Harvard Magazine and the Left’s Andrew Sullivan love affair
Speaking of Harvard, I just got a gander at Harvard Magazine, which has a smugly grinning Andrew Sullivan on the cover, as the exemplar of “The New Media.” I thought the article would be about bloggers generally, but the table of contents tells me I’m wrong: “World’s Best Blogger?” it asks. It then explains that the article is about “Andrew Sullivan, fiscal conservative [huh?] and social liberal, navigates the changing media landscape.” Turn to the article itself, and the caption says: “World’s Best Blogger? Andrew Sullivan’s views are predictable in only one way: always stimulating.”
To give you an inkling of the level of research that goes into this type of sycophancy — sycophancy that’s mailed on a regular basis to all Harvard grads — get a load of this exchange between one reader of the article (which is on the internet) and the article’s author, Jesse Kornbluth. First, the reader comment:
Andrew Sullivan didn’t engage in partisan speculation (or, for that matter, ascribe partisan blame) after the Tuscon shootings?? Really??
What world are you living in??
Perhaps it is the same one Sullivan is living in, there one where he still believes that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy.
The guy is one step short of wearing tin foil on his head. If that’s your criteria for world’s best blogger, then you’ve made a very good choice. Just ask yourself this question: If Andrew Sullivan were as “relentless” in asking Barack Obama for HIS birth certificate, would you still consider him the blogger of the year?
Yeah, didn’t think so. (nor should you; but I guess it’s OK, because his utter lunacy is directed at someone you both mutually hate).
Second, Jesse Kornbluth’s polite, but utterly clueless, reply:
As the author of the piece, I could respond better to these charges if you’d cite some specifics. Namely: could you provide a link to Sullivan’s Tuscon coverage in which he points a finger at a group or person who directed the shooter? And, in regard to Governor Palin, could you provide a link to a passage in the Dish where Sullivan makes the claim that she’s not Trig’s mother? Many thanks. JK
In about one second, any doofus can summon up myriad posts Sullivan did about Palin and Trig, or can find conservative comments castigating him for his lunatic monomania. Here are a bazillion such links. The same holds true for Sullivan’s hysterical screeds about Tucson. But someone who wrote an entire article about Sullivan for the glossy Harvard Magazine was not only unable to find evidence of his quixotic little obsessions in the first place, but also was either unable to do so (or couldn’t be bothered to do so) in the second instance, when someone brought those facts to his attention. You’d think that a Harvard grad (Class of ’68) could do better than that.
Andrew Sullivan is a bright guy. He’s also one of the people I credit with helping me cross the Rubicon from political Left to political Right. I was a New Republic subscriber for years. When he took over as editor, his editorials were so ludicrous and hysterical, I started getting jaundiced with the magazine and ended up being open to new influences. (Same holds true for Paul Krugman, whose anti-Bush hysteria leeched out any credibility from his writings, again sending me looking for more intelligence in political and economic commentary.) I have reason, therefore, to be grateful to Sullivan. But to laud the guy as a great thinker — he’s simply not. And for someone to write a whole laudatory article about the man without being aware of one of his overriding political passions (that his, his obsession with the identity of Trig’s birth mother) or of his ill-informed, partisan, post-Tucson rants, reveals lazy thinking, lazy research and lazy writing — which, sadly, is about all I expect from a lot of Harvard’s brand nowadays.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News
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