Having promised only fourteen months ago that he would leave and never darken our door again, Mr. Andrew Sullivan is back on teevee yet again, in the company of Chris Matthews yet again, to share his panicked True Conservative idiocy with the American public yet again.
And so, on the same day that Squint Scarborough on my "Liberal" teevee once again meekly handed a spotlight over to the smirking, blood-drunk, unreconstructed sociopath Bill Kristol, Chris Matthews on my "Liberal" teevee also let Andrew Sullivan cut to the front of the Beltway buffet line to once again make an utter ass of himself as in the days of old.
First, of course, Mr. Sullivan got right with God by denouncing Trump in clear, unambiguous terms.
And then out came the giant Both Siderist hammer... (h/t Heather for capturing for posterity the portion of Mr. Sullivan's antics which you will not find anywhere on MSNBC's own website)
...
Sullivan: The Left has gone so far to the Left it's now basically [a] Marxist. Especially on the questions of race.
Matthews: How... Who do you like? Your [bretty?] broad-brushing. Hillary's a loser. She's a Dukakis. The Democratic Party is swept all the way to the Left...
Sullivan: Well not the whole Democratic Party...
Matthews: Well you said that.
Sullivan: No I didn't. I said. You mentioned Black Lives Matter. I mean the race. The Left on the race question is now neo-Marxist in a way it hasn't been at all in the past.
Matthews: Neo-Marxist?
Sullivan: Yes! It believes that race is a structurally, economically and socially imponderable and completely unmovable force. I mean, I've read Ta-Nehisi Coates. That's what it is! It's Marxism without the happy ending!
Eugene Robinson: Oh, that's not quite what Ta-Nehisi says. I means he doesn't quite say it's unmovable.
Sullivan: He does!
Robinson: He says it's big.
Sullivan: He says the oppression is permanent because the structure is permanent....
And here it comes...
Sullivan: You have those attitudes on one side and Trump's white nationalism on another...
Matthews then goes to his safe place -- another meandering, Both Siderist mouth-dump about how everything is f*cked up and gridlocked and its everyone's fault because for the last 20 years...yadda yadda yadda and Sullivan just keeps right on going, shrieking and setting his scalp on fire that we are on the verge of a American fascist state in which Trump will rule by decree somehow.
Mr. Robinson then attempts to talk Mr. Sullivan down off the table by explaining to him as you would explain things to a small, hysterical child that, while scary, Trump is actually just a large, pestiferous rodent and not the second coming of Hitler.
In the many years since I began documenting Andrew Sullivan's public idiocies, Mr. Sullivan compiled such a formidable portfolio of ludicrous public pronouncements that, for the good of the Republic, I was forced to start an ongoing feature called "Stupid Sh*t Andrew Sullivan Says". Like my ongoing coverage of the inexplicably indestructible David Brooks, David Frum, Ron "Severe Dementia" Fournier, the Sunday Shows and so forth, the Sullivan beat was often a lonely one, but I have always known that, as the Conservative movement cracked up and the Republican party crashed and burned, the fairy tales that America's Very Serious Conservative Pundits and Thinkers would have to spin in order to save their seats at the Beltway media trough would get more and more amusing the further and further they fled from reality.
In the case of America's most famous gay Catholic Tory writer of opinions, his Napoleon-retreating-from-Moscow exodus from the real world was made ever so much more entertaining by the fact that three of the topics over which Mr. Sullivan obsessed -- Conservatism, race and politics -- are three subjects about which Mr. Sullivan clearly knows absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Up until he shuttered his blog and promised to quit bothering everyone, Mr. Sullivan remained defiantly certain that somewhere behind America's fake Conservatism of lavishly-funded think tanks, newspapers, magazines, book publishers, Hate Radio, Fox news, pulpits and politics ... some Disneyfied Reaganeque fantasyland of real Conservatism was lurking. And in an amazing coincidence, that real Conservatism always just happened to encompass whatever vagrant thought was flitting through Andrew Sullivan's head during any given week, even when that vagrant thought is the polar opposite of the thought which was flitting around in there a few years before.
On the subject of America's long history of white supremacy and racism, Mr. Sullivan has always been a rolling disaster. The existence of persistent and pernicious institutional racism was something that his Disneyfied Reaganeque fantasyland real Conservatism simply could not accommodate so he repeatedly just wish-wish-wished it away. Hell, as recently as three years ago, Mr. Sullivan appears to have been genuinely unaware that America fought a long and bloody Civil War over the question of whether or not God had ordained that White Men should rule the Earth by divine right.
And having promised to take his leave of Earthly matters and ascend bodily to a Better Place beyond the concerns of the rest of us scuttling buskers, Mr. Sullivan would now like to descend back into the realm of Earthly matters and once again be given a seat at the table and a byline in a major American publication where he may convert his misunderstanding of one book by one man into a damning declaration that the entire Left is "neo-Marxist" because Both Sides!
And he'll get away with it too. Yes, he is a fop and a fraud and, yes, of course he will be skipped to the front of the queue and his Beltway fortunes and privileges will be fully restored. Because as Tengrain of "Mock, Paper, Scissors" has astutely observed, the Beltway media plays a game of musical chairs in which no chair is ever taken away and no new players are added (except Luke Russert.)
So as we wind down my 11th blogiversary celebration, the great wheel turns once again and what we had hope was gone for good is now back yet again.
The Return of Stupid Shi*t Andrew Sullivan Says.
God help us all.
crossposted from Driftglass
