After 9-11, my favorite blogger was probably Andrew Sullivan. He was a must-read everyday and there was hardly a more eloquent supporter for defeating terrorists. At some point in the war, Sullivan started to get on Bush's opposition to gay marriage (He's HIV positive) and it soon trumped everything else. Early last year Katherine Jean Lopez from THE CORNER asked why Andrew doesn't just come out and endorse Kerry and get it over with. He finally did so later in the summer. It was a complete turnaround for a guy who defended Bush so adamantly early on.
My favorite blogger these days is James Taranto. He too has noticed the change in Sullivan and offers an interesting analysis today.
One of the oddest, and saddest, stories on the World Wide Web over the past few years has been the transformation of Andrew Sullivan. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, he emerged as an eloquent supporter of America's war against Islamist terrorists; although we had disagreed with him about various domestic matters pre-9/11, we offered him "three cheers" in a Sept. 17, 2001, item. Perhaps he was a bit overenthusiastically militant at times, but that is a sin of which this column has probably not been totally innocent either.
Sometime in the past two years, though, Sullivan turned into a fervent supporter of the "rights" of terrorists. His blog now consists largely of post after post bewailing the "torture" and "abuse" of the enemy. There are some important issues here, but Sullivan ignores crucial distinctions, treating Guantanamo as if it were the same as Abu Ghraib, illegal combatants as if they were legitimate prisoners of war. He even went so far as to endorse Sen. Dick Durbin's outrageous comparison of American servicemen to Nazis.
From there, Taranto demonstrates Sullivan's distaste for the use of fake menstrual blood at GITMO and why Sullivan's own repulsion at it makes it such an effective tool. Taranto cites seven instances of Sullivan's outrage about it.
Note how when Sullivan (or most anyone else) writes about this, it's always "fake menstrual blood," never just "fake blood." Lots of people are squeamish about blood, but the suggestion here is that there is something sordid about menstruation.
This is nonsense. A woman's reproductive cycle is natural and normal. Girls realize this within hours of hitting puberty, but it takes longer for boys to figure out. To a preteen male, the news that women have periods is unsettling. But boys eventually become men, and most of them have intimate relationships with women, which helps to demystify the female reproductive system. To a mature man, menstruation is not a horror.
There are, however, exceptions--adult men who remain strangers to the female body. Among them are homosexual men who identify as gay at a young age and thus do not have heterosexual experiences. Also among them are single men from sexually repressed cultures, such as fundamentalist Islamic ones, in which contact between the sexes is rigidly policed. Many of America's enemy prisoners fall into the latter category. If the mere idea of "fake menstrual blood" discombobulates Andrew Sullivan so, it stands to reason that its actual employment might be an excellent way to break the enemy's resistance.
If you don't read Taranto, I would suggest you give it a go. I don't get to THE CORNER everyday or even INSTAPUNDIT, but a day that I don't read Taranto is a busy day indeed. Taranto combines a unique look at the world as in the Sullivan example and he makes me laugh at something nearly everyday.
Current Favs:
Favorite Blogs
1. James Taranto
2. The Corner
3. Instapundit
4. Power Line
5. The Dynamist
Favorite Columnists
1. Thomas Sowell
2. Jay Nordlinger
3. Bob Novak
4. Mark Steyn
5. Walter Williams
(Of Course DRUDGE is a must every 2 hours, but I don't know how you categorize him.)
2 comments:
Tom, you are a tremendous conversationalist and storyteller. Much of that comes from being well read and intellectually curious. To you I tip my hat.
Thanks Pally. What a nice thing to say.
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