Andrew Sullivan Will Stop Blogging "In the Near Future"

Who cares?, you ask.

Um, no one, actually, but I needed a quickie post and look how quick this is.

As you can imagine this news from Andrew Sullivan has been greeted with a tasteful level of Seething Hatred. Various whoop-de-doos are linking their favorite dissections of Sullivan.

Through the Looking Glass With Andrew Sullivan

23 Jun

by Christopher Badeaux

Perhaps the single, common life goal of every intellectual, pseudo-intellectual, and intellectual aspirant, is to be a true Renaissance man -- a genius whose force of will and flexible, dominating intellect allows him to master or nearly master not one or two, but a whole host of related and unrelated fields of study and practice.

Sadly, not everyone can be Leonardo da Vinci or Karol Wojtyla. Or Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan, who has worn dozens of hats in his lifetime, is truly unique. He stands astride the worlds of politics, journalism, theology, foreign policy, and applied obstetrics like the Colossus of Rhodes....

Few among us have the raw intellectual firepower to go where he has. Fortunately, the internet tubes allow us to track his movements over time -- an otherwise dizzying effort made more vertiginous by Sullivan’s kaleidoscopic mind. As with all things Sullivan, the best place to start is with human genitalia.

To say that Sullivan has focused his laser-like mind on human reproductive organs is to engage in an understatement worthy of the master himself. We could simply look at Sullivan’s relentless, years-long focus on circumcision (a relentlessness not well-captured by the internet tubes, as Sullivan’s archives traditionally become difficult to search when he moves from site to site), an unusual genre for a man who will never have children and who is not Jewish or Muslim, though perhaps not so unusual given his general interest in the member in question---

But to spend too much time on mere ponderings on the presence or absence of foreskin is to do Sullivan an injustice. Anyone can bloviate on that. Few men of letters -- indeed, few doctors -- can diagnose a woman's pregnancy forensically from a handful of news articles and photographs. Few are gifted with the ability to toss out thousands of words as tightly organized as Ulysses at the drop of a hat and still able to offer informed medical opinions on changes to the female body during mid- and late-term pregnancy --opinions at odds with normal understandings of human biology and the preeminent textbooks of the field.

But then again, few men are Andrew Sullivan. Depending on the day, Andrew Sullivan might not even be Andrew Sullivan.

Dr. Sullivan on Sarah Palin’s Reproductive Abilities

[A] select group of internet personalities decided that Mrs. Palin's son Trig must, in fact, be her daughter's, who was then a senior in high school. This being modern American political online writing, proof of this ridiculous assertion was neither offered nor demanded, and a thousand would-be obstetricians immediately began poking at pictures of a teenaged girl to demonstrate, for all the world to see, that those photos showed she was large enough to be pregnant. That these same people would be the first to cry in fury if the child being subjected to this humiliation were not the child of a Republican was, again as usual, lost on the lay doctors caught in their five-minute hate.

Andrew Sullivan immediately leaped into the fray. Unlike the rest of these non-experts, many of whom began to back off of the story when word emerged that Mrs. Palin's daughter was pregnant and had been close to the time of Trig's birth, Sullivan, who apparently received a secret medical degree while attending Harvard, began obsessively following this story, turning the Atlantic from a fairly uninteresting opinion website into a leading journal of gynecology and obstetrics. Rarely in human history has a gay man been that obsessed with a married woman's vagina.

This became, perhaps even more than the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, Sullivan’s driving motivation during the 2008 campaign, if the quantity of his writings are any indication of his drive. While others were intimidated by photos of Mrs. Palin in late-stage pregnancy looking like a woman in late-stage pregnancy, the biological impossibility of a seventeen year-old girl giving birth to two non-fraternal children less than eleven months apart, and other indicia of what the rest of us take for ordinary reality, that laser-like mind knew no fear. Without a blow by blow of those two months of Herculean effort, it's impossible to fully capture the way in which the Atlantic rivaled the New England Journal of Medicine in pushing the edge of medical consensus; a sampling will have to suffice.

Great stuff.

Of course I noted that Andrew Sullivan was a gibbering maniac as well. (Do NOT comment on old threads-- the system will ban you.)

And of course, given Andrew Sullivan's penchant for claiming to be the victim of such outrageous betrayals as would make Christ Himself weep, there was this:

posted by Ace at 02:09 PM

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