Andrew Sullivan has a scrap of integrity.

Who knew?

Poor boy wanted to believe the president. Now he feels sorry for the troops. Why is this jackass worth an interview?

Just as Hitchens is the pet "liberal" of the conservatives, Sullivan has become the favorite conservative of the liberals. I think we got the better end of that deal. I've been reading his blog for a while now, and I was alarmed when early on he actually believed Bush was not anti-gay. But Sullivan did what others of conscience in his party did not: he endorsed Kerry in 2004. As soon as Bush won, other conservatives started expressing "grave concerns" about the administration.

Now Sullivan spends days writing blog posts about torture and getting called an evil homo by conservatives who are out to kill him. An ugly time for our country. But now that the fundamentalists in our country are on the defensive a little, let us hope that we can stand up to them AND to the people who will riot over a cartoon.

I read this article hoping for some kind of breathtaking insight into how a person who has been mislead finds the true path and reconstitutes himself. I think what I discovered was an apologist for past indiscretions who is hoping to see his book on the New York Times list.

Any democratic change in the Middle East that Mr. Sullivan seems to pine for is not—and should not be—the business of the United States government outside of normal channels such as support and education, surely not a war in which 600,000 may have died. Certainly not a war in which our country was led to the line in the sand by lies and distortions from the very beginning. Certainly not by an administration that would stoop to any depraved level to have its way.

Mr. Sullivan states, “I don't think it's a cop-out; we made an honest case, in good faith. The case still holds, but the execution of it was so disastrously incompetent.”

The fact is that the case doesn’t hold. There was no real reason to invade a sovereign country except either for some pathological obsession on the part of the president, or for enrichment of party flacks and companies. The Republican party has been for years and will be forever into the future the enemy, after all, of average Americans who must eventually pay the bills for what really does amount to treason of this class.

Mr. Sullivan claims concern for torture, and yet he is one of the instruments making this possible. Was he betrayed or did he simply look the other way?

There are no excuses for what has happened to America. We have gone from morning to sunset in one generation, and Mr. Sullivan has to shoulder more blame than just to say it’s someone else’s fault because they weren’t efficient.

Why the interview with yet another former disciple who has come to his senses? What I would like to see in at least one inteview is an honest apology by some former bush-backer for how they ignored the opposition ideas that they now see as right. Something along the lines of "I wish that I had actually listened to the argument instead of just shouting it down." or "I apologize for being a total hypocrite, I see know what I have done to harm the country." Instead we get more of this crap. Screw you Andrew Sullivan.

or the darkies, or the humanities departments. They've ceded them. They want Jews--who are the intellectual and financial bulwark of the Democratic Party--and all them hard-workin' Catholic Hispanics. It's gonna take some time for the Jews to swing 'round, but the staunch right-wing support for Israel--plus all the liberal trust-fund anarchists holding protest-placards equating the Star of David to a swastika--is starting the slow, incremental process of turning the tide. Besides, a significant proportion of homosexuals will always vote their pocketbook, no matter how anti-gay the Republican platform gets.

all I can remember of Sullivan's part in the 101st Fighting Keyboarders was his love for demonizing any war opponent as a supporter of genocide.

glad to see he sees nothing wrong with that. He was misled, he says, fooled by the administration. Well, maybe. But he seems to have the personality for it: read Sullivan's jingoistic language from his fightin' days and tell me this is not a man who loves to be on the "right" -- especially if it involves killing people in war.

"I trusted the Bushies" is, in general, a pretty untenable position after, oh, say, the 2000 South Carolina primary or the staged riot in Miami during the 2000 recount crisis. So Sullivan, I ain't buying your general gullibility.

The one place where one might at least give them a bit of the benefit of the doubt, though, was in the actual running of a war. Bush I had done a pretty decent job in Gulf War I, putting a genuine coalition together, getting Israel to be patient in the face of a load of scuds, and not getting involved in a quagmire. Cheney was part of that, and so was Powell. Powell had always been a key proponent of never putting American troops in danger unnecessarily, and helped Clinton to realize that the Somalia adventure of the last days of the Bush I administration was a disaster, so that "cutting and running" became nonpartisan police.

So it was at least reasonable to assume that there were voices within this Administration who would not be so damn stupid as to do what it in fact did, disbanding the army, allowing looting except at the Oil Ministry and pretty much letting the Iraqis destroy what was left of their country's infrastructure.

There's a word for what Cheney and Feith and their ilk did, and it's defined in the constitution as giving aid and comfort to our enemies. Can you imagine if Bill Clinton had run the wars in Croatia or Kosovo this way? So, yes, Sullivan got disillusioned, but why did he have to wait for Abu Ghraib? At what point after the fall of Saddam's government did they do anything right?