Free Republic

Andrew Sullivan: The truth about civil marriage - why it is the essential criterion for gay equality - is that it alone explodes this core marginalization and invisibility of gay people. It alone can reach those gay kids who need to know they have a future as a dignified human being with a family. It alone tells society that gay people are equal in their loves and in their hearts and in their families - not just useful in a society with a need for talented or able individuals whose private lives remain perforce sequestered from view. This is why...

Finally, after two weeks of Andrew Sullivan enthusing over Obama on the weekend panel gabfest, The Chris Matthews Show, to the point that Matthews called it a “romance,” Matthews finally popped the question: MATTHEWS: Are you still a man of the right? Mr. SULLIVAN: I think of myself as a conservative, yes. And I think actually, at this point, Obama represents more conservatism than the Southern populism of the GOP. Say WHAT? Apparently, a “conservative” is whatever Andrew Sullivan is. He just can’t bring himself semantically to express what he has done romantically—admit that his love for Obama has caused...

Once considered one of the more interesting conservative intellectuals, Andrew Sullivan had an emotional meltdown during the Bush years over two issues: gay marriage — Sullivan is desperate for government approval for him to play house — and the supposed “torture” of terrorists (which Sullivan emotionally argues is morally equivalent to our enemies’ slaughter of innocents.) Last year, Sullivan gave up any credentials he had for criticizing the “birthers,” or any other fringe element, when he spent about a week hysterically promoting the obvious hoax that Trig Palin was not really born to Sarah, but to his older sister, Bristol.

President Obama may seem to dither, but he is ready to strike Andrew Sullivan There is a strange quality to Barack Obama’s pragmatism. It can look like dilly-dallying, weakness, indecisiveness. But although he may seem weak at times, one of the words most applicable to him is something else entirely: ruthless. Beneath the crisp suit and easy smile there is a core of strategic steel. In this respect, Obama’s domestic strategy is rather like his foreign one — not so much weakness but the occasional appearance of weakness as a kind of strategy. The pattern is now almost trademarked. He...

Excerpts from the new Mike Loads gyno-mystery by Andrew Sullivan: Nine months is a lot of time. Enough time to rehab a darling vacation bungalow on Cape Cod. Enough time for a whirlwind romance with the contractor. The birds 'n' bees boys down at the OB/GYN lab claim that's how long it takes to hatch a baby. But in my line of work you learn it's also plenty enough time to hatch a plot -- maybe the single biggest stinking political gestation coverup plot ever to hit P-town. My name is Loads. To me, everything is a mystery. I was...

....Last week, in one of the most baldly racist diatribes I have heard on American radio, the biggest figure in the conservative movement, Rush Limbaugh, noticed that there had been a ruckus on a school bus in which a white kid was stomped on by a black kid. The incident, it turned out, was a classic school bus bully story: the white kid was being tormented and the bullies were refusing to let him sit down. There was no racial rhetoric in a bus full of black kids and white kids. But this is what Limbaugh said: “In Obama’s America,...

It seems that Andrew Sullivan’s application for US citizenship hangs in the balance — but not really, and that is the issue. Gawker and other sites report that this past summer, blogger and columnist Sullivan was arrested on national seashore in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for illegal possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor that would incur a $125 for Sullivan, if he was found guilty. No big deal — it happens a lot in that area of our country. The only stumbling block is Sullivan’s pending U.S. citizenship, which might have been adversely affected should he have been brought to court. Enter...

Political commentator, author and writer for The Atlantic magazine Andrew M. Sullivan won't have to face charges stemming from a recent pot bust at the Cape Cod National Seashore - but a federal judge isn't happy about it. U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings says in his decision that the case is an example of how sometimes "small cases raise issues of fundamental importance in our system of justice." While marijuana possession may have been decriminalized, Sullivan, who owns a home in Provincetown, made the mistake of being caught by a park ranger with a controlled substance on National Park...

WASHINGTON – One of the most influential bloggers, pundits and columnists in America, Andrew Sullivan, has joined the rising chorus of voices across the political spectrum calling for Barack Obama to release his original, long-form birth certificate to put aside growing doubts about his eligibility for the presidency. Sullivan writes that he believes official accounts, such as the recent statement by Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Health Department, that maintain Obama was born there and is a "natural born citizen." Sullivan says, however, Americans should not be expected to accept on blind faith the word of public...

The whole birth certificate issue gets weirder still: "I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago...." But why are we supposed to rely on the testimony of Dr Fukino, whom I believe entirely. It is not my job as a journalist or yours as a...

Here it is, a fascinating glimpse into the actual attitudes and beliefs of a segment of American society, the part that strongly disapproves of Obama, the Palin base, the Fox News core. The full email from Boston police officer Justin Barrett is after the jump. I note two things that stand out to me. The first is the crudeness of the racism. "Banana-eating jungle monkey" is the baseline description of Gates, coupled, as it always is, with "I am not a racist". He also thinks it's real cool to use "ax" instead of "ask". Then this description of policing in...

....Palin could have gone to a major hospital in Anchorage and delivered the child and still have Trig as an Alaskan. But, no, she had to add an extra risk to her unborn child by ensuring her local hospital and family doctor could deliver the child - even if that extra 45 minutes (like the ten hours that preceded it) could have posed a deathly risk to a special needs infant....It remains true that no one in the MSM will investigate the details of this truly bizarre story.... The one MSM newspaper that tried to report out the story of...

Perhaps the single, common life goal of every intellectual, pseudo-intellectual, and intellectual aspirant, is to be a true Renaissance man — a genius whose force of will and flexible, dominating intellect allows him to master or nearly master not one or two, but a whole host of related and unrelated fields of study and practice. Sadly, not everyone can be Leonardo da Vinci or Karol Wojtyla. Or Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan, who has worn dozens of hats in his lifetime, is truly unique. He stands astride the worlds of politics, journalism, theology, foreign policy, and applied obstetrics like the Colossus of...

I completely agree with Andrew Sullivan that hate crimes are a left-wing, thought-policing scam. Here's Andrew: "The real reason for hate crime laws is not the defense of human beings from crime. There are already laws against that - and Matthew Shepard's murderers were successfully prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in a state with no hate crimes law at the time. The real reason for the invention of hate crimes was a hard-left critique of conventional liberal justice and the emergence of special interest groups which need boutique legislation to raise funds for their large staffs and...

A longtime pundit and supporter of the homosexual lifestyle choice has admitted online that the so-called "hate crimes" bill now pending in the U.S. Senate is totally unnecessary, according to a report. "The real reason for hate crime laws is not the defense of human beings from crime. There are already laws against that – and Matthew Shepard's murderers were successfully prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in a state with no hate crimes law at the time," wrote Andrew Sullivan in his "Daily Dish" column. "The real reason for the invention of hate crimes was a hard-left...

Even if you are an intelligent man, reading Andrew Sullivan can make you stupid. It happened to President Obama this week. At his 100-day press conference, President Obama invoked Churchill rejecting the use of torture for interrogation in the days of the Blitz during World War II. Obama instructed the assembled multitude: "I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, 'We don't torture,' when the entire British--all of the...

The assertion of total power through unchecked violence - outside the Constitution, beyond the reach of the law (apart from legal memos from hired hacks instructed to retroactively redefine torture into 'legality') - will be seen in retrospect as the key defining theory of Bush conservatism. It ended with torture. Why? Because reality may differ from ideology; and when it does, it is vital to create reality to support ideology. And so torture creates reality by coercing "facts" from broken bodies and minds. This is how torture is always a fantastic temptation for those in power, even if they first...

During the Q&A that makes up the bulk of my Sarah Palin piece today, radio host and Media Malpractice documentary filmmaker John Ziegler attacked Andrew Sullivan as the ultimate example of how the media rewarded attacks on Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska). Andrew Sullivan is a guy who should never be allowed back in any remnant of the conservative movement after what he did, just on the Trig “trutherism” issue. It’s just scandalous. I mean, this guy is still invited on major TV shows after coming forward with, and continuing, the theory that Gov. Palin faked a pregnancy of a Downs...

Everyone knows the old line about “a billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money.” Not for Andrew Sullivan, it doesn’t. Even $400 billion is apparently something to sneeze at, a mere bagatelle not worth “quibbling” over. And so it was that the Atlantic editor excoriated Republicans for making a stand for fiscal conservatism in opposing the stimulus bill. Sullivan was a guest on this weekend’s edition of the Chris Matthews Show, which sported a certified 100% conservative-free panel. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman did his part, accusing Republicans of being “Chairmen of the Flat...

One of the most despicable acts of the recent presidential campaign was the viscious attack on Sarah Palin and her family, and Andrew Sullivan was instrumental in pushing the idea that Trig Palin was not Sarah's son. I am sure most of you are familiar with the sordid rumors SU\ullivan promoted. Well, Andrew Sullivan is up for an award for "Best Blog" in the Web Log Awards for 2009. He is currently in the lead. As far as I can tell, "Hot Air" is the only non-liberal blog that has a chance of beating him. Please go to the link...

(Excerpted) And so this movie was really about two gay men and the journey between them. The two gay men are Harvey Milk and Dan White. The two gay men are Barney Frank and Ted Haggard. The two gay men are Tony Kushner and Larry Craig. The two gay men are Frank Kameny and Roy Cohn. And as the years have passed by and HIV churned the gay world as powerfully as plagues and wars often do, these polarities were complemented by any number of variations in between. (...) This is not easy for anyone, let alone for homosexuals. For...

The writer Andrew Sullivan sits across the table from you on Chris Matthews' Hardball praising gay-marriage as a symbol of the homosexual community's desire to join the mainstream. He is a Catholic, conservative in many things, and a highly articulate spokesman for his point-of-view. What do you say? The requisite conservative on pundit panels usually falls back on citing heterosexual marriage's 5,000 year history as society's basic building block. Marriage has always been between a man and a woman. 65% of the American people are against homosexual unions. Etc. That's not going to get it. It's a way of brushing...

A reader writes: I love to see you grapple with trying to explain this woman and her thought processes. You are Tcs2 missing something obvious though. She believes in the literal truth of the Bible. She believes it informs on matters of science, biology, evolution, physics, cosmology, etc. So if there are multiple creation versions in the Bible what do you do, make up your own reality. If there are contradictions in it, ignore them. Just like you ignore inconvenient facts about day-to-day life. If you BELIEVE the bible is the literal inerrant word of God what do you do?...

A reader writes: Earlier this week, in your post “The Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote For Obama”, you wrote under Point 4: “A truce in the culture war. Obama takes us past the debilitating boomer warfare that has raged since the 1960s. Nothing has distorted our politics so gravely; nothing has made a rational politics more elusive.” On the one hand I agree with you; on the other hand, you don't go nearly far enough. An Obama presidency means much more than a truce in the 60’s culture war. It means the end of a much older and more...

I don't think there is any precedent in our history for the shameful manner in which the Left has treated Sarah Palin. Left-winger Andrew Sullivan gleefully posted a particularly disgusting example of the phenomenon today; it's a YouTube video titled "Red, White and MILF." Watch it only if you have a strong stomach. If you don't know what "MILF" means--I'm sure most of our readers don't--Google it. I can remember when Sullivan was a respected journalist, not a gutter smear merchant and borderline pornographer. His descent exemplifies the Left's decline in recent years to a baboon-like level of discourse. The...

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH ANDREW SULLIVAN? What is his problem with Sarah Palin? I don’t get it. The Log Cabin Republicans have thrown their support to her. He is a long time member of the group, is he not? One would think he’d be in support of her candidacy and of her choice for Vice President by John McCain. One of Palin’s first acts as Governor of Alaska was to veto a bill that would have denied gay couples the same benefits as are paid to married heterosexual couples in Alaska. Regardless of her personal feelings (is being gay a...

Who knew that Andrew Sullivan is a fan of beauty pageants? Apparently he's been scouring videos of pageants of the 80s; first he came up with Sarah Palin in the swimsuit competition of the 1984 Miss Alaska competition. If you missed it, here it is. Now Andrew has found the talent competition. It probably won't get her as many votes as the swimsuit video, but it certainly won't do her any harm:

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported yesterday that he asked the McCain campaign if Sarah Palin is the biological mother of Trig Palin.Kurtz published a response from Michael Goldfarb of the McCain campaign:"These rumors are false. It is her baby. The whole thing is absurd. All of this rests on the fact that she wore her pregnancy extremely well. A couple of months later, there are a ton of pictures showing she is obviously pregnant. It's ridiculous. There's just nothing to it. We're not going to release her gynecological records to prove it. It's just madness."Kurtz asked the scurrilous question...

For the past two weeks serious commentators and columnists have been asked to take the candidacy of Sarah Palin for the vice-presidency of the United States seriously. Formerly sane people have written of the McCain campaign’s selection of this running mate as if it represents a new face for Republicanism, an emblem of can-do western spirit, a brilliant ploy to win over Clinton voters, a new feminism, a reformist revolution, and a genius appeal to the religious right. I’m afraid I cannot join in. In fact I cannot say anything about this candidacy that takes it in any way seriously....

How the Enemies of the Normal Are Destroying Obama by Mark P. Shea 9/10/08 It is an old fact of Christian theology that concupiscence "darkens the intellect" -- or, as I prefer to put it in more colloquial terms, "Sin Makes You Stupid." The visceral reaction to Sarah Palin by the Enemies of the Normal in the Obama camp is a picture-perfect illustration of this. From the instantaneous embrace of Trig Trutherism by Andrew Sullivan, Kossites, and various demented contributors to the official Obama Campaign site to the strange theories put forward that Palin is (wait for it) a pro-life...

Patrick Ruffini admonishes the Dems: --------------------- "The most important thing about a good attack is not the attack itself. It's baiting your opponent to respond the way you want him to respond, because only the things that come out of his mouth will ultimately stick. Obama seems to be falling into the trap of response-centrism. If only they could respond the right way, they figure, all will be well. But it won't be. Because the game they are playing is reactive. Instead of changing the subject off Palin by launching some explosive new attack on McCain, all they do is...

September 7, 2008 The fright begins as John McCain reveals his reckless side Sarah Palin has opposed his key policies, so why did he pick her? Andrew Sullivan There is one reason the job of vice-president exists. In a system with a single executive, you need someone to fill in if the president is incapacitated or dies. In war time this is especially important. More salient: McCain just turned 72 and would be the oldest first term president in American history with four cancer scares and the awful residue of Vietnamese torture in his bones. The pick is also the...

Weekly Standard Dean Barnett asking a very important question. One that needs to be answered: Now. Yesterday on a blog hosted by the prestigious magazine the Atlantic, a post popped up at 11:49 a.m. with the breathless title, “Here We Go.” The post read in its entirety, “Todd Palin's former business partner files an emergency motion to have his divorce papers sealed. Oh God.” The post linked to the Alaskan court system where you could see the motion if you cared to click through. "The author" here is, yes, RAWMUSLGLUTES himself. WS isn't saying so because they're so repulsed by...

Double Down 06 Sep 2008 04:32 pm Bill Kristol on Sarah Palin. All he writes about in this piece of propaganda is electoral strategy and the people he hates in the media. In a week, he hasn't said a word about Sarah Palin's foreign policy views. I know she's being safely indoctrinated by Joe Liebermanand AIPAC as we speak, but the fact that Kristol, like the rest of us, has not yet been able to point to a single view of hers on foreign policy in her entire life, is eloquent enough.

(This is the last half of the blog entry about the Palin selection, read the entire entry:) This decision is not worthy of a great power. Whatever skills Palin may turn out to have, however fabulous a person she may turn out to be, even if she becomes the Eva Peron of Christianism, McCain had no idea when he picked her. He winged this. That's the critical, unavoidable, devastating point. John McCain has demonstrated with this insane decision that he is unfit to be president of the United States. This was an act of near-criminal negligence. If he can behave...

Andrew Sullivan, May 31, 2001: I think a fair assessment of these tactics would be blackmail and intimidation. I ignored them as I have learned to ignore most such threats over the years. To answer them is to give legitimacy to the very premises of their argument: that the most intensely personal details of someone’s private life can and should be used for political purposes. The truth is: no-one’s legal, consensual, adult private life should be plundered and exposed for political purposes.I ignored the requests for comment because there was nothing to comment on. . . . I was asked...

I’ve voted a straight Republican ticket every year of my life since 1975, when I first came of voting age, but I was stunned and horrified by McCain’s choice of Palin. I simply cannot even consider voting for McCain after this choice, which speaks loudly of his own selfishness and fundamental frivolousness. So I was shocked when I turned to the conservative blogs looking for others who shared my dismay and found a celebration going on. They really honestly believe that Palin’s “inexperience” and Obama’s “inexperience” are equivalent. I have had no luck at all in the past 24 hours...

Earlier this month Andrew Sullivan, a well-known writer, once in the center, now on the left, nominated me for what is apparently his lowest badge of distinction for defending citizens who shoot to wound graffiti vandals, or "taggers," while committing their vandalism. Under the heading, "Malkin Award Nominee," Sullivan provides a quote from my radio show: "'So you will now say -- I hear the voice of an ACLU member -- 'Dennis, do you think that this guy should have shot these people spray painting graffiti on his shop?' To which my answer is yes. I do. Not to kill....

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar? According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured. Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks...

I called Orson Swindle, a fellow POW who is campaigning for McCain, to ask him about it. “I recall John telling that story when we first got together in 1971, when were talking about every conceivable thing that had ever happened to us when we were in prison” Swindle told me a few minutes ago. “Most of us had been kept apart or in small groups. Then, in 1970, they moved us into the big cell. And when we all got to see each other and talk to each other directly, instead of tapping through walls, we had 24 hours...

Why is it so close? That’s been the chatter after these past two weeks in the three-month run of the Obama-McCain smackdown. The Obamaphiles are nervous that their man has stalled in the polls after what, objectively, was a successful trip overseas. The McCainites, terrified of a Democratic wave, are taking solace in the failure of Barack Obama to break away. The straggling Clintonites are busy preparing their told-you-sos. There are any number of theories offered for the tightness. One is that Obama is too temperamentally aloof for most Americans. According to the columnist Maureen Dowd, he is the Mr...

The day Andrew Sullivan found out Santa Claus does not exist: A few things have unsettled me these past couple of weeks about the Obama campaign. It is not the small adjustments to previously-held positions - FISA, the Second Amendment, Iraq. It's a sense that Obama's ample self-regard is lapsing into hubris. The signs of this are pretty trivial on the surface, but they are troubling nonetheless. That simulated faux-presidential seal was both tacky, silly and presumptive - a small version of "Mission Accomplished" Obama could well do without. The decision to give his acceptance speech in a stadium, rather...

Osama vs Obama 20 May 2008 06:05 pm Well: one person agrees with Bush's and Cheney's and Lieberman's loathing of Iran. (he links to an external site, showing Osama's hatred of Iran.)

From the very beginning, the premise and the promise of Barack Obama’s campaign was that it would transcend race. And last autumn the Obama team also knew this was the only way it could win. The Clinton brand among black voters was so strong, so unbreakable, so resilient a force that even the first credible black candidate for the presidency remained stuck 20-30% behind Hillary Clinton among African-American voters. She was, after all, the wife of the “first black president”, as the author Toni Morrison called Bill. She had almost all the black political establishment behind her. Her husband, from...

It is for many in the Obama camp an unthinkable thought. But politics is sometimes the art of adjusting today to what seemed inconceivable yesterday. I'm talking about the possibility — and the powerful logic — of a unity Obama-Clinton ticket for the Democrats. I never thought I'd even consider it; but times change; politics shifts, and in the roiling flux of this American campaign, a bold unifying gesture could make the Democratic ticket — and an Obama presidency — unstoppable almost overnight. It's still highly unlikely, but so was JF Kennedy running with Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan running...

One email has really got me thinking. The best point of those who disagree with my earlier post on Walker/Spann is that Walker wasn't/isn't really a lefty. He's actually a right-wing religious zealot. Here's the case: "Maybe I missed something, but I am not sure how a religious fundamentalist and zealot like John Walker is an embodiment of the American Hating Left. He is a right wing religious nut just like the guy arrested here in Cincinnati last week for sending fake anthrax to abortion clinics. While you may be correct that his permissive parents and his multicultural context may ...

Barack Obama made a call for nonviolence in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict - infuriating the Rev. Al Sharpton, who accused the presidential candidate of trying to "grandstand in front of white people," sources told The Post. I think that is part of Jeremiah Wright's view of Obama as well: he will never forgive him for winning so many white votes, and breaking the pattern and ideology of victimhood and marginalization that forged Wright's identity. This dynamic is very powerful in minority circles. In the gay world, for example, the younger generation faced enormous hostility at first in...

The manner in which free societies lose their moral compass is always incremental. Step by step by step, certain core values are whittled away. There is rarely a moment at which a government stands up, and asks its people if they wish to abandon such "quaint" notions as the Geneva Conventions, the rule of law, humane interrogation or habeas corpus. These things are abandoned incrementally or secretly, slice by slice, euphemism by euphemism, the chronology always clearer in retrospect than at the time. And each incremental step is always portrayed as a small but essential temporary sacrifice for the sake...

Last week was officially the moment that the race for the Democratic nomination slipped through the looking glass into surrealism. Here is a brief list of those people who are now actively supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: Pat Buchanan, a charming man slightly to the right of Genghis Khan; Rush Limbaugh, the most voluble and incendiary of right-wing talk-show hosts; Richard Mellon Scaife, the media mogul who financed the virulently antiClinton crusades of the 1990s; and, if you read between the lines, even Karl Rove, the “architect” of the past decade or so of Republican dominance in electoral politics. Am I...

Even after all the hype, this Tuesday’s vote in Pennsylvania will be a watershed primary election. This isn’t because it could determine whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues on its brutal, nihilistic path towards the destruction of the most promising figure in the Democratic party since Kennedy. It isn’t because it’s been an age since the last primary vote and every nasty toxin in American culture has been drawn to the surface by the Clinton poultice. It isn’t even because Pennsylvania is an indisputably important and large state that any Democrat needs to win in November. It is because the Clintons...