Andrew Sullivan Demands That Instapundit Explain His Position On The Surge

Pardon the abiguity of the referent of "his" in that sentence. But I think the ambiguity serves the headline. Once Instapundit gets done explaining to Andrew Sullivan what Instapundit's position is on the surge, perhaps he can tackle the thorny question of telling Andrew Sullivan what Andrew Sullivan's position on the surge might be.

A lot of people defended Democrats who reversed themselves on the surge because they had last urged more troops back in 2004. Jim Geraghty defended this as a change in position based on a change of situation, for example. (I'd link the post, but it seems that the former The Kerry Spot is now The Hillary Spot, and previous TKS entries have been retconned out of existence, like Supergirl.)

But Andrew Sullivan can't be so excused -- he was supporting "more troops" virtually up to the moment Bush began signalling support for the idea.

Coincidence? He just happened to stop bashing Bush for not supplying more troops to stabilize Baghdad at the very moment he decided to bash Bush for doing precisely that?

People can have differing opinions on the surge, but one person can't possibly have so many positions, all of which seem to be suspiciously driven by an automatic gainsaying of whatever Bush might be doing this week.

Memo to Sullivan: You don't like the FMA. We get it. We heard you the first eight thousand times when you said so directly; we don't need these stealth criticisms of it running through your every post about Iraq.

Geraghty, by the way... has a good post about Democrats' calls for "sacrifice" for the war.

Sacrifice what, specifically? They don't say, really. Because "sacrifice" in the abstract sounds sort of good and noble, but sacrificing something tanglibe and real is kind of a downer. I guess that's why they call it "sacrifice."

posted by Ace at 02:03 PM

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