Ethan Gach

Let me get this out of the way first.  I like Andrew Sullivan, appreciate a lot of the work he produces, and can cite the Dish as an enormous triumph in blogging that is both insightful and entertaining.  Now then, with that praise entered into the official record, onto the controversy.

Sullivan has already gotten a lot of pushback for his recent Newsweek cover story.  Yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf went on to criticize the piece, “Why are Obama’s Critics so Dumb?” at length, by asking a question of his own: “Why Focus on Obama’s Dumbest Critics?”

“No, Obama isn’t a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power?”

Friedersdorf further points out what I think is the primary problem with the argument at the center of Sullivan’s article,

“But his Newsweek essay fits the pattern I’ve lamented of Obama apologists who tell a narrative of his administration that ignores some of these issues and minimizes the importance of others, as if they’re a relatively unimportant matter to be set aside in a sentence or three before proceeding to the more important business of whether the president is being critiqued fairly by obtuse partisans.”

Our own Ryan Bonneville makes a similar critique,

“I don’t really begrudge anyone who chooses to support Obama in the upcoming election because he’s the lesser of two evils. That he is better than Romney is unequivocally the case. (Nor, to be fair, do I begrudge anyone who supports Romney because he’s the more conservative candidate. That is also the case, even once we leave off this nonsense about Obama’s secret socialist plans to bankrupt the universe.) I do begrudge liberals who support Obama without an honest assessment of just how much of a disaster his foreign policy has been for liberalism.”

What frustrates me most about Sullivan’s now widely circulated piece is how lazy it is in parsing through the reasoning that is implicit in putting certain policy priorities above others. [click to continue…]

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