He meant that Andrew Sullivan’s readers are soap opera junkies.
I think so. Certainly, it looks like Ace and I stopped reading Sullivan regularly within a year of each other—more or less when the passion that followed 9/11 was starting to fade, and ultra-sober analysis was called for. Yet Sully was offering none of that—not then, and not now.
Spadilio’s post is . . . very complete. Near-encyclopedic. So if you were wondering whether he’s walking back his earlier, more pivotal point about whether Sullivan intended to mislead his readers, you might skip toward the end, and look for boldface and a link over here.
I’d love to help, but I’ve got to run to the mail drop.
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Yeah, I believe him, too.
Why would he lie?
Oh, right. I’d forgotten the current terms of debate: anyone who disagrees with me about anything is a liar. Or maybe a lying liar. Or at the very least someone who lies.
Carry on, then.
Bloggers who lie claim they were “just joking” and that makes it all right.
“Fruitbait” is the more colloquial, I think.
I’m of two minds about this.
On the one hand, “queerbait” is by any reasonable person’s definition, an anti-gay slur. The fact that he used it when talking about Sullivan suggests that his antipathy to Andy runs a bit wider and deeper than on mere ideological or stylistic grounds. It would be like me dissing a Black blogger, and working the term “jungle bunny” into my narrative. Not acceptable at all.
On the other hand, Ace nails the very essence of Andy Sullivan’s writing: overwrought, melodramatic spewing that only make sense if you assume the person behind them has the emotional maturity of a twelve-year old. As he points out, the guy seems to be a victim of his own deep emotional investment in a politician, which is a pretty pathetic thing for an educated, fairly realistic commentator to have done in the first place.
Sullivan is to political blogging what Mark Morford is to hipster culture: a self-parodizing narcissist who’s maintained a longterm paid gig only because he got in on the ground floor of Web-based column-writing, and gleefully pandered to a generation raised to think that Hunter S. Thompson-esque Left-bigotry and nihilistic rantings are “insightful journalism.” One wonders how much longer he can keep the act going.
Mikal, I was unclear: Ace did indeed apologize about the “queerbait” remark, and then he explained his state of mind that led to a stack-up of offensive language toward Sullivan. But there was an apology in there, and I should have summed the post up more accurately.
Ace isn’t anti-gay. He isn’t. He just fucked up a little, is all–he lives his life so close to that line that it isn’t shocking when a toe goes right over it.
I think that kind of humor is probably difficult.
More and more I find I care less and less about lines and going over them. You want a revolution? You gotta do revolting things.
Isn’t it, if you want a revolution, you have to do REVOLVING things?
I can never remember.
Maybe Ace dreams of escaping the right-wing ghetto.