Sullivan's Travails

Andrew Sullivan cannot have an easy life. A Catholic gay man who is also HIV positive, his political views have led him to attach himself to a party, a movement and a church that believe him to be practicing an abomination. Influential Republican power-brokers blame America's sexual tolerance for the attacks of 9/11. The military he reveres is kicking gays out at a rate unseen since the presidency of Ronald Reagan--another Sullivan hero. And his church offers a warmer embrace for pedophile priests than for honest homosexuals.

Sullivan is best known as a kind of all-purpose controversy magnet. He posed for a Gap ad; he posted a lurid online advertisement for unprotected sex; and he briefly accepted $7,500 in paid website advertising from a pharmaceutical industry trade association whose products he regularly praises, before returning it. During his stormy editorship of The New Republic, he opened its pages to the lunatic ravings of Camille Paglia, the racist pseudoscience of Charles Murray and the libelous fantasies of Stephen Glass. Sullivan has, moreover, been the target of much gay ire over the conservative content of his writings in The New York Times Magazine, where its editors inexplicably allowed him--slyly but effectively--to out a whole host of allegedly gay Democratic politicians, including Clinton Cabinet members, along with liberal talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell.

Now Sullivan has launched a career in the brave new world of "blogging," or vanity websites. And while his site arouses a certain gruesome car-wreck fascination, it serves primarily as a reminder to writers of why we need editors. Andrewsullivan.com sets a standard for narcissistic egocentricity that makes Henry Kissinger look like St. Francis of Assisi. Readers are informed, for instance, that Andy's toilet recently overflowed; that he had a rollicking dinner chez Hitchens; that he might have seen Tina Brown across a hotel lobby, but he's not sure; and that, in separate, apparently unrelated incidents, he had a nightmare and ate a bad tuna-fish sandwich that upset his tummy, requiring many "stomach evacuations."

Beyond the confines of his bathroom, Sullivan's singular obsession appears to be the crushing of any hint of democratic debate about the war. His campaign began with a now notorious London Times missive warning his fellow patriots: "The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts...may well mount...a fifth column." Called upon to defend this vile slander of inhabitants of the very city that suffered the attack, Sullivan named four writers who, he determined, "were more concerned with what they see as the evil of American power than the evil of terrorism, that their first response was to blame America." Among the myriad problems with this answer was the fact that at least one of the four--me, as it happens--supported the war and much of the patriotic reaction the attacks inspired.

No matter, the Sullivan Inquisition continues undeterred. Barely a day passes without his unmasking yet another "Anti-War Democrat"--in whose ranks he includes the pro-war Tom Daschle, the pro-war Hillary Clinton and the pro-war Janet Reno, among many others--basing his argument less on the words these politicians speak than on the thoughts he knows them to be holding in secret. In Clinton's case, he writes that when she said that Congress should be "asking the hard questions" and "having the debate Congress is required to have--where to go, what to do," her words may have been "unobjectionable" but her "intent is clear." Democrats simply prefer "weakness" to a "strong and unapologetic role in the role [sic]." Can there be a better illustration of the modus operandi of the ideological commissar--the McCarthyite mullah--than this kind of mindreading? (It's also a pretty solid argument for proofreaders.)

A British expat, Sullivan has set himself up as a one-man House Un-American Activities Committee. Take, for instance, Ted Rall's nasty, offensive cartoon ridiculing Marianne Pearl and 9/11 widows as money-grubbing attention grabbers. "If this is what is motivating some elements of the anti-war left," he roared, "they're even more depraved than I thought," as if mocking the victims of September 11 is a leftist cause célèbre; as if one silly cartoonist speaks for anyone but himself. Next came the commissar's decree: "No paper should ever run Rall again."

Sometimes Sullivan's hysterics are merely amusing. For instance, his TNR colleague Jonathan Chait counted fifty-one attacks on the moderately liberal Paul Krugman in slightly more than five weeks. Sullivan also, in Chait's words, "distort[ed] Krugman's views so wildly as to venture into pure fantasy." (This happens a lot.) The pundit's crime was to accept a $37,500 consulting payment from Enron years before he became a columnist and to disclose it when he first mentioned Enron favorably in Forbes and later negatively for the Times. William Kristol and Irwin Stelzer, by contrast, took their Enron cash and then proceeded, respectively, to edit and to write a highly favorable article about the company without any niceties of financial disclosure. Calculated on the basis of Sullivan attacks, the conservatives' transgressions were approximately one-twentieth as serious.

It is not as if responsible blogging is impossible. Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles.com and Josh Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com manage to control (or at least occasionally mock) their own egos while offering valuable and quirky takes on the news, and without any news from their bathrooms. But the will to censorship that underlies Sullivan's rants is dangerous. Smart fellows like Ron Rosenbaum, Howard Kurtz and Michael Wolff have marveled at the ideological heterodoxy of the well-spoken "gaycatholictory" who likes to compare himself to George Orwell. This reputation is--to put it mildly--undeserved. In the space of a few days, Sullivan's site recommended articles by Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, Norman Podhoretz, William F. Buckley and Michael Ledeen. Not exactly Orwell Country, I fear. Sullivan recently announced to his acolytes that he plans to write less in order to play Benedick in a Washington production of Much Ado About Nothing in a pair of black leather pants. "That should pack them in," he adds. Give the man credit for audacity, if nothing else.

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