Sunday, June 26, 2005

The writing is being fixed around the policy

Andrew Sullivan gets upgraded from his usual American commentary slot in the Sunday Times of London to a long Focus piece on the Downing Street Memos:

Focus: Secret memos fuel US doubt on Iraq
ANDREW SULLIVAN
He’s vowed to complete his mission in Iraq, but President Bush faces growing disillusion as leaked documents reveal the hidden path to war and the mood changes in America


Yet just a fortnight ago (as they'd say in London), Sully was telling his blog readers that:

All the memo shows is one individual's take on what was going on in Washington. It was also my take and the take of lots of journalists and observers. It proves nothing but that senior figures in Downing Street believed that the war was inevitable, unsellable to the British public and that there was almost no post-war planning. I guess it is slightly amazing that any senior government official can get three things right. But I'm underwhelmed.

By the way, there was already more than one memo when he wrote this, showing that he was sufficiently underwhelmed to even research it properly, beyond reading a laughable Michael Kinsley column.

So what's changed? Well for one thing, there are hints that the Sunday Times is now his major income source. Sully freelances all over the place, but only one outlet gets this acknowledgment:

My British employer, the Sunday Times, provides a helpful guide to all the documents it has published ... My main employer, the Sunday Times, scores another huge scoop with this leak

Another element of the mysterious Andrew Sullivan finances.

UPDATE JUNE 27: Things get weirder. Sully has posted what he says is his Sunday Times piece on his blog. But it's not the same piece that actually ran in the Sunday Times. In particular, the web piece downgrades the role of the Downing Street Memos. Here's the key sequence from the web article:

The poll that showed sixty percent of Americans now want to start removing troops from Iraq merely confirmed what was obvious: Bush's war-policy can no longer be sustained by the kind of "trust-us" condescension that he has previously employed. [****] And so the debate has polarized yet again - and the poles are now further apart than ever.

But the actual ST article has five DSM paragraphs at the [****]. He mentions the memos, once, and in his more dismissive tone of a few weeks ago, in the web piece. There's the ever-present rule with Sully to follow the link. But now it applies even to his links to himself. Are his readers not supposed to know that he was against the memos before he was in favour of them?

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