Eric Alterman Endorses Genocide!

I hate Andrew Sullivan.

Not for the reasons most people hate him. Not, for instance, because he refuses to engage anyone in actual debate. Not because of his weird jihads against organizations that fired his worthless ass and people who point out that George Bush tells lies. Not because he seems to think that he is morally and intellectually superior to everyone on the Left wing. Not even because of the disturbingly sycophantic orgasm he had while watching one of the most inept, stumbling and blatantly dishonest State of the Union addresses in American history.

No, I hate Andrew Sullivan because he makes me a conformist. How? Because he keeps writing such utterly dishonest bullshit that everyone with a soul, a brain, and a pen has started writing anti-Sullivan screeds, desperately trying to exorcise the unclean feeling they get when they read him. It's gotten to the point where writing refutations of Sullivan's writing is about as original as watching TRL.

Everybody's doing it.

And yet...

And yet...

It simply must be done. I've tried showering. It doesn't work. I feel dirty.

So, let's just have a little fun with Andy, shall we? Because I don't feel like talking about this for very long.

The gist of the column is that, well, Eric Alterman is stupid and mean. He is stupid because he is repelled by Ann Coulter and has no compunctions about saying so in public (Good Lord! That means I'm retarded!), and mean because he wishes Rush Limbaugh would go away (Good Lord! That means I'm Satan!).

The fun starts, of course, when he accuses Alterman of advocating genocide.

Sharp turn! Lost me there.

Alterman, in an interview, said, "I hate to say it, but I wish the guy [Rush Limbaugh] would have gone deaf. I shouldn't say that, but on behalf of the country, it would be better without Limbaugh and his 20 million listeners."

Anyone who has actually heard Limbaugh speak for more than 10 minutes knows that causing Limbaugh to go deaf (or dumb..preferrably dumb) should be, priority wise, somewhere between balancing the budget and defending the country against terrorist attacks. Yes, it's that important. But I'm willing to admit that the point is debatable.

What is not debatable is the fact that, from the context, it is blindingly obvious that Alterman is not saying we should get rid of Limbaugh's 20 million listeners (although I, for the record, am). Rather, he means it would be a lot better if those 20 million people did not have Rush to listen to.

This distinction, of course, is beyond Sullivan. He bitches on for a little while about how terrible and horrible Alterman is, and how he is personally responsible for the state of American political discourse. He gets all self-righteous about how bad it would be if someone advocated the slaughter of 10 million homosexuals, or 10 million African-Americans (Note to Andy: take a close look at some of your pals on the Right. You know, the religious fundamentalists and the white supremicists?).

His coup de grace, then, is this brilliant rhetorical quesiton:

"Do you think [a conservative] would still have a place in respectable discourse after [suggesting various liberal groups should be killed in large numbers]?"

Through wit and cleverness, he implies that the answer is no. I, surprisingly enough, disagree. The answer, of course, is (say it with me):

Ann Coulter.

A tired whipping post for us Liberals, yes, but then, so is Sullivan.

The one bright point in this haze of dip-shitism is that this means that people on the Right are scared of our pal Eric. If you'll look carefully, the Right only really starts to throw a fit about what a bad person someone is when they start making the Right look bad, which What Liberal Media? certainly does.

But that's the only good thing, and not nearly enough to cheer me up. I'm done with this. I grow tired of this game, and this man. No more Sullivan for at least two weeks.

Edit: After all that, I realized that I forgot to mention what article I'm talking about. It's his always fair and unbiased Idiocy of the Week in Salon. Sorry. The intern responsible for the oversight has been shot.