The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s Favorite Blog of the Day

Welcome to the folks coming over from Balloon Juice and Sarah, Proud and Tall, and thank you, Sarah, for the links.

Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish.

But not for statements like this:

I haven't had a credit card for years, because I actually live like a fiscal conservative.

We’re sure you do, Andrew.  But you know what else you live like?

A man with a six-figure income and no children.

Getting a little tired of being told by the well-to-do strolling down Park Avenue that the hoi polloi need to share in some more sacrifice and tighten their belts another notch.

Sullivan also thinks we need to raise the age of retirement.  Again not advice we want to hear from someone who can go on vacation for weeks at a time seemingly whenever he wants and who has a job he can do and do well until he’s 90, if his health allows.

One of the things that drives us nuts about Sullivan is that it’s all so personal with him.  I don’t mean he thinks it’s all about him.  I mean that sometimes---a lot of times---he doesn’t seem able to imagine that not everybody in the United States is a gay ex-pat Brit living in Washington, D.C. whose big disappointment in life recently was being turned down for a mortgage on a second home.

Yeah. Sullivan didn’t get to buy a summer house in Provincetown.  The heart heart bleeds.

So why is he our favorite blog of the day?  Not for statements like the above but because he routinely makes statements like it---wrong-headed, even dumb, sure, but personal.   The Dish isn’t about politics, economics, foreign affairs, or even religion, which he writes about regularly and on which, as with all the other topics, he imagines he’s an expert.  It’s about being Andrew Sullivan and what it’s like to think like Andrew Sullivan about a lot of things.

That’s what we like about the Dish.  It’s about Sullivan thinking about a lot of things.  Sullivan is interested in just about everything---although judging by his blog, he doesn’t go to movies or read many books; he does, however, read poetry.---and he blogs about it all.  Politics are important to him but he sees them as part of life, not the be-all and end-all.   The Mental Health Breaks and Faces of the Day and the views from readers’ windows are diversions but they aren’t his version of cat-blogging.  They are diversions from what other A-list bloggers would consider diversions if they bothered to be diverting.

Sullivan knows that diversions are an important part of life, that they are what makes life worth the trouble.

Once upon a time, when liberal bloggers’ hearts were young and light and beat as one with shared fury at George W. Bush, the editors here at the Mannionville Daily Gazette pointed out that the liberal blogosphere was sorting itself out between the “wonks” and the “writers” and we made the pitch that it would be a good idea for the wonks to link to the writers more often.  (The writers were already linking regularly to the wonks.)  We thought and still think our ability to entertain, to divert, to write about things other than politics was a strength, an advantage we have over the Right side of the bandwidth.  Over there, besides the fact that most of their A-listers can’t write, their relentless propagandizing makes them boring.  Come for the movie reviews, stay for the bar graphs, was our proposed slogan.

The wonks didn’t listen and since then they’ve grown even wonkier.  They’ve also become more self-referential and more of a closed circle.  But when they aren’t writing about politics---or economics, which they treat as politics by other means, or history, which is only interesting to them in how it applies to the politics of the moment---all they have is whatever’s their individual version of cat-blogging.

They are not very likely going devote a post to the gay origins of the high five.

Jon Mooallem traces the emergence of the gesture to Glenn Burke, a gay Dodgers player in 1977. Burke was abruptly traded to the Oakland A's in 1978, most likely because of his sexuality. But he found another home in San Francisco's gay community…

Unless they link to Sullivan.

The editors acknowledge that this post is a not very thinly disguised advertisement for the author’s own blog.

The editors also admit they are just as annoyed as you are by the use of the too precious New Yorker-style editorial We and promise not to let the author get away with it in any of our future posts.

Comments

[Sherri]

I really can't take Sullivan very long. I prefer his former bloggingmate at the Atlantic, James Fallows, who writes about more than just politics and also seems to have a clue that not everybody is fortunate enough to live his life.

[Douglass Truth]

exactly! I think sometimes: he's such a moron, but it's a great blog. even with all its superciliousness and self-importance. i get something great from it every day.

[KathyF]

The windows are poetry.

[actor212]

Getting a little tired of being told by the well-to-do strolling down Park Avenue that the rest of us hoi polloi

The clause "the rest of" is unnecessary.

I say this as one of the well-to-do who stroll Park Avenue.

[Belvoir]

Well said. And of course he's a "personal" blogger, but to a vaster degree than you outline here, Lance. He's a "personal" blogger because he really does have an alarming lack of empathy -again as you mentioned, he honestly cannot relate to people unlike himself, outside his media circle and media class.

Unless it's an abstraction like protesters in Iran. Don't see him ever giving a whit about protesters in WI say, he has absolutely nothing to say about working class Americans except to consider draconian assaults on them like the Ryan plan as "serious" and needed. He doesn't care one bit.

Such an odd duck. Still going on about Thatcherism, 25 years after he left Albion. He'd never have made it in the UK, he'd be eaten alive there. Here he's a special snowflake, who's coasted on patronage and rewarded as the bright boy on scholarship he once was. And gets very tetchy when his spaecial snowflake status is questioned. He decides long after the fact that the Iraq invasion was a Mistake, but the Hippies Were Still Wrong, and wants a medal for it. OH, I could go on.

He's a "personal" blogger all right. Most narcissists are!

[dedc79]

I enjoy the blog as much as it frustrates me (for many of the same reasons you list). It's interesting that Sullivan seems to have learned a lesson from Iraq but not THE lesson. He realizes he was wrong about the war but he continues to stubbornly cling to other conservative mantras in the face of ample evidence that they are misguided. Sullivan wasn't just wrong about the rightness of the war; he was (for a long time) incapable of acknowledging that there were legitimate concerns about the purpose of the war and its consequences.

[Christian Von Schack]

Brings to mind Balloon Juice commenter Wile E. Quixote's take on Sullivan about two years ago. It's quite a screed, but he admits to liking Sullivan too:

Andrew is willing to countenance enough government interference in the health care system to keep his ass alive and insured, but not so much as to actually provide health care for people who aren’t expatriate, gay, British Catholic Tories suffering from AIDS.

Read the whole thing here.

[Primigenius]

I refused to read Andrew when he was editor of The New Republic years ago. He was so exasperatingly and willfully obtuse. There was always a point in whatever he wrote where you came to the conclusion that he only had a partial understanding of what he was writing about. And then when Peretz anointed Dubya the second coming of Pericles, I parted company with the whole shebang.

[jfxgillis]

Lance:

Laugh. Let's make August 10 "Andrew Sullivan Day!" since I wrote this exactly two years ago to the day: Correctly Political: Why I Despise Andrew Sullivan and it makes the same two key points. 1. He's a true solipsist. 2. That's why he's a compelling read.

In his favor, he linked and quoted from that in his Tenth Anniversary Cheer & Roast series and oooooh baby does a link from Sully generate hits.