[guest post by Dana]

To my mind, any talk about the “objective truth” is particularly rich when coming from a man who obsessively pushed a conspiracy theory involving Sarah Palin’s uterus and made Trig Trutherism a thing.

As noted:

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.

Certainly, let’s take Dr. Sullivan’s discussions about mental health with the seriousness it deserves.

(Pre-emptive strike: This post is only a comment about Sullivan’s own mental health.)

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back)

–Dana

President Obama is currently exploiting Down syndrome at his website barackobama.com. He has published a letter, ostensibly from a grown Downs adult (although at the end she says she had help writing the letter from her obviously partisan relatives), that begins as follows:

Hello! My name is Brittany and I live in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. I am 25 years old (but I will be 26 on October 3rd!). I am a registered Democrat and I have been voting since I was 18. I am one of the 47% of Americans who fall under Mitt Romney’s definition of “entitled” and “unable to take responsibility for my life.” I have Down syndrome.

. . . .

I have also included my picture, not just because I’m cute, but because I wanted to give you a face of one of the 47% to share with Mr. Romney.

I wish you would come to Pennsylvania because I would really like to meet you.

Please say hello to your wife, Michelle, for me. I wish I could live in the White House, too, and I like your dog, Bo.

—Brittany

P.S. My mom and her friend helped me write this.

I bet mom and her friend would like to come along to the White House, too.

If Barack Obama could feel shame, he would probably start with his inclusion of this letter on his site. First of all, Obama supports allowing women to kill babies like Brittany, at least up until the time they are born.

Second, one of the most prominent Down syndrome babies in recent years has been Trig Palin. And while I’m sure you can find evidence of Obama giving lip service to the idea that Sarah Palin should not be mocked for keeping Trig, he didn’t go out of his way to tamp down the mockery his supporters heaped on her. Indeed, perhaps the most prominent Trig Truther, Andrew Sullivan, is a favorite of Obama’s:

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 thoughtful analysis with a sampling of lots of essays that are out there.

Obama loves Sullivan so much he invited him to a state dinner at the White House this year.

But wait! I’m not done yet! How about those upcoming ObamaCare taxes? Looks like they’re going to hit the parents of special needs children especially hard:

The 30-35 million American who use a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) at work to pay for their family’s basic medical needs will face a new government cap of $2,500 (currently the accounts are unlimited under federal law, though employers are allowed to set a cap).

There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children. There are several million families with special needs children in the United States, and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education.

This Obamacare tax provision will limit the options available to these families.

Please, President Obama, don’t pretend you’re on Brittany’s side, on the side of Down syndrome babies/fetuses or their parents, or that you have any right whatsoever to exploit this particular issue.

Thanks to dana.

[Posted by Karl]

As usual, you are positively encouraged to engage in sockpuppetry in this thread. The usual rules apply.

Please, be sure to switch back to your regular handle when commenting on other threads. I have made that mistake myself.

Sockpuppet comments about the Republican primary race are strictly prohibited. If you wish to use sockpuppets for that purpose, confine your comments to this thread. Same goes for any discussion that is not funny where people want to get angry at each other. Offending comments will be summarily deleted and the violators flogged.

And remember: the worst sin you can commit on this thread is not being funny.

—

It’s going to be hard for the Excitable Boy to ever top the unhinged dementia of Trig Trutherism, but it won’t be for lack of trying.  Andrew Sullivan’s latest fever dream involves not Sarah Palin, but one of his other favorite designated villains, the Prime Minister of Israel:

Here’s a prediction. Netanyahu, in league and concert with Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, will make his move to get rid of Obama soon. And he will be more lethal to this president than any of his domestic foes.

Sully does not quite have Benjamin Netanyahu on a grassy knoll… not yet, anyway.  Rather, he imagines Netanyahu in a conspiracy to launch a war against Iran to advantage the GOP in this year’s election, undoubtedly (and ironically) stroking a white Persian cat as he issues the attack orders.

A sane person might read stories of Israeli saber-rattling and at least consider the possibility that Israel is actually trying to avoid military action.  Or that stories about Israel not warning the US of an attack on Iran are designed to create plausible deniability for the Obama administration.  Instead, Andrew Sullivan apparently believed Andrew Adler’s lunatic comment speculating that Israel’s most inner circles have thought about ordering a hit on Pres. Obama — and he’s running with it.

Perhaps this is not a surprise, given the role Sullivan has awarded the Likud party in some of the bizarre conspiracy theories he has floated in recent years.  However, this new delusion almost necessarily implicates Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a former head of the Labor Party. Indeed, Sullivan also believes Netanyahu would rally “a key part of the Democratic fundraising machinery to side entirely with Israel against the US president.”  To whom is Sullivan referring?  He could mean anyone.  After all, this latest conspiracy theory is diverse, involving not just Jews, but a Mormon and a couple of Catholics (if only as henchmen).

What I really want to know: Who will portray Sullivan when this is turned into a major motion picture by Oliver Stone?

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

With a ridiculous cover headline — “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” — I get why Ann Althouse (or anyone, really) would not want to bother with the latest from Andrew Sullivan, although he is likely not responsible for that headline.  The article is not an ad hominem attack of Obama’s critics, but a centralized compilation of his various apologies for the President.  Insofar as his defenses parallel the likely narrative of Obama’s reelect campaign, it’s worth looking at his takes on criticism of Obama from the right (Sullivan also addresses criticism from the left, which won’t play much role in the campaign) on major issues:

Jobs.  Sullivan begins — as Team Obama almost certainly will — with Obama inheriting a terrible economy, writing that “[n]o fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the [first] 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment.”  Yet shortly thereafter, he writes:

Since [the beginning of 2010], the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration.

Sullivan is comparing Obama’s gross job creation to Bush’s net job creation, ignoring that Bush also inherited a recession resulting from the collapse of the tech bubble.  By Sullivan’s own standard, this is unfair.

By the standard of net jobs created, Obama remains underwater and will be lucky to get to zero net jobs created by the end of his term.  Conversely, if we simply judge Obama by the recovery, the results are terrible when compared to past recoveries.  Nearly a million people have dropped out of the labor force, dropping the participation rate to an historic low, implying an unemployment rate close to 11%, instead of the official 8.5%. (more…)

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Apparently Andrew Sullivan is not new to the concept of crackpot theories.  Long before he went spelunking in Sarah Palin’s womb to explain the incongruous event of a woman over forty years old giving birth to a child with Down’s Syndrome (note: I am being sarcastic), he was exploring the racial differences in IQ.  Groan.

I admit I didn’t know that back The Bell Curve came out, it was Andrew Sullivan’s decision to give a cover story to an essay by one of the authors summarizing its findings.  Sullivan justified it by saying, “the notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief.  It’s an empirical hypothesis that can be examined.”

Well, first, actually yeah, that is kind of is racist.  The only question is really whether or not it is true.  And there is nothing wrong with a serious scientific inquiry into the subject.  We should never shrink away from a question because we are worried what the answer might be.  But The Bell Curve wasn’t that kind of serious inquiry.  It was plainly an attempt to dress up regular old racism with a scientific gloss, something bigots had been doing since eugenics was fashionable.

The Bell Curve of course is the book that asserted that black people, on average, had a lower intelligence than white people, or so that is what its authors claimed it proved.  What it actually proved, precisely understood, is far less useful: that the people considered by a myriad of persons to be “black” tended to have lower IQ scores than people considered “white.”  And when you state it like that, you start to see the hidden assumptions that completely undermine their analysis.

(more…)

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Okay so metaphorically, we just chopped off Charles Johnson’s head and mounted it on a pike on our collective front lawn, so why not go for Andrew Sullivan next?  Sullivan, in his usual method of being immune to facts, has gone all “Trig Truther” on Jared Loughner, claiming 1) it was reasonable to assume that the right was responsible for the Safeway Massacre, and 2) it might turn out Loughner was inspired by the right.  This gets to be too much for Megan McArdle, who writes in part:

Andrew’s defense seems to be that there are a lot of right wing jerks out there, and that by combing Loughner’s writing, he can find a few sentences here and there that sort of sound like things that might have been said by one of those right wing jerks.  But I’m pretty sure that if I combed through Loughner’s writing, I could find some sentences here and there that imply that Loughner read Andrew’s writing, or gay rights literature, or Edmund Burke.

To which Sullivan replies:

Really? Go ahead. Make my day. Or withdraw the claim.

Um, “make my day?”  Isn’t that violent rhetoric?

And really coming from Sullivan, that sounds like overcompensation.

But as for the challenge… okay, guys, let’s “make his day.”  This is a full on bleg.  Let’s find quotes from Sullivan that sound a lot like Loughner and post them in the comments.  Probably the first place to start would be Sullivan’s Trig Trutherism, compared to 9-11 Trutherism.  So come on, let’s see if anyone can make his day.

H/t: Big Government, and Simon Jester.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

Andrew Sullivan is handing out compliments to Sarah Palin, as part of the New Civility and what he calls “generous anger”:

And when there are individuals in politics you have learned to distrust or oppose, it is always helpful from time to time to add a genuine compliment, not for the sake of it, or for credentializing, but because there are very few people who have no redeeming features and noting them is only fair.

How about my long treatment of Sarah Palin? Here, there is no conceivable way in which, in my judgment, her presence on the national stage can improve our discourse, help solve our problems or improve public life. But that does not forbid one from noting the great example she has shown in rearing a child with Down Syndrome, whatever his provenance, or noting her effectiveness as a demagogue, or from admiring her father’s genuineness or her skill in exploiting new media.

Awwww. That’s kinda sweet. I think it’s time we on the right return the compliment.

Here goes . . .

Ahem . . .

There is no conceivable way in which, in my judgment, Andrew Sullivan’s presence on the Internet can serve any useful purpose. But that does not forbid one from noting the great example he has shown in rising above the revelation that he sought gay sex on the Internet after condemning that exact behavior in others. That he has managed to maintain an audience despite such stunning hypocrisy — coupled with his demented and protracted investigation into Sarah Palin’s uterus — is a testament to Andrew’s skill in identifying and exploiting suckers with rank demagoguery.

“I offer no apologies or regrets for persistence.”

Here endeth the compliments.

UPDATE: Karl has much more in comments about other things Sullivan has managed to rise above. And (h/t dana) iowahawk has more on the Juicebox Mafia as CSI — featuring “Chief Forensic Gynecologist Andrew Sullivan.”

[Posted by Karl]

Andrew Sullivan is wallowing in self-pity over what he anticipates as a double digit win for Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race. It is a display that has television’s Andy Levy and IMAO’s Frank Fleming feeling sorry for Sully. But that pity might stop people from noticing that “the most popular one- or two- or three-man blog on the internet” has descended from unhinged conspiracy theorist to delusional hack.

Consider his analysis of the Massachusetts special election:

I can see no alternative scenario but a huge – staggeringly huge – victory for the FNC/RNC machine tomorrow. They crafted a strategy of total oppositionism to anything Obama proposed a year ago. Remember they gave him zero votes on even the stimulus in his first weeks. They saw health insurance reform as Obama’s Waterloo, and, thanks in part to the dithering Democrats, they beat him on that hill. They have successfully channeled all the rage at the massive debt and recession the president inherited on Obama after just one year. If they can do that already, against the massive evidence against them, they have the power to wield populism to destroy any attempt by government to address any actual problems.

I don’t remember that the GOP gave Obama zero votes on the stimulus bill, mostly because Snowe, Collins and Specter voted for it. I do recall Sen. Jim DeMint’s “Waterloo” comment, as it pointed out how utterly self-centered Obama was in trying to ram his unpopular proposals through Congress. I don’t remember that they beat Obama on taking over the US healthcare system, mostly because both houses of Congress have passed bills, and can pass a final bill without a single Republican vote. (One wonders why Sullivan, who claims to be a True Conservative, would see either of the health boondoggles Congress passed as desirable, but I digress.) I do not believe Obama has inherited massive debt, mostly because the claim is horse manure on at least four levels.

Then there are Sullivan’s predictions:

Even if Coakley wins – and my guess is she’ll lose by a double digit margin – the bill is dead. The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it. That’s all he can get now – and even that will be a stretch.

The earlier, less deranged Sullivan would have been smart enough — and attentive enough to the debate — to know that mandating coverage of pre-existing conditions has no chance of passage without coming up with the funding to prevent insurers from going into a death spiral, which sets you down the road to requiring people to buy insurance, etc.

It is one thing to entertain bizarre conspiracy theories about Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, and so on. It is another to sloppily regurgitate partisan Democratic whine about the current political environment that has no basis in reality. Does he ever look in the mirror and entertain the thought that Obama and the Dems are suffering now because his hyperventilating, sycophantic paeans to Obama — and those of his fellow travelers in the establishment media — set up unrealistic expectations? Naaaaaaaah.

–Karl

Sullivan fail.

It’s apology time, Milky Loads.

This is my “Okay, I’ll post about Andrew Sullivan if you stop writing me about him” post.

Via the Internet Scofflaw, we learned that Andrew Sullivan once sanctimoniously wrote:

My view is that no one is above the law, and that when a society based on law prosecutes the powerless and excuses the powerful, it is corroding its own soul.

So when Andrew Sullivan gets busted for something, he will of course demand to be prosecuted if those less powerful than he are also being prosecuted. Right?

Heh.

Via a swarm of e-mailers, we learn that in a recent case where Sullivan got busted (for pot), charges were dismissed — and a judge has written:

In the Court’s view, in seeking leave to dismiss the charge against Mr. Sullivan, the United States Attorney is not being faithful to a cardinal principle of our legal system, i.e., that all persons stand equal before the law and are to be treated equally in a court of justice once judicial processes are invoked. It is quite apparent that Mr. Sullivan is being treated differently from others who have been charged with the same crime in similar circumstances.

You see, his arrest could endanger his immigration status. Getting busted for pot probably endangers others’ immigration status as well, but they are not Andrew Sullivan, Famous Hypocrite, friend to Obama, and client of the brother of a U.S. Congressman.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that anyone would be surprised.

It’s quite apparent that there is one standard for Andrew Sullivan and another standard for the rest of us. But we already knew that. Andrew Sullivan is the world’s biggest hypocrite. He is a man who decried promiscuous gay sex:

It all began in April, when Sullivan published a mocking account of his recent visit to San Francisco. “The streets were dotted with the usual hairy-backed homos,” he had snarked. “I saw one hirsute fellow dressed from head to toe in flamingo motifs.”

. . . .

This was classic Sullivan, right down to the contempt for what he calls the “libidinal pathology” of gay sexual culture. He considers gay marriage the only healthy alternative to “a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation.” He has hectored gay men for their obsession with “manic muscle factories,” and written at length about the need for “responsibility” in the age of AIDS.

And then advertised online for promiscuous gay sex (link not safe for work):

I take loads in my ass.
I take loads in my mouth.
I give loads in asses.
I give loads in mouths.

TURN-ONS
hairy hung masculine guys

And when Sullivan’s penchant for seeking cheap sex from strangers was revealed, he pontificated that it was proper to ignore the controversy:

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 to confirm a story presented anonymously, the only salient details of which I believed to be untrue. Why should I answer?

But when it came to Sarah Palin’s son, Sullivan was only to happy to press Palin to answer a story presented anonymously, the only salient details of which were untrue. Did Sullivan think Palin should answer? Naturally, that was different:

Why not kill this rumor with Palin’s medical records? A 43 year old woman’s pregnancy with a Downs Syndrome child would have been intensely monitored, and the records must be a mile long. Just release them, ok?

One standard for me, another for thee. If there is any point on which Sullivan is consistent, that is it.