Sully's on a bummer

The kids are all left, and Andrew Sullivan has the answer: Bill Maher!

Jesus, it’s like old home week: Just a few days ago I was talking about Peggy Noonan, and now it’s time to revisit Andrew Sullivan. Anyone who didn’t have to look him up will recall two things about him from his glory days in the early oughts:

1. Gay conservative
2. Iraq Warmonger

Maybe the more polite observers (that is, Sullivan’s apparently endless supply of high-end admirers) will say #2 isn’t fair, that he was duped by the compassionate-conservative magnetism of George W. Bush and he admitted as much later. The thing there is, I am very confident, based on his past performance as a total careerist, that Sullivan only finally, publicly, and at length denounced the Iraq War because he had previously stuck himself so mucilaginously to it that, if he wanted to return to the Land of the Acceptable Opinion-Givers, he had no choice. (You can read more about that in my own 2016 Village Voice essay on his return to the glossies, before his more recent conversion to the Substack racket he and I both share.)

But while Sullivan had to eat shit on Iraq, he never had to supply a similar retro-fit to his Gay Conservative bit — which is weird, considering that American conservatives are now returning, with the exuberance of released prisoners, to their anti-LGBTQ roots.