Mar
10
Sullivan takes Scott Rasmussen to task for saying this:
One of the more amazing aspects of the health-care debate is how steady public opinion has remained. Despite repeated and intense sales efforts by the president and his allies in Congress, most Americans consistently oppose the plan that has become the centerpiece of this legislative season.
In 15 consecutive Rasmussen Reports polls conducted over the past four months, the percentage of Americans that oppose the plan has stayed between 52% and 58%. The number in favor has held steady between 38% and 44%.
In response, Andrew Sullivan cites one poll (Yougov) which shows a majority favouring healthcare reform whilst ignoring almost every other single poll taken this year that shows more Americans opposed to healthcare than supportive. In fact, 38 polls taken into 2010 asking whether Americans approve or disapprove of the Democratic proposals for reform show them disapproving whilst only three polls show Americans approving.
And he then offers this chart from Pollster.com to prove Rasmussen wrong (he takes out Rasmussen polls to get this effect):
What it shows is that in the last four months, the range of people disapproving is 6%, exactly what Rasmussen shows and the range of those approving is 6%, again exactly as Rasmussen shows.
And then Sullivan critiques the Rasmussen poll itself:
And Pollster’s poll of polls, excluding Rasmussen’s outlier numbers, favoring the old, white and Republican, show a dramatic rise in support this past month, as the consequences of getting nothing at all begin to sink in:
Or voters as they are also known (it will be the white middle-aged and elderly who will make up the vast majority of the voters in November).
I could ignore polls to get an impression I wanted too, but then that would be dishonest wouldn’t it?
For example, here’s Obama’s approval measured by registered and likely voters (ie those that actually matter and can be arsed to vote):
7% more disapprove than approve of Obama. Here’s the same poll aggregation (both aggregations are for 2010 only) with all polls thrown in (ie polling all Americans, not just those prepared to vote):
It’s not difficult to create your own reality, the problem is, no-one else shares it.
Feb
25
I read these Andrew Sullivan commentary on the resignation of Sarah Palin’s spokesperson, Meghan Stapleton and I’m struggling too see how Andrew Sullivan uses this Stapleton quote:
“Earlier this week, I handed Governor Palin my resignation, effective the end of this month. While I had hoped to work together on so many more projects, time with my precious 2-year-old has been further minimized with the whirlwind commitments of all things Palin. I have done my best to scale back, but Isabella is now resorting to hiding my BlackBerry, and she shouldn’t grow up begging for a mother to start acting like a mother.”
to be able to make this point:
Meghan Stapleton, the most loyal of all Palin’s aides, has now quit. She was the most loyal of the loyal, the most inner of the inner circle. In the end, even the closest aides cannot keep telling the kind of lies that Palin demands of them. Money quote, which surely reflects back on Palin’s decision to launch a national campaign, a book tour and a cable news career while having custody of an infant with Down Syndrome:
Now as he himself repeatedly tells us, Andrew Sullivan is a very smart man. And I’m just a dumb Palin-supporting conservative. So obviously he knows best, but I’m just not seeing the logical journey he made in this instance.
Jan
26
And yet I perceive not a jot of a change in, say, Glenn Reynolds or Mickey Kaus, two of my early blogging peers whose worldviews remain unaltered. Ditto the vast majority of neocons who seem to have found all their setbacks more proof of their original ideas. On the left, one finds the same kind of rigidity – how has Moulitsas evolved over the years – or Greenwald? I hoped the web would find a way to loosen writers up, jostle them a little out of their patterns of thought. But, for the most part, I was wrong, wasn’t I? The same idiocy that counts all political adjustments to new facts or new circumstances as “flip-flopping” also penalizes those who dare to change their mind in the face of a changing world online.
In the face of a changing world. Really? Instapundit:
But Andrew’s mental “flexibility” seems awfully convenient — he supported Bush and the war when both were popular, then opposed them both when that was popular, and then supported Obama when that was popular. Now I’m watching Obama’s polls drop and waiting for the next display of open-mindedness. . . .
Jan
25
The Eloi (Part Two)
Filed Under American Politics | 1 Comment
Andrew Sullivan responds to this unhappy Obama voter:
I believed that Obama would try to level the playing field between big business and small, between thieves and honest business people, between greed and moderation. Instead, he bailed out the most wicked and left the rest of us fail.
I watched with horror as Obama followed Bush’s lead in bailing out banks, auto makers, insurance companies, all of those companies deemed “too big to fail.” What does that mean? My small company got thrown under the bus and my savings were ravaged – perhaps Wall Street is using them for bonuses this year.
Not to mention President Obama is recklessly spending our country’s future into oblivion. It was clear after just 90 days what a mistake I’d made. My taxes have gone up and my quality of life has gone down.
Sullivan’s response?
What you have here is big babyism.
The caring side of the Obama boosters. Stupid people. How dare they question the elites?
Nov
19
Thank God For Andrew Sullivan
Filed Under American Politics | 7 Comments
From his blog:
This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life. There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it – and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided – is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read.
Gosh! Thank crikey that someone is out there obsessing about an individual, focusing on her vagina and offering the medical judgement that she is “deeply disturbed”. Yes, a single book warrants that sort of self- anointed gatekeeping for the benefit of all.
Personally, I think a person who is incredibly bright, a superb writer and with a lot to say on the current state of political philosophy but obsesses about one politician is the one with the mental difficulties.
so The Dish has gone silent twice, both times over Sarah Palin. Really, in the course of modern American politics, does she really deserve that? This of course is the blogger, so enamoured with Obama, that he won’t question the broken campaign promises, isn’t curious about the falsified job creation statistics or critically questioning over Obama’s dithering about Afghanistan, but thinks the matter of when Palin told her children that she’d been chosen as VP candidate is a matter of national importance. This is the man who is quick to jump on any perceived homophobia, call’s out conservatives and Republicans as racist, but sees nothing wrong in focusing on a woman’s gynaecological history.
He finishes with this:
There is a possibility here of such a huge scandal that we would be crazy not to take our time either to debunk it or move it forward for further examination.
Yes of course there is. of course, Sullivan is the only person to see this, but then he does think of himself as smarter than everyone else.
He should take an aspirin, lie down in a darkened room, or better yet, go and seek some psychiatric help.
Sep
28
Michele Bachmann refuses to answer a question about the dead census worker in Kentucky.
Big deal. She doesn’t represent Kentucky. There is no evidence that the death of the census worker was politically motivated, and yet this doesn’t stop HuffPo, Balloon Juice and Andrew Sullivan making the insinuation (or in Balloon Juice’s case, more than an insinuation). From the strongest critics of Glenn Beck, comes the palpable excitement at the possibility of violence in American politics.
Nothing more needs to be said about these shameless people.
Sep
21
On Religion
Filed Under religion | 79 Comments
I’ve been reading some interesting posts about religion today, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on what I’ve been reading.
Richard Dawkins has an essay (scroll down past the first essay) at The Wall Street Journal. It’s fair to say I’m not a fan.
In it, he argues that evolution effectively makes God redundant:
Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics. To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity—certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences.
…
Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.
But even within those two paragraphs, Dawkins seems to be limiting his own arguments. He states “Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences”. And earlier on in the essay, he notes the ‘adaptibility’ of physical laws to the latest discovery:
What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws—it’s happened often enough in the history of science).
So Dawkins is saying that there is nothing certain about the laws of physics and that our understanding is limited in any case. But from that he expects us to believe his certainty that God somehow has to conform to his uncertain arguments. There is a logical failing there.
Sep
14
That’s Worrying
Filed Under Uncategorized | 21 Comments
I find myself somewhat in agreement with Andrew Sullivan.
Sullivan calls himself an Oakeshottian conservative. In brief (and very generalised), Michael Oakeshott believed in a balance between the forces skeptical of government, and the forces who believe government has the power to do good. The two forces balance the excesses of each other. So Sullivan’s response to a dissenting e-mail is interesting. First the dissent:
But with Obama we don’t get change, we get more of the same. More government, just like Bush. A failed Keynesian stimulus driving us ever deeper into debt (and straight out the Bush playbook, with his ridiculous tax rebate of last year). More government in health care (Bush, Medicare expansion). More government in energy policy (energy bill passed under Bush’s watch). I’m all for change, just not for big government.
Part of Sullivan’s initial response corresponds to my developing views:
I also realize that in real politics, you have to construct a solid coalition for all this and make arguments for it consistently (as Reagan did for decades) and have some credibility. But the GOP has been doing he opposite, fighting wars – cultural and military – instead of attending to basic fiscal responsibility and limited government. You cannot just pivot on a dime without some accounting of the recent past.
I know that this will make me somewhat unpopular with those on the right, but the conservative movement has failed in recent times. They idolise Reagan, whilst completely ignoring the very reason for Reagan’s successes; that a consensual coalition is required to enact a non-divisive agenda. This is something the current conservative movement is ignoring.
I have a great deal of respect for the tea-party movement. anytime citizens become concerned and then peaceably engaged is good for democracy. sure there are excesses, some of the signs are hardly likely to persuade waverers, but that is a minority. The majority is a citizenry concerned for their future, worried about losing what they have and suspicious of a power grab by bureaucracies and partisan single interest groups. Sullivan is right to point out that these concerns have come somewhat late, but under Bush, the threat to an individuals autonomy was a lot less pervasive than it is now.
But the tea-partiers are looking to the wrong period in American history. Turning the clock back to Thomas Paine, Common Sense and the revolution is denying the narrative of American history. Reagan had the right idea. He was a post New Deal conservative. Whilst he was suspicious of government, he recognised that government has a function in a civil and ordered society. And the truth is, those protesting in Washington on 9/12 are post new deal conservatives too. I doubt they want the repeal of social security. They rely on their medicare if they are eligible (I know – great society not new deal) and they were brought up in a newly industrialised and prosperous post-war America.
So the protests do have the ability to resonate on a larger scale if they are focused in the right way. And just as importantly, they are essential to the democratic process. And it is on this point that I part with Andrew Sullivan’s conclusions:
The protestors keep saying that they want their country back. Sorry, my fellow small-governmenters, but this country is a democracy, and you didn’t lose your country, you just lost an election. You had your chance for eight years. You blew it, and you lost. What Obama is doing is what he was elected to do. The principled response is not a massive, extremist-riddled hissy fit a few months in, but a constructive set of proposals to build on universal care for a more market-friendly and cost-conscious system in the future. You have to win some political credibility for that; and then you have to beat the man you lost so badly to last year. That’s the civil and civilized way forward for the right. It also seems, alas, to be the one they are currently refusing to take.
Andrew Sullivan is wrong. politics is not a zero-sum game in which the losers of elections should be forced to sit back and wait for their turn to come round again. Winning an election does not give the winner carte blanche to enact any legislation that he wants. All an election win grants, is the right to control the agenda for a while. But politics is a dynamic process that constantly requires all opinions to be engaged. Without that, balance in the political process cannot be achieved. And it is this balance that sees to the needs of all the citizenry.
Jul
31
Playing Spot The Straw Man
Filed Under American Politics | 27 Comments
In a post on this disgusting and obviously racist e-mail by a Boston police officer, Sullivan doesn’t feel contented to criticise the officer involved for the content of the e-mail as any sane and normal person would do. No, for Sullivan this is an opportunity to attack all his favourite targets. Cheney, Palin, Christianists, Bush and FoxNews all feature in a post about one racist cop. Talk about projection. Here are the offending pieces:
Here it is, a fascinating glimpse into the actual attitudes and beliefs of a segment of American society, the part that strongly disapproves of Obama, the Palin base, the Fox News core.
Notice the Cheney view: that a suspect has no rights; and is always a suspect, always at the mercy of the state and government, with a duty to obey police and military power or face brutal consequences.
And the more you read, the more you realize how deep the Bush-Cheney legacy runs and how the torture and ‘enemy combatant’ state, celebrated nightly on Fox, easily seeps into domestic law enforcement.
And notice in the email how all of this is bound up with a defense of God. Notice the classic Christianist line
Andrew Sullivan is a very intelligent blogger. When he’s writing on the nature of conservatism from an intellectual standpoint, he’s an addictive read (although I don’t always agree with him). But posts like this are just idiotic. From one policeman referring to Gates as a “banana throwing jungle-monkey”, Sullivan has morphed this into a universally conservative sentiment. He makes no case to back this up, he doesn’t even attempt to. Andrew Sullivan is a hateful man. It is sad to see such intelligence go to waste.
Jul
10
Andrew Sullivan’s Palin derangement has gravitated to women in general it seems. Well Ok, not all women, just attractive right wing women:
If you wonder why Fox News’ newscasters all look like porn-stars, or why batshit homophobes like Ann Coulter retain a following, or Carrie Prejean becomes an instant star, don’t forget the starbursts factor
To be fair to the whacko at The Atlantic, he is referring to an idiotic piece by Steve Chapman at The Chicago Tribune. By contrasting failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Myers with Sarah Palin, he draws the amusing conclusion that Republican women only get ahead by being attractive.
But it’s really not hard to see why Palin inspires such devotion. And I do mean “see.” She has one obvious thing going for her that Miers didn’t: She’s a babe, and she doesn’t try to hide it. As an article in the latest Vanity Fair puts it, Palin “is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics.” And while that fact doesn’t earn her points with me, it obviously does with many people.
Citing a Pew Research poll, Chapman takes the evidence that 48% of men approve of Palin whilst only 41% of women approve of her as proof that men are thinking about Palin with something other than their brain. Perhaps someone should suggest to Mr Chapman that 7% isn’t a particularly big difference, and that other reasons may be influencing this ‘gaping chasm’ between the sexes, like Palin’s pro-life values for example. I also find it strange that he doesn’t investigate the fact that more women approve of Obama than men (by the same margin of 7%). And we’ll just skip past the Glamour magazine article about how women are fantasising about Obama, or how excited the press got about Obama’s topless photos; after all, why spoil a polemic with reality.
It’s not just Palin that gets objectified by Chapman, who seems to be thinking a little bit too much about scantily clad Republican women:
Palin is not alone in using her looks to enchant the Republican faithful. Carrie Prejean went from being a runner-up for Miss USA to a conservative heroine because she came out against gay marriage in her pageant interview — but also because she wears a bikini well. Ann Coulter would be just another rabid pit bull if not for the long hair and short skirts.
I don’t want to leave out the man who is obsessed with Palin’s reproductive history. Why did McCain pick Palin as his running mate? Her boobs obviously:
John McCain picked Sarah Palin because he was a) desperate, b) has no integrity, c) cares much more about his career than national security, and d) couldn’t take his eyes off her boobs.
These commentators don’t seem to understand the concept of feminism and sexism, namely that women shouldn’t be objectified. That they should be engaged with on their merits, not on their birth canals, bikinis or short skirts and long legs. And the left is supposed to be the home of feminism. Mind you, they’re not getting a lot of leadership on the issue:
