One flew over the Daily Ditch
In “Andrew Sullivan revises history (again),” Atlantic national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg sagely observed that “Andrew Sullivan should be thankful that The Atlantic’s fact-checking department has no purview over the magazine’s website.” Goldberg subsequently appended this clarification: “”When I implied above that a magazine with standards would not allow Andrew to misinterpret history, I should [...]
Andrew Sullivan’s Island
Leon Wieseltier created a stir this week when he floated the
idea that Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan’s harsh
attacks on Israel may be motivated by anti-Semitism.
For good reason, many argue that Sullivan should not be taken
seriously and deserves to be ignored. Yet he still drives
political [...]
In which Andrew Sullivan tortures the truth
In Andrew Sullivan’s hysterical effusions on “torture,” usually featuring Dick Cheney, Glenn Reynolds finds Sullivan to be “a preening, hectoring, self-centered, unpersuasive bad writer. ” The current occasion of Reynolds’s verdict is this post by Sullivan.
Coincidentally, of my own stuff from 2009, my favorite post is “Obama veers into the Daily Ditch” [...]
Learning from Hannah Rosenthal
Barack Obama’s appointed head of the State Department anti-anti-Semitism office is one Hannah Rosenthal. Like other Obama administration diplomats, Rosenthal has apparently decided that her real battle should be against Israel. Rosenthal made waves in Israel this week when she criticized Israel Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren for failing sufficiently [...]
The Daily Ditch, part 325
Charles Krauthammer responds to a recent attack on him by Andrew Sullivan. Krauthammer demonstrates with clinical precision that Sullivan “leap[s] from nonexistent fact to blanket ad hominem without even a pause for a reality check.” I wish only that Krauthammer had brought his psychiatric training to the discussion.
The phenomenon Krauthammer describes is not [...]
The Decline and Fall of Andrew Sullivan
I’m currently finishing the last volume of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. One of the book’s themes is the decline and fall of Kenneth Widmerpool, a friend (sort of) of the narrator who is introduced in the first pages of the first volume, some forty years before the series’ end.
It occurs [...]
