Braindrops

...Andrew (the day you anger) Sullivan

There's certainly a better pun somewhere, but I have real work to do.

Anyhow, frequent readers of Andrew Sullivan's blog (cited as a top-10 website by The Jewish Press, of all sources), have seen him evolve from a strong supporter of George Bush's go-it-alone-ism (In one memorable post that's not memorable enough for me to locate, he succintly described France as "not an ally." And that's before Claudia Rosett really got started.) to a consistently harsh critic of the Babylonian morass, based, as best as I can tell, on the sniffings of people whose opposition to downtreading the masses never quite made it over the fence into Do-Something Land.

I don't know Sullivan, of course, other than in the way modern technology fosters unidirectional relationships. I do know that he has been an unrelenting critic of the hypocrisy evinced by the UN and others in their benign acceptance of anti-semitism. In general, he seems like an honest and clear thinker. The consistency of his criticisms following the presidude's watery support for the FMA, however, resembles those of the best Bush-bashers this side of the New York Times.

I'm enough of a libertarian-wannabe to prefer the restriction of anti-homosexual activism to churches and the like where the state can't exercise its rather blunt tool kit (which, when you boil it down, consists only of force) in defense of a somewhat arbitrarily selected morality. (With apologies to Dennis Prager, most people adhere to the religious beliefs of their culture, rather than engaging in some sort of comprehensive theological analysis. The culture assigned to any particular infant is, to my mind, fairly arbitrary.)

However, at the current time, the presidential contest has been waylaid by presumably well-meaning souls who oppose the use of violence in the suppression of the Islamists that want nothing less than the horrific suppression of every child ever met by every person reading this blog. Unfortunately, it seems as though the sustained use of the American military (which I consider to be indispensible) will, to some extent, depend on the outcome of the election.

If I'm in Bush's snakeskin boots, and I think I need to win because my cause is right (reasonably assuming that ego-related issues play no more or less a role than on the other side), and one of the costs is getting my hands dirty in the swamp of high-school-level bigotry, then that's what I do.

Do I like it? No, but if I'm willing to allow an unknown number of Iraqi children to die in the interests of salvaging the future of their society (which is an inevitable component of supporting the war, like it or not), then I'm willing to (even dishonestly) adopt the rhetoric of the Jerry Fallwells of the world, even if it makes the Log Cabin folks unhappy. The end (no pun intended) justifies the means.

- Moishe Potemkin

Posted by MoisheP at September 13, 2004 08:27 PM