Enumerating old themes

It's not getting any easier to know what's going on with Andrew Sullivan. He finally got around to officially retracting his supposed retirement from blogging, but despite occasional signs that he is, as Sullywatch puts it, heading towards semi-reasonableness, there's a few warning signs of Old Sully in his Sunday Times column today:

That IO [Iraqi insurgent Information Operation] platform was amplified by an American election much of last year, where journalists couldn’t help but report Iraq through the lens of domestic politics. Now, that is less evident.

The remaining difficulties are still reported. But the American press, even in its most liberal redoubts, has essentially changed its tune since January 30.

Which sounds like his notorious "fifth column" accusation just dressed up in new jargon. But there's also the unintended self-mockery. Take this passage:

Under autocracies people are manipulated by paranoia and resentment. In democracies they force their leaders to give them better sewers and roads and schools and police

-- perhaps a subconscious but awkward homage to John Betjeman's sarcastic In Westminster Abbey:

Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.

Then again, Betjeman's wartime verses provide an apt summary of the reactionary right's home front contributions to the War on Terror:

I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
Help our lads to win the war,
Send white flowers to the cowards
Join the Women's Army Corps,
Then wash the Steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone.

The one difference is that where his subject still prays to God, her modern day equivalents have substituted George W. Bush.