Comrade Andrew

It's mainly a casual spectator sport, the ongoing feud between Andrew Sullivan and the National Review staff. It has escalated from pro-life issues to more general issues of conservative theology. But one quick note: the speed with which Sully has embraced rhetoric that he used to denounce is remarkable. Consider for instance --

The attitude of people like [Ramesh] Ponnuru and [Laura] Ingraham and [Mark] Levin is indeed Stalinist in form, if not content. But when you have to defend a massive increase in government spending and power in the name of conservatism, this kind of newspeak is necessary.

He gets in the digs from the Trotskyist and Orwellian playbooks; won't Hitch be impressed? But there was a time when tossing around a term like Stalinist would draw his ire, for example this attack on cartoonist/provocateur Ted Rall:

Rall is someone who craves and shouldn't get more attention, but his views from an interview last year are revealing:
"My theory is that essentially, people don’t like to think they're living in a country [the US] that’s led by an evil, dictatorial madman. But they are, they are living in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia."

[link via Google cache because Andrew seems to have (inadvertently?) sabotaged direct searching of his archives]

And note that his complaint here is not what with the factual (in)accuracy of what Rall says, but the violation of "elemental decency and taste." Yet now, not for the first time, Andrew seems to be eligible for one of his own awards.