He underestimated the power of the dark side

If Andrew Sullivan's recent return to rapid fire blogging marks a quest for another taste of his perceived glory days earlier in this decade, he is in for some Proustian frustration. For one thing, his former allies have turned on him. Now, they could just use the inconsistency of his present and past statements against him, like Sullywatch often does, but instead there is nasty tactic that almost has us feeling sorry for him. Consider the reaching for thinly disguised references to him being gay by his new critics -- something that used to send him flying off the handle when it was read into what his critics of longer standing had said.

Example: this contribution from James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal online:

Andrew Sullivan, who has long had an (sic) peculiar preoccupation with "torture" tales

Sullivan ... gay ... weird sex ... "torture" ...geddit? In fact, we wonder if the grammatical error an peculiar is revealing -- that they had written something like "obsession" first and then further dog-whistled it to get it just right?

But they're not alone. As we noted a while ago, runtish pundit (term courtesy of Roger Ailes) Mickey Kaus has in fact led the way with repeated references to Sully as excitable, and he gets an Amen to that from Glenn Reynolds today:

As Mickey Kaus has noted, Andrew can be excitable.

There's a very Borg-like quality to this settling on agreed terminology for the War on Sully. Also odd is that when reproducing the Reynolds quote, Kaus clips the reference to himself. Not coincidentally, he recently accused Sully of stealing a pretty obvious point from him: that it benefits Hillary Clinton to be attacked by the Republican dirty-tricksters because it generates sympathy on the liberal end of the Democratic party without requiring any change in her policy positions. They feuded via e-mail:

Sullivan says (replying to an email query):

[Sully quote] yep. i read yr [Kaus] item. but ... i thought [anti-Hillary website] was misogynist and would backfire ... as a sign of how the attacks would only shore her up. but if you want to take part of the credit for my point, go ahead. [end Sully quote]

[Kaus resumes] You, the reader, make the call. ... Maybe that last sentence only looks condescending!

Kaus had headed this item "Magpie alert" making it pretty clear what he thought. In fact, if we had to choose who's the worst in this collection of siamese fighting fish, it would be Kaus. If we had more time, we'd calculate a ratio of Kaus's criticisms of John Kerry to those of George Bush, coming from a self-declared Kerry supporter. That's a level of intellectual dishonesty that goes up to 11.

UPDATE: Barely was the ink dry on this post when we wandered over to National Review's The Corner to see John "Midgette" Podhoretz (term courtesy of Roger Ailes -- damn he's good) leave just a surface tension level of subtlety on an attack on Sully:

ANDREW SULLIVAN IS MRS. ANNAKIN (sic) SKYWALKER [John Podhoretz]
... in what may be the worst writing moment of his career, Andrew Sullivan has actually decided to echo the worst screenplay ever written by the worst screenplay writer. When Andy wrote, in that nauseatingly self-gratulatory passage you quote, "This is how liberty dies - with scattered, knee-jerk applause," he was speaking in the voice of Natalie Portman, who, in Star Wars ROTS, says, "This is how liberty dies -- to thunderous applause." If he's going to go all camp on us, couldn't the Sullied One have quoted Mae West or Joan Crawford or Bette Davis or something?

Note the synergy of the War on Lucas with the War on Sully.

2nd UPDATE 21 JUNE: Taranto returns to a similar theme with a contrast of Sullivan quotes past and present, headlined -- following Kaus -- Mr Excitable. And another round here. And Sully is used to argue in favour of Karl Rove's bizarre 9/11 outburst ("Andrew Sullivan explains why Karl Rove is right") here.