That post really was a tour de force.

It Is, officially, On.

Oh, it's on.

Time to raise the alert level!

You know what, though? It's not really on. There's not going to be a running flamewar between them. Glenn's post was less an opening salvo in a battle than the coup de grace to Sullivan's cred as a warblogger.

The captain of the football team just declared him, officially, irrelevant.

This has been brewing for a long time. This is gonna be good.

Bah, I'll believe Sully is 'out' when Insty starts slinking him.

As it is, that post just gives Sully tons more traffic.

On the other hand, I find the question of what Glenn thinks rather less pressing than I used to.

Stopped reading him, except through an occasional link here.

Heh.

Indeed.

Andrew who? Never heard of the guy.

I think Sullivan's downfall proves a major media talking point wrong. The media loves to say that blogs have no accountability - no editors or multiple levels of fact-checking, etc.

What they ignore is that blogs police other blogs and readers are the ultimate police. It's a free marketers dream. Basically, all a blogger has is his or her credibility. Lose that, and lose readers and respect. Personally, I don't think it was any of Sullivan's actual opinions that sunk his blog. It was the whiplash everyone got when they realize he had gone, seemingly overnight, from a conservative to a...well, I'll be honest. I still don't know what the hell Sullivan is.

Plus... well, look, there's no more pretense of cordiality between them. This sets up the Ultimate Blog War, bigger than Godzilla vs. Megalon.

I know that was tongue-in-cheek, but, seriously, Sullivan's fallen so far off the radar that he's not going to be anybody's idea of an "Ultimate Blog War" contender.

While "someone" may have stopped reading Glenn, nobody can seriously suggest InstaPundit has suffered any serious change in stature. If there has been any drop in importance at all, it's certainly not on the scale of Sullivan's plunge.

About all Sullivan's good for these days is comic relief such as the Andrew Sullivan Freak-Out Advisory. Speaking of which, I think the people that run it should have the "About" page have a list of every update that's been made to it and why. It would be funny to see how many times Excitable Andy makes the wild swing from "Chagrined" to "Filled with Heart-Ache" with links to each outburst.

Maybe at some point he'd come across it and realize what a ninny he's become. If not, it would add to the comedic value. Anyway, it wouldn't be much work, as they usually post an explanation when there's a change, so they'd just have to copy the explanations to the main "About" page.

The captain of the football team just declared him, officially, irrelevant.

Yeah, but doesn't Sullivan's diposition make him sort of like the head cheerleader?

Drama nerd? What does it all mean?

I agree that that was about as brutal as I've seen Reynolds get.

"disposition"

Glenn sticks it in and breaks it off. Boo-yah!

I never really understood why so many center-right folks liked Sully anyway; his early pro-war stuff was pretty weak tea compared to the stuff offered by Wretchard at The Belmont Club or Stephen Den Beste at USS Clueless. And then Andy went off on that gay-marriage jag, where he seemed to think that keestering some other guy was a basic human right deserving of sanctification by the state.

He oughta just change his name to some hilarious Britishy satire thing like "Gaylord Fuzzpube Knobgobbler III" and publish his screeds in The Guardian.

And let's face it...Sullivan is a shitty, self-centered blogger.

He has no blogroll and he rarely links to other blogs. His blog is like the Huffington Post - an old media guy playing in a new medium with limited success at first, but eventual crashing and burning.

Forgive the grouchiness of the last few comments. I'm in a reasonably bad mood this evening.

Slublog:

I'm in a reasonably bad mood this evening.

Monty is definitely living in Grouchyland.

Yeah, but doesn't Sullivan's diposition make him sort of like the head cheerleader?

Drama nerd? What does it all mean?

It means that if he gets back to warblogging and manages to prove himself once again, there just might be a happy ending here along the same lines as the ending of Lucas.

Picture him in that letterman's jacket. Awesome.

Monty,

Andrew was really good at criticizing the NY Times and the problems with Howell Raines, Jayson Blair, and the whole culture of that place. And he was largely dead right. I never knew how dysfunctional the NY Times was until Andrew's blog pointed it out. He was the first blogger I read.

But in 2004, he showed what he really cared about was gay marriage and it became clear he wouldn't support Bush. But he kept up a risible charade that wasn't a sure thing. Then he started making absurd arguments that Kerry was the real conservative in the race.

Then he wasn't worth reading even out of curiosity. He was getting ridiculous.

Monty...beat by Canadians? Ouch.

Maybe, in the spirit of Glenn's smackdown, we should just turn this thread into a place to rant about things that just piss us off.

Sort of wandering from the topic, but in a sort of odd phase-shifted disynchronicity someone at a board I frequent has started a thread called "Things that don't piss off Moslems."

It's pretty short.

Moonbat_One:

I share the same problem with calling Excitable Andy (Lord Knobgobbler) that Slublog has: his "blog" is nothing of the kind. He rarely links and has no blogroll. It's clear that Andy considers himself a destination, not a waypoint. That whole "give me money so I can vacation in Europe pay the bandwidth bills" was just weak, and everyone who gave him money should be wearing a big DUMBASS sign.

I guess I'm just not into the big "media expose" thing. I've never trusted Big Media "news"; I've known all along that their methods were sloppy and that the reporters were lazy. And since I'm not gay and have no real opinion on the gay marriage issue the Andy thinks is so earth-shaking, he has little to offer me.

beat by Canadians? Ouch.

Allah's right. The "blogwar", such as it was (past tense) was more like a siege than anything else. Instapundit has been slowly demolishing Sully for months, one brick at a time. For instance, I recall Ace posting on how Glenn "jerks this towering shot into the cheap seats" at Sully during the election. Something about how Andrew was totally, flat-out wrong about Kerry's position on gay marriage as opposed to Bush's.

War's over, now it's just the mop-up.

Sir,

Great post. Don't stop. Kick this worthless bastard while he is down. He's earned a good beating.

rcl

Monty...just so long as Twins fans don't morph into the whiny mess that defines Red Sox fans. I only watch baseball sporadically, and don't have any allegience to any particular team. More of a football guy, and can feel your pain, since I'm a Cowboys fan.

Hey, what's that smoking crater? It smells, too...

Funny. This morning I heard Bill Bennet saying a number of complimentry things about Sullivan. He read one of his columns, which of course, I can't find. Something about Sullivan attending a charity function given by Pat Robertson and sounding somewhat conciliatory of the Christian right.

Andrew really did change. He used to be more logical than he is now. I don't know what happened.

However, I've always found his whole approach to gay marriage to be pretty unpersuasive, and I'm somebody who agrees with him on it.

Megan,

Things that don't piss off Muslims:

1) Killing and dismembering Americans
2) Killing and dismembering all other infidels
3) Flogging women
4) Flogging all infidels
5) Killing wives, daughters, and mothers in order to preserve the family honor
6) Marrying off the daughter at age 12
7) Creating "Vice-Police" who will beat and torture you if you don't meet "the purity standard"
8) Killing anyone (even other Muslims) who desecrates the Koran
9) Using subterfuge and manipulation of the law to attack the freedoms and societal norms of most western nations.
10) Dhimmitude
11) Jihad
12) Forming alliances with Neo-Nazis, Anarchists, and such to reach their goals
13) Killing or subjugating said Neo-Nazis et al. when the goals are met
14) Attacking/bombing schools full of children
15) Attacking/bombing clubs full of civilians
16) Attacking/bombing buildings full of civilians
17) Attacking/bombing buses full of civilians
18) Attacking/bombing airplanes full of civilians
19) Desecrating other the artifacts of other religions
20) Prohibiting, many times under penalty of death, the practice or proselytizing of other religions

Ace, you linked him. What the heck?

Shadow -

Yeah, you're thinking along the same lines we were. :) I'd link the thread but I think the folder was just restricted to members only. Ace offered to link the board tomorrow though so I'll put the main site address down here:

J*Wing

And, subsequently:

The One & Only What Doesn't Piss Off Moslems List

AFAIK the rest of the folders are still open to guests.

Excerpts:

"Twinkies"
"Noam Chomsky"
"Howard Zinn"
"Decapitations"
"George Galloway"
"Stoning women to death for getting raped."
"Throwing acid in women's faces for not wearing veils."
"Cutting off women's noses and ears for getting raped."
"Burning women alive by booby-trapping their kerosene stoves for getting raped."
"Strangling women with copper wire for getting raped."
"Raping women."
"Beheading Jews"
"screwing other men, boys, animals, etc instead of women for pleasure"
"Silly Putty"

Your list is pretty comprehensive, though, and I'm not sure about Silly Putty.

Whoever is in charge of the Sullivan advosory system ought to jack it up to "Filled with HeartAche" now- before it's too late.

Andrew really did change. He used to be more logical than he is now. I don't know what happened.

Then he decided that rather than simply stating this as a fact, he would try to cover it over by presenting whatsisname... John Kerry... as the better choice. That didn't really work. So he ended up going the the lefty-moonbat Blame Bush route. Downhill all the way.

Again, sort of off topic (though we are talking about Excitable Andy), but I just noticed that RCP added a NYT article to their evening update.

I don't really have anything intelligent to say about it, but it's called "Sniffing Out the Gay Gene" and it's by Steven Pinker. The first sentence contains the words "Annals" and "Swedish."

Maybe I've just been awake too long but I'm having a bit of a gigglefit over here.

Wow. That was a gobsmockingly effective dismissal.

Allah dictated:

Picture him in that letterman's jacket. Awesome.

Andrew really did change. He used to be more logical than he is now. I don't know what happened.

The guy is a good writer, and he's one of the people who got me interested in reading blogs after 9/11. And I didn't even really mind when he started criticizing the way the WOT was being fought.

But then, somewhere along the line, he stopped criticizing and just started bitching about the Bush administration. And that pretty much coincided with the time where he started fixating on gay marriage as the be-all and end-all of issues. And on that specific issue, he could've made some more persuasive points (I'm open to some sort of civil unions that would give gays hospital, inheritance, etc. rights), but he seemed to view nearly everything through the prism of his own emotions.

Couple all of that with his bullshit bandwidth pledge drives and his dissembling about who he was going to endorse on his blog while he had already denounced Bush in the gay press, and you've got a lot of former fans like me. And this was way before he had any "heart-ache" about how Catholic the Pope was. I'm just glad that I've always been too poor to contribute to his European vacation fund. And didn't he promise to shut up for a while, too?

Let's be honest, Sullivan, like a lot of other guys, thinks with his dick. And that kind of thinking has turned an otherwise thoughtful commentator into a hack.

I wonder what effect the salty wetness of Andy's tears will have on his CPAP machine.

There remains a chance that Andrew will offiically go over to the Dark Side and become a Senior Editor at Media Matters for America

- he and David Brock could engage in some "Wonder Twins Powers - Activiate" commentary on Bush and the Evilness of Evil Conservatives.

Yes, Sean, it is a tragedy. Andrew Sullivan used to be very interesting to read. I liked his whole Eagles (new type of hawk for the post-9/11 era, basically) concept, his awards were cute, he was a fiscal conservative, he effectively took on the NY Times, and, yes, I found his take on gay issues to be interesting. His writings on his struggles with Catholicism were also interesting. I liked reading him because he didn't fit in well anywhere on the political spectrum, so that seemed to give him a fresh, outsider point-of-view on many issues.

Then the whole gay marriage thing came up, and it was amazing how quickly he turned into a complete joke. Soon he viewed everything through that prism. Concerns about federalism were swept aside as he cheered on tyrannical judges. Anyone that objected was a "bigot" that wanted to "permanently deny" the "civil rights" of gays and make them "second-class citizens forever". When he started criticizing everything about the Bush administration, it was clear that it was primary due to the gay marriage issue, but he dishonestly and repeatedly claimed that was not the case, damaging his credibility.

Eventually nothing was left but screeds against Bush, screeds against the War on Terror, screeds against "bigots", screeds against the Catholic church, etc. He'd often fly into hysterics and jump to crazy conclusions. For example, a proposed bill would allow civil unions but not make them continguent on a sexual relationship, basically so any two people could give each other legal rights. Sullivan somehow twisted this into you could have a civil union but only if you proved there was no sex involved, and then he ranted at that strawman like there was no tomorrow. What a joke.

Eventually I realized that none of the original reasons I read him were valid anymore, so I stopped checking his site. Yes, maybe occasionally he makes some good points about overspending by the Bush administration, and he can apparently still sock it to the NYT, but sifting throught the hysteria to find the few good parts is just not worth it.

At risk of sounding like Estrich (referencing Kinsey's Parkinson) I can't help but wonder about years and years of HAART. There's got to be a cumulative effect from all these drugs (if not the virus itself)), and rarely (e.g., Estrich) have I witnessed such a rapid and public descent into irrelevant hysteria.

The Freak-Out Chart is cute, but at the same time Sullivan's just a so-very-tiring, never-ending celebrity story - the Michal Jackson of blogging - long since undeserving of the attention he continues to be afforded by this medium.

The most striking dig was at the end of Glenn's post:

"When Andrew was a champion of the war on terror, writing about martial spirit and fifth columns composed of the "decadent left," did he believe that nothing like Abu Ghraib would happen, when such things (and much worse) happen in prisons across America (and everywhere else) on a daily basis? If so, he was writing out of an appalling ignorance.

As Mickey Kaus has noted, Andrew can be excitable. A while back he apologized to me for some of his criticisms during the election, and more recently he has apologized to his readers for his waffling and defeatism on the war last spring. Perhaps he'll apologize for this at some point in the future. But, I confess, I find the question of what Andrew thinks less pressing than I used to.

"

The whole thing is quotable.

The gay issue became his sine qua non and he looked at virtually everything through his zipper. Self-absorption seems to be a particularly gay trait, from what I have observed. Does anyone else see the same thing in Sullivan? I used to enjoy his blog but took it off my "favorites" months ago. Tiresome, screeching, hyper-reactionary, no fun...other then that, what's not to like?