Sully's descent to farce

Via The Corner: official notice that Andrew Sullivan is, shall we say, a few condoms short of a pack.

Harsh? You be the judge. Below I've excerpted a sizable chunk of Sullivan's commentary from Sunday's Times of London, as a public service: that august paper's online edition is virtually inaccessible to statesiders without LexisNexis, unless one is willing to pay a stiff price in GBP or resort to more underhanded (coughBugMeNotcough) means.

Kerry: the right choice for conservatives

If you are a conservative, whom should you be rooting for in the American elections? I am not being entirely facetious here. The conservative “movement” in the United States is still firmly behind the re-election of President George W Bush. He uses conservative rhetoric — taking the war to the enemy, upholding conservative social values, respecting religious faith, protecting the family and so on.

He is widely regarded as one of the most conservative presidents in recent history — rivalling Reagan, eclipsing his own father in right-wing bona fides. And yet if you decouple the notion of being a conservative from being a Republican, nobody can doubt that the Bush administration has been pursuing some highly unconservative policies.

Start with the war. Almost overnight after 9/11 Bush junked decades of American policy in the Middle East, abandoning attempts to manage Arab autocracies for the sake of the oil supply and instead forging a policy of radical democratisation. He invaded two countries and is trying to convert them to modern democracies.

Nothing so liberal has been attempted in a long time. In the 2000 campaign, Bush mocked the idea of “nation building” as liberal claptrap. Now it’s the centrepiece of his administration. The fact that anti-American lefties despise the attempt to democratise foreign countries should not disguise the fact that Bush is, in this respect, indisputably a foreign policy liberal. He has shown none of his father’s caution, no interest in old-style realpolitik.

Reading this one might forget that Sullivan strongly supported military action both in Afghanistan and Iraq, even while throwing nonstop hissy fits acting as the reincarnation of Horace Greeley. The opener “He invaded two countries…” is particularly choice, as it recalls (deliberately, to be sure) the antiwar Left's claims that the American president is to blame for the world's ills.

There is no mention whatsoever in this column of the nature of this war, or of our enemies. And 9/11 appears only as a passing note.

At home Bush has been just as radical. He has junked decades of conservative attempts to restrain government and pushed federal spending to record levels, dismissing the idea that this will have damaging consequences. He has poured money into agricultural subsidies, he famously put tariffs on foreign steel, he has expanded the healthcare programme and increased the role of central government in education.

He has little or no concern for the separation of church and state, funnelling public money to religious charities, and he has appointed some of the most radical jurists to the federal bench. Just try finding a coherent theme in Bush Republicanism. It is in fact one of the most ramshackle distillations of political expediency ever tarted up as an “ism”.

M'kay. I, too, have problems with this Administration's freespending ways—the Medicare expansion and the agriculture subsidies are both abominations.

But. The steel tariffs? Gotta do better than that, Sully. And save for the Britishism “tarted up”, the second paragraph reads like a NYT editorial, with about as much credibility.

And though I might be mistaken on this—I quit regularly perusing Sullivan's site a year back, after he started PMSing every other week—the only tangible criticism he's offered of the President's judicial nods are that they aren't inclined to mandate gay marriage post-haste. (Which brings up another odd omission in this piece: homosexual marriage, the central, fiery star in Andrew's firmament.)

When so many people warned that the hardest task in Iraq would be what happened after the fall of Baghdad, was it sensible to junk all the carefully written government reports for reconstruction and wing it? Was it wise to brag in the days after the first military victory in Iraq that it was “mission accomplished”? When the insurgency was growing, was it sensible to apply the methods of Guantanamo Bay to the hundreds of petty criminals and innocents hauled into Abu Ghraib?

At almost every juncture where prudence might have been called for, Bush opted for winging it. This approach can scarcely be called conservative.

Is Sullivan insinuating that the scandal at Abu Ghraib was the result of regular practice at Gitmo? 'Cause that would, you know, make him either factually challenged or a liar.

Or both.

And “winging it” is rather in the eyes of the beholder. Were there mistakes—even very serious ones—during the immediate postwar and the following occupation? Absolutely. But what Sullivan and a host of other neoliberal Platonists refuse to recognize is the simple truth that there would always, under any set of circumstances and with the most prescient of leadership, have been some mistakes. There's not some transcendent, shiny Form representing the ideal invasion and reformation of a corrupt fascist dictatorship by a noble alliance.

Not even World War II—the archetype of such liberations—could measure up to such standards. (See also: Victor Davis Hanson).

Now down the rabbit-hole:

So where is conservatism to be found? Maybe you should cast a glance at Boston, where this week the Democratic convention will anoint one John Forbes Kerry, a northeastern patrician who is fast becoming the eastern establishment’s favourite son.

Yes, Kerry’s record on spending, defence and social policy has been liberal. But that is not the theme of his campaign.

[emphasis added.]

Did I mention farce?

What follows are several paragraphs contrasting the two candidates. Sullivan plays a strange game here, sometimes putting Kerry's position in unflattering terms (“We need to return to the diplomatic obeisance to the United Nations”), other times making the Senator sound rather like the author himself (“At home we need to restrain the unruly religious right”—never mind that the influence of groups like the Christian Coalition has been in decline for a decade).

The concluding paragraphs read like a study in denial.

Does that make Kerry right and Bush wrong? On the most fundamental matter, ie the war, I think Bush has been basically right: right to see the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Islamist terror; right to realise that the French would never have acquiesced to ridding the world of Saddam; right to endorse the notion of pre-emption in a world of new and grave dangers.

Much of the hard work has now been done. Nobody seriously believes that Bush will start another war. And in some ways Kerry may be better suited to the difficult task of nation building than Bush.

Much of the hard work is done? And what is this about “another war”? How many times has Sullivan himself claimed to see further than most, foretelling that the struggle against atavistic Islamic nihilism was an ongoing war that might take a generation? That this struggle is the defining issue of our time, and that the very survival of the West is at stake?

What about Iran? North Korea? Saudi Arabia? Has Senator Kerry provided even the semblance of a foreign policy able to deal with these regimes? And are we back to normalcy, until such time as a mushroom cloud opens over New York or San Francisco or Seattle, because as a people we lost interest and left a dangerous enemy wounded but ultimately undefeated?

At home Bush has done much to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government and he has been almost criminally reckless in his conduct of the war. He and America will never live down the intelligence debacle of the missing WMDs. He and America will be hard put to regain the moral high ground after Abu Ghraib.

The argument that Kerry must make is that he can continue the war but without Bush’s polarising recklessness. And at home he must reassure Americans that he is the centrist candidate, controlled neither by the foaming Michael Moore left nor by the vitriolic religious right.

The utter mendacity of this passage is worthy of Moore. Certainly Sullivan is smarter. But evident malice that he holds towards the President is of the same order as that found on the Left, and is all the more remarkable because of the unrestrained admiration that it displaced.

Put all that together and I may not find myself the only conservative moving slowly and reluctantly towards the notion that Kerry may be the right man — and the conservative choice — for a difficult and perilous time.

Dear Andrew:

And you are making a quite convincing case for the latter.

MORE: Over to Ace. (I'm encroaching on his domain with this, anyway.)

Sullivan is Kelly Clarkson. We're all tired of her. I'm saving my $20 this year and buying an E tab.

Yes.

And now I"m so over Andrew Kelly Clarkson.

He's just so 2002.