Poor Andrew Sullivan. One of the most embarrassing things is to do something you think will be perceived as outrageous, only to find that everybody expected it all along.
Andrew endorses Kerry, and the blogosphere says "didn't he do that weeks ago?" This was a telegraphed punch that made Shock and Awe look like a sneak attack.
I didn't really pay attention. I still respect Brother 'Drew, but he sees religious right bogeymen in the onion dip, and I have no idea what if anything will dissuade him. Several of my email missives have fallen flat.
But Mr. Lileks cuts him to ribbons. Has the torch been passed? I think James takes Andrew's spot with this vicious fisking:
Keeping the country united? Good luck. Imagine FDR running a war with a press composed of cynical snickerers who derided the president as a rich old cripple who thought the best way to defeat Tojo was a war in North Africa and preached defeat every day through the hard slog of the Pacific theater. Imagine running a war with an entertainment industry that declined to make a single movie about the conflict - why, imagine a "Casablanca" where Rick and Sam argue about whether America started it all because they didn’t support the League of Nations. Imagine a popular radio drama running through the early 40s about a smart, charismatic, oh-so-intellectual Republican president whose bourbon baritone mocked FDR’s patrician whine, a leader who took no guff from Stalin OR Hitler! Lux Soap brings you, The West Wing of the White House! Imagine Thomas Dewey’s wife in 1944 calling the WW2 a war for oil; imagine former vice presidents insisting that FDR had played on our fears after Pearl Harbor. Imagine all that.FDR won the 1944 election 25,602,504 votes to Dewey’s 22,006,285. And this was almost two million votes less than he got in 1940. Did he fail to unify the country, if half the voters wanted someone else? Or is that just how we always are, more or less?
I admit. I have a fantasy. Kerry wins. He’s having a summit with Tony Blair. In the middle of the conversation, Chirac calls up; Kerry excuses himself and has a brief chat about a new resolution to let French oil companies bid on reconstruction projects, and they have an amiable conversation in French. Kerry hangs up.“Your predecessor,” Blair says, “spoke to him in English.”
“I know,” says President Kerry. “He couldn’t speak French.”
“He didn’t have to,” Blair notes. He gives a tight smile. And sighs. And gets down to explaining what now must be done.
If Tony B. ran against Kerry in this country, I wonder who'd win? I'd vote for him. Everything else aside, he gets it. He always has.