Pride and Pride

We noted a little while back some latent tensions between fellow Crimson-hued conservative bloggers Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus, and as the dispute rumbles on, we can't really tell if it's a gimmick to bump up each other's referral hits, or whether there is something more fundamental going on. But the choice of words in the dispute can be revealing.

Before it was Kaus's strange and repeated references to Sully as "excitable." In a post on Friday where Sully does actually sound annoyed, he pleads:

But he takes after me for inconstancy?

Which made us think of one of the six novels we've ever read, Persuasion, where the charge of inconstancy is the one that wounds Captain Wentworth the most:

I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.

Unlike the novel, we don't know whether this drama has a happy ending.

UPDATE 8 MARCH: Happy ending? Not yet. Completely out of the blue (or is that crimson?), Kaus uncorks a random dig at Sully; the context is a Kaus claim that his blogging about MSN to AOL e-mail problems led them to be rectified, which leads him to threaten to shift into "full Sullivanesque Gloating Mode." Has he read our Sully-50 Cent post?