Reflected In The Funhouse Mirror

And Andrew Sullivan -- pursuant to his apparent brand differentiation strategy, I guess -- is bravely standing up to the "NRO-Reynolds chorus," whatever that means. I don't think I really agree with Mark Levin, Rich Lowry, et al. on the specific subject at hand, though I confess that I haven't followed that particular pissing match very closely. However, I do agree with them that Andrew has been consistently, pompously, and annoyingly moralistic and irritatingly unspecific. So if that's the chorus, well yes -- but it's a song that has a lot of notes, most of them struck by Andrew himself. And I'm irritated with him, not for the reason you might think -- because I disagree with Andrew -- but more the contrary, because every time I read one of his preening posts, I find my opposition to torture weakening in response, even though I've been consistently in opposition to torture since 2001 (and before). God help me if he ever starts blogging in support of nanotechnology and bans on cloning -- I'll probably start looking at Leon Kass more sympathetically. It's like listening to Robert Bork talk about original understanding jurisprudence. --Instapundit

Now all the friends and sycophants who had fawned upon him so lovingly over the years; the stanch supporters in Walter's world who had stood with him throughout his career in a solid phalanx of adoration and approval that had formed a shield against public criticism even in his darkest moments; the thousands in the academic world, the professors who had so often cited him with warm approval as an example of the perfect public servant, the students who had secretly or openly made him their ideal; all that heterogeneous mass of uneasy and sometimes startling bedfellows who huddled together under the term "liberal", some truly so and some among the most rigid and reactionary, in their complete intolerance, that he had ever known; all those overseas in many lands who admired him as a symbol of what they considered best in the American system -- now they all would turn upon him, he knew, with the frantic, hysterical savagery of the tyrannical betrayed. --Allen Drury, Capable Of Honor, p. 481