Andrew Sullivan: Update on Neocon Derangement

Andrew Sullivan is the moment's most prolific Iran blogger on the web. Yet his work's a travesty of journalism, with all the petty, venal, and scurrilous anti-Semitism we are seeing. On top of that we've also got all of his pathetic Man-Crush Obama blogging.

Dan Riehl has some thoughts:

If Andrew Sullivan wants to jump into the emoting bin at Wal-Mart to pick-out a cheap canned syrupy concoction on Iran to serve up to his readers, he's allowed; but it shouldn't be confused with the insight, or wisdom he colors it up to look to be. And it does matter for reasons that are critically important to America and her security.

The rejection of al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan; the ground-up election of Obama in America; and now the rising up of Iranians for freedom and civility with their neighbors: these are the green shoots of recovery from 9/11 and its wake.

Sullivan manages to see Obama's invisible hand having at least some role in all this. But Obama has been more invisible, than he's been a hand in fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, or to the Iranian people currently dying in the streets. In fact, he's done more to legitimize the very leadership that still oppresses and shoots innocents down in the streets in Iran, than has he done anything to undermine it. To the extent America has played any role, this movement was not born of the last five months.

Ann Althouse, picking up on the same themes, asserts Sullivan's questionable integrity:

It is possible that Obama is doing exactly the right thing — but I can't take Andrew Sullivan's word for it, because of he's been slathering praise on the man for far too long.

I'm glad to see Sullivan's writing coming under scrutiny.

I've long said it, but the more I read Sullivan the more I'm convinced he's simply an awful man. What's bothersome this morning is Sullivan's opportunism. All week he's been attacking the "evil" neocons - deploying the oldest and most despicable anti-Semitic canards - and then today he turns around to expropriate the day's top neoconservative writing as his own.

In his post, "Today's Must-Reads I: Gerecht," Sullivan spins off Reuel Marc Gerecht's work as validation of his own:

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a neoconservative with intellectual honesty and a real grasp of the region he studies, homes in on the core fact on Day 9 of the uprising, and Day 1 of the battle ...

As Iranians have come to know theocracy intimately, secularism has become increasingly attractive. Iran now produces brilliant clerics who argue in favor of the separation of church and state as a means of saving the faith from corrupting power.

Where Gerecht is analytical, Sullivan scavenges like a vulture. He feeds on the insights of others:

It is hard to overstate the importance of this, which is why, in my judgment, this is potentially the most important positive moment in history since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because it is the clearest and most promising sign that the Islamist Wall is breaking up. We have long wanted and needed a reformation of Islam and Islam's relationship with politics. The two are connected: without some civil space for dialogue, how can anyone do the intellectual and theological work to forge a new Islam more compatible with democratic norms and individual freedom. Iran is beginning to show us how that can happen.

Now step back and note how Sullivan actually repudiates himself in a later post, citing the master Bush-basher, Spencer Ackerman, in "This Conservative Revolution":

I've written before that this reminds me of the American rather than the French revolution - because it is being waged not as a means to destroy the system, but to force it to live up to its democratic promises. And that's why it's so potent. That's also why Obama's emphasis on justice, rather than freedom, is so shrewd. What we have to focus on is simply the election, its fraudulence and the necessity of a new vote. That's all. If those promises are met, the coup-regime will fall. Of course no liberal democracy will instantly follow. Mousavi is not a radical; he's a moderate establishment type. This is Gorbachev not Yeltsin. But this is not something to fear; it is something to embrace, as Reagan did.

Sullivan then quotes Ackerman for authority ("Moussavi’s Message of Reform").

But come on! What democratic promises in 1979?

As I've indicated, Ackerman wants to consolidate a "reformist" Iranian Islamist state "BECAUSE IT OVERTURNED A U.S-BACKED REGIME."

Ayatollah Khomeini did not come to power with the promise of freedom. The revolution of '79 installed a Islamo-fascist dictatorship. Spencer Ackerman sees the Bush administration as a bigger threat to the Iranian regime than the mullahs in Tehran. And Andrew Sullivan, in citing him, is blogging too fast to realize how stupid he makes himself out to be. Once you deconstruct what Sullivan is saying, we see it's all about him and his Man-Crush Dream-Boy Obama.

Iranians DO NOT need regime change to validate President Obama's hollow words on "justice." The Iranian people need to establish the secular state that Reuel Marc Gerecht has laid out, and when they do, they'll vindicate the neoconservative vision that folks like Andrew Sullivan and Spencer Ackerman have worked so hard to destroy.

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UPDATE: Thanks for the links! Atlas Shrugs, Gateway Pundit, and Riehl World View.