The centre cannot hold

Maybe everyone is extra tired from watching all the baseball, but it certainly seems that Andrew Sullivan is having particular attention span problems these days -- perhaps having lost the anchor that came from Dubya's manliness and resolve.

Sullywatch documents two cases of his overeager linking: one to a deeply unfunny Derrida-football riff that Sully attributed to Gregg Easterbrook but actually came from one of Easterbrook's readers, and another, via Mickey Kaus, that supposedly represented a John Kerry flip-flop in the hunt for Osama [note, by the way, the thirst of people who claim to be supporting or leaning towards Kerry for any bit of hackery that fits the Rovian stereotype of him, but that's another story].

Anyway, Sully just seems confused when he leads of with this:

IRAQ'S ELECTION: Let's review where we are. There aren't even faintly enough U.N. troops to prepare for a legitimate election in January

Who said anything about UN troops? Presumably he caught a glimpse of stories like this one from the NYT, which referred to a shortage of UN election monitors. Later on he seems to catch himself and realise that the issue is whether there are enough US troops to induce UN monitors to come -- but the incoherence neatly mirrors Dubya's own on the topic.

In fact, given Sully's continued weak spot for Dubya, we're not ruling out him offering a last minute endorsement, along the lines of Butt-head's trenchant analysis of Radiohead's Creep: "if it wasn't for the parts that suck, the other parts wouldn't be as cool."

UPDATE: we're going to claim some predictive power for this post, because AFTER our observations on Sully's lack of attention to details, the following classic typo appeared [since fixed without comment]:

KERRY FOR PRESIDENT: Here's the New Repubic endorsement.

The aforementioned Butt-head collapses in laughter.