Sullyphrenia

As Pejman Yousefzadeh writes at Ricochet, “For all those who found [Andrew] Sullivan’s fawning worship of the president insufferable and nauseating, enjoy the schadenfreude:

This was going to be the most transparent administration in history. It was going to roll back executive over-reach and put warfare against terrorism within a constitutional framework that could defend the country against Jihadist mass murder without sacrificing our values. And yet on a critical issue – the killing of allegedly treasonous citizens who have joined forces with al Qaeda to kill and threaten Americans – we were first given a memo that isn’t actually the real memo which contains no meaningful due process at all.

Now, the administration has given the Congress the actual memo, which, one hopes, does less damage to the Constitution and the English language. But why can “we the people” not see the actual memo? That phrase came up a lot in his recent Inaugural address. Funny how in practice in this respect, Obama is showing such contempt for the concept. And the “memo” Mike Isikoff procured is so legally shoddy and its corruption of the English language so perverse it almost demands we all see the real thing. To use the word “imminent” to describe something that is in the indefinite unknowable future is like calling torture “enhanced interrogation.” To lean on the word “infeasible” without any serious definition of what feasible would be is surreal. Underneath its absurd language and twisted rationales, the memo comes perilously close to the equivalent of “Because I said so.” And the core message of the policy is: trust me.

Allow me to reprint an item from last August charting some of Andrew’s previous travails up and down Mt. Obama:

After calling John Kerry “the right man – and the conservative choice – for a difficult and perilous time” in a 2004 edition of the London Sunday Times, and describing a speech by Obama in May of 2009 as “a conservative one by a conservative president,” Andrew Sullivan temporarily came to his senses and had a reverse Pauline Kael moment. In March of 2011, he told Chris Matthews, “I don’t know why anybody voted for Obama in the primaries,” and around the same time, titled a piece, “Obama To The Next Generation: Screw You, Suckers:”

To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you’re fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama’s cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.

As I wrote at the time, “Funny though, I think Andrew will find Barack Obama once again conservative — or in Sullivan’s case, reactionary enough — to meet the definition of the word as only Andrew Sullivan can define it.”

Flash-forward to today’s edition of the Daily Caller. In a piece titled, “Four years later, some ‘Obamacons’ disenchanted with Obama,” the DC manages to find one self-styled “conservative,” who’s ready and eager to vote for The One in November:

Andrew Sullivan, a blogger for The Daily Beast, still considers himself a conservative, but supports Obama in 2012 as he did in 2008. In a post on Monday, Sullivan once again made ““The Conservative Case for Obama,” in which he argues that Obama is actually the more conservative candidate.

“My post yesterday says it all,” he emailed TheDC. “The only nonpartisan non fanatical conservatives I know of are for Obama. No other option makes sense to me.”

I’m sure Andrew actually believed that at the moment he wrote it, too.