good in these kind of transformative moments in history - the Arab 1848 as it were. We should be vigilant on that score. But it is bizarre to read conservatives who praised the Iraq war that led to the empowerment of al Sadr and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in a country occupied by the US to be now retroactively endorsing the other Saddams of the Middle...

Jack Stuef predicts Palin's campaign strategy: She knows she can’t win, but she needs to be in the presidential conversation to make her money. So she’s probably going to refuse to go to Iowa and New Hampshire so she can take her message to the whole country, i.e., the places that will pay her tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to say her catchphrases for an hour and pose with conservative men on oxygen tanks who want nothing more in the world than to f*** her. It’s the dream of every little girl in America to run such a...

As things now stand, Christians who hope to overthrow prostitute-killing Islamism, support a baby's right to a full birth, and defend time-honored marriage are Christianists. But there's more. Tea Party members are also Christianists even if they're self-identified atheists, according to Andrew Sullivan. Appearing on NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" last week, The Daily Dish blogger, inveighed: "The Tea Party, of course is not about fiscal issues at all. They have no plans to balance the budget now or any time in the future. They are radical Christianist, right-wing group..." I have my doubts. Indeed, Andrew Sullivan is so obsessed...

"Sarah Palin represents an America this is absolutely, definitionally white, that's very much rural America." That's how The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan summed up the former Alaska governor in his appearance on the November 7 BBC Radio 4 "Americana" program. Echoing Peter Jennings' infamous description of the 1994 midterms, the liberal British-born blogger added of 2010 voters that they had "had a panic, a tantrum." For his part, Washington-based "Americana" host Matt Frei reinforced Sullivan's analysis, labeling Palin the "Evita of the North" and generally failed to question Sullivan's analysis. "Despite all the kind of hullabaloo about the Tea Party, and...

Andrew Sullivan on Friday said that if you say something bigoted on Fox News, you get rewarded, promoted, and celebrated. As the topic of NPR's firing of Juan Williams was raised on the syndicated program "The Chris Matthews Show," Sullivan was far more critical of the cable news station than the radio network. Unfortunately, host Chris Matthews opted not to play some of the bigoted statements made over the years by other NPR personalities that have gone totally unpunished thereby making Sullivan's point totally absurd.

Want to make friends in "elite" political blogosphere? Don't dare be outspoken on behalf of Delaware Republican U.S. Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell. In a Sept. 15 post on his The Atlantic blog, "The Daily Dish," Sullivan takes a break from gossiping about political figures' genitalia to take on conservative talker Mark Levin's response to those who were seemingly hell-bent on O'Donnell not being the Delaware GOP nominee within the conservative media intelligentsia. After going through a litany of Levin's alleged indiscretions against O'Donnell detractors, Sullivan argues that his so-called "conservative" counterparts had it coming since Levin had been so critical...

Since August 29, 2008, when Sarah Palin was first introduced as John McCain’s Vice Presidential choice of a running mate, reactions to Palin were and continue to be extreme. The extremity of Palin hatred started within hours of the announcement, as did the hideous rumors (about her son Trig for instance) that were passed from one leftist website to the next without one shred of evidence to back them up. The goal, simply put, was to destroy Sarah Palin by any means possible. Being as passionate as they always are, progressive bloggers, media pundits, leftist groups and even comedians started...

Weigel responds to the Levi-Bristol break-up by shaming the media: "Why assume that [Sarah] Palin was behind [the Levi-Bristol engagement], cleaning up a problem before a possible 2012 run? It’s because the alternative, truer explanation is dull. Palin as tabloid joke is a story for 2008. The story for 2010 is that she’s a master plotter, a recruiter of grizzlies, whose book sales and TV deals prove that she’s outsmarted everyone. This theory doesn’t have many takers inside of Alaska, where Palin’s celebrity and national designs are frowned upon by people who wanted her to serve out her term. But...

Ezra Klein's attempt to pass off JournoList as just a water-cooler confab seems pretty much exploded by this latest Daily Caller piece. I mean: what is the point of putting out an email with the subject line "The Line On Palin" if there isn't an actual line? And what is this if not organizing a media narrative: “Okay, let’s get deadly serious, folks. Grating voice or not, ‘inexperienced’ or not, Sarah Palin’s just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick ‘outsider’,” Kilgore said, “What we can do is to expose her ideology.” What you mean...

Guest blogging for lunatic Andrew Sullivan, disgraced former WaPo blogger David Weigel tries to talk some sense into Sully: Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's son and it's irresponsible to suggest otherwise. [...] All of the evidence indicates that Trig Palin is Sarah's son, and none of it suggests otherwise. I paid close enough attention to this in 2008, and realized pretty quickly that the countervailing theories made no sense. Too many people watched Palin announce the pregnancy and saw her come along until she went into labor, prematurely, while attending a National Governors Association event in Texas. Here in Alaska,...

(VIDEO AT LINK) Chris Matthews sees Palin inflicting an "early knockout" in the primaries. Larison, still betting against her, argues that the GOP establishment will quash her candidacy: Palin and Mondale are alike in that they represent the face of the party as it was when it was defeated, but they are quite different in their sources of support. Mondale was the candidate of the party establishment and important interest groups, and Palin has made a point of aligning herself with every possible anti-establishment, insurgent campaign she can find. Contra Kornacki, Bernstein finds the comparison off: Yes, Mondale got clobbered...

Here is just one example of how Andrew Sullivan propped up Levi Johnston as the obvious truth-teller within the extended Palin clan. Out of all of them only Levi deserved to be taken seriously. According to Andy, Johnston was the real rogue of 2009. ... His story deserves to be taken more seriously as a real account of what Palin really is. Until Wallace and Schmidt screw their courage to the sticking place, he's the best we've got.Johnston's account for the reasons for Palin's bizarre resignation are also more convincing than Palin's classic insistence that she was quitting....Now, comes today...

I try not to comment about hypocrisy in politics because switching sides on issues of “principle” is such a routine part of partisan game-playing that commenting about it would be like writing a post declaring that water is wet, that Death Valley is hot, and that Perez Hilton is annoying. But very occasionally, an incident comes along that is so glaring in its clueless exposure of the seedy underbelly of political debate that it requires a moment of stunned observation, sort of like watching a guy immolating himself while giving a lecture on fire safety. The recent complaint by Andrew...

Andrew Breitbart’s $100,000 offer for the full archives of the now-defunct liberal listserve Journolist has prompted a fight between himself and Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan. Breitbart has not yet had any takers for the offer – assuming such a complete archive of the e-mail list founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein even exists – but Sullivan contends the offer alone has crossed a new line. “Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning,” Sullivan wrote. “Your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private...

[SNIP] I needn’t be lectured by a so-called “conservative” who has aided and abetted in this perversion of the American political experiment. Sullivan’s disgusting, ends-justify-the-means obsession with the personal family life of Sarah Palin breached every ethical and journalistic boundary known to the cosmos. Between airing Palin’s hacked private emails and making a cottage industry out of challenging the maternity of her son, Trig, sometimes the word “irony” or “hypocrisy” is not descriptive enough. To highlight the absurdity of Sullivan’s outrage, perhaps his submission entitled “The Palin Emails” can grant you insight into a demented mind. Before divulging them in...

Friedersdorf wants the issue left alone: I assume Trig Palin is Sarah Palin’s son, and that I don’t think we should go down the road of demanding hard evidence on these sorts of questions (even if it meant never finding out the truth in an individual case) — it sets a precedent that would mire future elections in ever more absurd accusations and counter-accusations, all of them focusing attention on the personal history of candidates rather than their professional qualifications and policy positions, a road we’ve gone too far down already, and that benefits the least qualified seekers of office...

David Petraeus is the real Pope of counter-insurgency and if he decides that he needs more troops and more time and more resources in Afghanistan next year, who is going to be able to gainsay him? That's Thomas P. Barnett's shrewd assessment. Obama's pledge to start withdrawing troops in 2011 is now kaput... It really is Vietnam -- along with the crazier and crazier rationales for continuing it. But it is now re-starting in earnest ten years in, dwarfing Vietnam in scope and longevity. One suspects there is simply no stopping this war machine, just as there is no stopping...

We all know former Vice President Al Gore has a sycophantic media supporting him on his pet cause of global warming. But this might be a little over the top, or it could very well explain a lot. In December 2007, when Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, The Washington Post's Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan argued the former vice president had won the Nobel Prize for "sexy." Well, apparently this is an inside-the-beltway notion that has existed for years. On HBO's June 4 broadcast of "Real Time with Bill Maher," film producer, director, and screenwriter Judd Apatow harkened back...

The nominee to be the next justice of the Supreme Court has no opinion on anything. Well, that’s not entirely true. She did believe in providing free coffee for students when she was dean of Harvard Law School. She once publicly protested against the ban on honest homosexuals serving in the US military — but that is genuinely the only controversial statement she has ever made in public. How do such people exist? Well, the truth is they have existed on the career ladder for the US Supreme Court since Robert Bork was crucified by the Senate when Ronald Reagan...

It is no more of an empirical question than whether she is Jewish. We know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly odd, bizarre, anachronistic, even arguably self-critical or self-loathing. And yet we have been told by many that she is gay ... and no one will ask directly if this is true and no one in the administration will tell us definitively. In a word, this is preposterous - a function of liberal cowardice and conservative discomfort. It should...

A quote for the ages from uber-swish Andrew: Here's a revealing glimpse into how a delusional, incompetent, pathological liar has managed never to hold a real press conference and yet remains a credible public figure. He's off on one of his Sarah Palin jags. Again. And it's still only 2010.

Here's a revealing glimpse into how a delusional, incompetent, pathological liar has managed never to hold a real press conference and yet remains a credible public figure. She avoids the filters - i.e. skeptical journalists - and deploys one simple propaganda tool: (Requests to interview Palin for this article, specifically about her experiences in the 2008 campaign, were turned down. Her former communications aide Meghan Stapleton explained that "with her Fox exclusivity, we are denying requests for articles and stories right now.") The reason I banged on and on about Palin's bizarre story about her fifth campaign prop during the...

The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan caught wind of one of my posts today and, without delay, honored me as a Hewitt Award nominee on his blog, The Daily Dish.

Honestly, I did now weigh in on the controversy about Andrew Sullivan and Anti-Semitism, I do not believe that the guy is a Jew-hater, I believe that he is either suffering from Dementia or he is just plain stupid. How else could he get so many facts wrong. Last month it was the City if Hebron. When Israel put the Cave of the Patriarch on the Heritage Site list, Sullivan objected because of the horrible 1994 incident where one lone demented Israeli went to the Cave and began shooting, killing 29 Arab worshipers. He called a massacre (and it was)....

Andrew Sullivan used to be an interesting commentator. Long ago, he looked at both sides of the issues and provided intelligent insights. Now he's a one-trick pony: a gay liberal masquerading as a conservative. Mainly, he's obsessed with torture, a topic about which he has become the Liza Minelli of the internet (see Forbidden Broadway for the reference). Today alone, he has four posts dealing with torture either in whole or in passing. To read more, click here.

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