[craigching]

It's fine to pick and choose the things you stand for, but the man has to be taken as a whole (IMHO). I want to like Andrew Sullivan for some of the things he stands for, but he was also a vocal proponent of the Iraq war and many other issues that I stand against. Someone who says this about the Iraq war:

> the allied campaign was a model of restraint and liberation, the most precise invasion in world history

makes me think they've really lost touch with reality. I'm not here to say that Saddam Hussein was some angel, but to put our role in those words leaves me wanting better critical thinking.

Andrew Sullivan is a man and he has his good and bad. So let's not "one issue" the man and suppose that he's good simply because he's for gay marriage (a position that he stands to gain from I might add).

I'd rather see better, true "liberals", elevated over Andrew Sullivan. Glenn Greenwald comes mind ...

[graeme]

What year did Sullivan say that? I recall thinking, circa 2004-6, "gosh, Andrew Sullivan is wrong about Iraq. How does he not see how wrong he is?"

But the thing was, he changed. Gradually, he came to notice that the modern Republican party was doing lots of bad things.

Certainly, this puts him nowhere near writers like Daniel Davies and James Fallows, who clearly saw the war was going to be a disaster, before it happened.

But at least Sullivan was able to change his mind. Though maybe he didn't fully recant Iraq. I can't recall the details now. I just recall my impression of the time that, whatever he was, he wasn't a zealot. He genuinely seemed to be thinking through and considering his opinions.

But yeah, far more a fan of Greenwald. Or Ioz, if anyone remembers him.

Anyway, the point of my reply is that I don't think the Sullivan of today would agree with that quote, and I suspect he wrote that not long after the invasion. That doesn't make it a smart thing to have been written, but simply quoting that gives an inaccurate view of Sullivan. Unless I'm wrong on the details of when he said it and what he changed his mind about.

[firebones]

I ran across this the other night. Pointing you to it because it seems to offer a complementary counterpoint to your benefit of the doubt point of view.

http://pando.com/2015/01/28/andrew-sullivan-is-not-the-futur...

[graeme]

That piece doesn't address Sullivan's change circa 2006-08. IIRC, he Began to oppose the Iraq war, and the republican party, where he had been a strong supporter previously.

I never shared Sullivan's views. I could be misremembering how much he shifted in that period, since I didn't follow him closely. But the article doesn't address those years, only earlier times. (which sound pretty bad, if the characterization is accurate)

Edit: here is a piece that comments on Ames and Sullivan. It's how I remember his later writing. No moral hero, but a man clearly aware that he made an enormous error on iraq.

http://thedailybanter.com/2013/01/andrew-sullivans-political...