Thursday April 24, 2003

SPINNING SANTORUM. Stanley Kurtz’ piece on the Senator Santorum affair (weird comments about gays and incest) is very long and does not mention Andrew Sullivan. This is odd for a few reasons. First, it’s odd because Sullivan, for all his hideous faults, is the best-known conservative crusader against anti-gay discrimination (and the attendant sodomy-law concerns) within the conservative movement. It’s like talking about the Democratic Party in the 1990s without mentioning Clinton – a bald omission that makes sense only if by so doing you’re trying to make a point. Or conceal one.

The latter seems to be the case here, because Sullivan has blogged tirelessly on the subject of Santorum of late (perhaps in hopes of instigating a Trent-Lott-style, zone-flooding repudiation of him among the Right). You'd never know this by Kurtz’ NRO article, which is largely about how unfair the NYT’s coverage was, and, by extension (we might say hyperextension), how liberal journalism ruins everything it touches (“But so long as the mainstream media keeps producing the sort of partisan and ignorant nonsense it has deployed in its effort to destroy Sen. Santorum…”).

Kurtz better go tell Glenn Reynolds that he’s doing Howell Raines dirty work.

Trying to spin the statist, pro-sexual-repression gibberish of a Republican Senator into an attack on liberals is a noble bit of chutzpah, but Kurtz is going to have to do better than this.