As an experiment (I work for a newspaper), I cut and pasted one of his more effective Bleats onto the editorial page. It took up three full columns!

Where to cut? What can you cut? I’d rather have him writing in full on his Web site than see his stuff cut to 16 inches in the paper.

BTW, Lileks is not the Twain of our time, he is the Samuel Pepys. When historians turn to this era, they’re going to look at Lilek’s Bleats to understand how all this came down, day by day. This will be his claim to posterity.

AS: But in wartime, a president bears the greater responsibility for keeping the country united. And this president has fundamentally failed in this respect.

Lileks: Oh, surely. But maybe – just maybe – many people did not want the country to be united if it meant being united behind Bush.

BINGO. If anyone is to blame for “disunity” in America today, it’s Al Gore. I ceased to be a fervent Democrat when Gore suddenly lost all honor and composure in the days after the 2000 election and began running around the country telling as many haters as he could find that “your vote did not count.” Shameless, inexcusable opportunism. No candidate worth voting for would ever think to undermine our democracy with such a cheap and false charge as that. Gore, not Bush, created the hatred and hostility that cripple this country today.

Lileks: [Bush] is a much more potent and immediate threat, after all. Who?s heard from Osama lately? Meanwhile Bush is out there every day handling snakes and speaking in tongues and supergluing parapalegics to wheelchairs, because his weird-beard God loves suffering and commands him ? via text-messaging, for all we know ? to kill them oily rag-heads. I mean, today I was behind a car whose bumpersticker had a picture of Bush with the slogan “American Terrorist.” I know that driver was behind Bush before Bush failed – in a fundamental way – to convince the driver he was not equivalent to Abu Nidal. Probably because he misprounced “Nuclear.” Farking moron.

Keeping the country united? Good luck. Imagine FDR running a war with a press composed of cynical snickerers who derided the president as a rich old cripple who thought the best way to defeat Tojo was a war in North Africa and preached defeat every day through the hard slog of the Pacific theater…

Lileks may have had him in mind, but that in fact was the position taken by FDR’s ambassador to Britain. Who was, perhaps not coincidentally, he father of the most strident of Washington’s current paranoiac conspiracy-mongers, Teddy “Cooked Up in Texas” Kennedy.

Many pundits have been predicting an upswing in black voters voting for Bush. Not to mention, you have democrats challegnging the ballots in Florida, claiming, in essence, that minorities are more incompetent when filling out voter registration card and so are being disenfranchised. If I’m african-american, I’d be very tired of being manipulated by the democratic party because quite frankly, the DNC is just not subtle about it.

Prediction- 16-20% of african american voters will vote for Bush.

“What I don’t understand is why Sullivan seems to know nothing of the Carter Administration. Just because someone finds himself behind the wheel of a huge honking behemoth of a national vehicle doesn’t mean they’ll drive responsibly.

He may well run over the rose bushes, burn out the clutch, and blame it on “a great national malaise”.

You stole my thunder …I was going say it’s like

giving an alcoholic the keys to a car expecting this to sober him up.

On the way home, on the radio there were ads from Dr. Dobson/Focus On Family about the marriage ballot proposal and from Michigan Right To Life supporting Bush. I’m a bit undecided on the issue of gay marriage and I happen to think that abortion should be legal (though limited – my position has to do with Jewish law, which permits it in certain cases). However, I think that if it helps to elect Bush so he can prosecute the WOT, go ahead and exploit these issues. Remember, in 2000, 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home and Karl Rove doesn’t ever want to see that happen again.

I love Lileks and I’d love to be hearing him on the radio or seeing him on Fox. He does an excellent take-down of Sullivan’s “logic.”

That being said, I’m tired of thinking about Andrew Sullivan. He’s been linked to on a lot of sites lately because he’s so shockingly disappointing.

Now that we’re all no longer shocked, I propose that we simply forget about him. He’s not a serious concern.

May he and Kerry ride off together into the sunset of the deluded on November 4th. Please God!

In other words, AS mastered nothing but the art of gab.

I’ve noticed over and over that journalists such as Sullivan often display a truly abysmal ignorance on matters of military tactics and military history, in particular. I wonder what they teach in “modern history” at Oxford, and whether it would explain his strange ignorance of said history? He is a real puzzlement. Like many journalists, he displays a facility with words that masks the fact that he isn’t saying much that makes a whole lot of sense. Although the “reasoning” behind his support of Kerry made his piece eminently and easily fiskable, Lileks fisks it with such flair that I’m in awe.