If Sullivan Believes Bush Then So Do I!

When Andrew Sullivan writes a post entitled "Reality Check," smart people watch their wallets (in a metaphorical sense, of course; I don't actually think that Sullivan is a pickpocket- although, if I shared his sense of journalistic ethics, I would rephrase that as: "While nothing has been confirmed yet, several people in the know have recently been talking about the long list of people accusing Sullivan of petty theft").

He says:

"REALITY CHECK: Interesting poll in USA Today: 70 percent think things are going moderately well or very well in Iraq; and 67 percent believe that the administration did not deliberately deceive anyone about the WMD threat from Saddam. If I were to poll my own brain, I'd come up with similar results. Sorry, Paul. Try harder."

I'm not really sure who Andy's trying to stick it to with that first poll result. I think that things are going moderately well in Iraq. The war is over, the Iraqi people are experiencing more freedom than they have in a generation, and the only people still shooting at us are coming in groups of ones, twos, and threes. For a formerly totalitarian country a large portion of whose population hates our guts, that's not too bad. No, what concerns me, and lot of other liberals, is the fact that more and more of the evidence is pointing towards a lukewarm commitment to rebuilding Iraq on the part of the administration, and the not-insignificant possibility of a hostile (or at the very least, corrupt as hell) government replacing Saddam's regime. It is not the current state of Iraq that I'm worried about; it's the future that concerns me.

In contrast, it is exceedingly clear who Sullivan is trying to stick it to with that second poll result. Actually, it reeks of desperation. With the weeks going by without any evidence of WMDs in Iraq, the administration is coming under increasingly heavy fire for deceiving the country on the road to war. For the first time since Enron, it seems that there is a seriously damaging story that is not going to go away in a week or two. As more and more people are realizing (some to their joy, others to their horror), this one has legs.

And so, the ridiculously fraudulent ex post facto explanation angle being covering in other corners of the Right-wing media, Andrew decides to rely on the good ol' common sense wisdom of the American people, a huge chunk of whom believe that some or all of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi.

Well, shit, if the American people plus Andrew Sullivan believe it, it must be true!

The funniest part about his post, however, is the obligatory shot at Paul Krugman. This man simply cannot get past his little jihad against PK. From the weeks and weeks of postings about Krugman's extremely minor but fully-disclosed dealings with Enron, to favorably citing Krugman-stalker Donald Luskin (who has turned into an embarrassment even to Krugman-haters), Andrew simply cannot stand to go even short periods of time without trying to discredit Bush's most consistent critic in the major media. At this point, it seems necessary to create some version of Godwin's Law specifically for Sullivan - whenever he mentions Krugman, he is automatically Wrong About Whatever He Is Talking About.