Andrew Sullivan On The Importance Of Consistency

You know you’re in trouble when Sullivan titles a post, “Consistency Revisited.”

And apropos of nothing, Andrew sure knows how ruin someone on the right — my reputation amongst my fellow Neocon Rightwing Death Beasts is forever tarnished, as Sullivan utters those dreaded words, “Ed Driscoll has a good point”:

I’ve noticed a few right-of-center blogs complaining of double standards on the left, in the denunciations of extremist rhetoric and imagery of the Tea Party marches. Ed Driscoll has a good point. The extremes of the anti-war left before Iraq were every bit as inflammatory and loopy as the Tea Partiers today. Now, they were opposing a war that turned out to be a catastrophe for all involved [Especially for Saddam — Ed], while the Tea Partiers are just opposing the working poor having a chance to buy health insurance. But if Godwin’s Law is the point, many (but not all) on the left currently do not have a leg to stand on.

Of course, Andrew backed the Iraq War himself, at least until his great schism of 2004, which led to writing this about President Bush’s opponent in 2004: “Kerry may be the right man – and the conservative choice – for a difficult and perilous time.”

By 2007, Andrew found a neat way to make a subtle variation on the increasingly shopworn Bush=Hitler chorus, by arguing that Bush equaled Hindenburg(!), when Sullivan dubbed him “The Weimar President.” Back then, I wrote:

My current favorite is Andrew Sullivan’s newest riff, on “The Weimar President”. I can only guess that Andrew believes that President Bush is an elderly figurehead leading a weakened but relatively benign quasi-socialist administration suffering the ravages of hyper-inflation and that Hillary, Obama or whoever his successor is, is the next Hitler, about to install a terribly malevolent war machine and concurrent massive welfare state?

Further deconstruction of this lead zeppelin of an analogy, here.

As I suggested in that post, perhaps Sullivan was merely getting a jump on the next administration. And speaking of which, in May of 2009, Sullivan wrote:

This speech, to my mind, was a conservative one by a conservative president who seeks first and foremost to use existing institutions to address the new challenges of the moment, and then seeks pragmatic compromises, always open to future checks and balances, in those places where such institutions clearly need reform and adjustment.

So Kerry and Obama are conservatives; Bush, whom Andrew once staunchly defended for his decisive response in the wake of the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, was the president of the leftwing but impotent Weimar Republic.

Consistency.