POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Andrew Sullivan Acts Retardedly

Andrew's dropped some pretty crazy stuff before, but every time you think that the freak show hosted by The Atlantic for reasons that are as obscure as The Hunger Artist couldn't possibly get any more demented, he produces a new and even more Gordian mental contortion that renders one both gorgonized and revolted.  So it is in today's post on Sarah Palin stating that Rahm Emanuel should resign for having called a room full of proggs---the class of people who actually read Andrew's blog for information---"f*cking retarded," before apologizing to those actually suffering cognitive dysfunction not haplessly or ignorantly visited on themselves by regular consumption of pot or reading of Andrew's posts, for example.

The reason he is OUTRAGED!  OUTRAGED! by the outrageous conduct of Palin is that he has it on the perfectly good authority of Bristol Palin's baby's biological father (the sort of stand-up guy that one can trust implicitly) that Sarah Palin referenced her baby as retarded in private, to the disbelief and consternation of the man who, calling himself Ricky Hollywood, rests his reputation not only on his ability to father a child out of wedlock and to cast insinuations on television shows regarding the former Governor of Alaska and one-time Republican nominee for Vice President, but also on his extraordinary career as a semi-nude model in a women's magazine . . . which, in saner times, would have prevented Scott Brown from becoming a Senator from Massachusetts.  Assuming for the moment that we could trust the testimony of this (unimpeachable) witness (and indeed who am I to judge?), would it be correct to say that Sarah Palin might have uttered such a thing privately?  I ask only for information, because the privacy of the utterance has been extended as a mitigating circumstance on behalf of Mr. Emanuel, who is by no means a vulgar person . . . publicly, as is certified by his training in ballet.  I seem to recall that this same observation was made in defense of Harry Reid's comments about a candidate's attractive freedom from the stigma of negro dialect, except in cases where its use is commendable (for example on the podium in front of an audience of African Americans looking for authenticity), though the writers of Game Change claim that they were not speaking to him off the record.

But what compounds the OUTRAGE that Andrew feels is Sarah Palin's meretricious insistence that the child she calls hers was actually conceived and gestated in before being expelled from her very own womb, despite all evidence to the contrary, consisting as it does in sudden flashes of insight vouchsafed from the supersensual realm of ideas as things, visited upon the author in states of reverie Coleridgean in their intensity (and likewise not unalloyed with psychotropes), which, as everyone who has experience in this cogitative condition (at second hand, naturally, from reading Thomas De Quincey) knows are difficult to recapitulate thereafter in any detail.  At any rate, Andrew calls for the great soothsayer Levi Johnson, to say some sooths about the mind-boggling political cover-up of the century all time. . . that Sarah Palin is not the biological mother of the child called Trig (never has been and never will be), but instead is likely covering for Bristol who, against all the odds, managed to give birth to a trisomy-g (Tri-g, see?) baby at her young age, in spite of nobody having noticed that Bristol was pregnant, and so on.  So clever is he that he has used Occam's razor to perform a Caesarian on a dead (male) horse.

Quite frankly, Andrew Sullivan is insane.  I don't think he's just a slow learner.

Yeah, Ace couldn't refrain from commenting, either.

UPDATE: Oy.  "The intellectually disabled."  New Rahmbo: "What's the matter with you people?  Are you f*cking intellectually disabled?"  You know, part of the problem here is that this is a common gambit, to state that the reason someone disagrees with you is because they're stupid.  Or, racist.  Or, the victim of false consciousness peddled by Fox News, or whatever.  It's an attempt to shout people down and to short-circuit a reasonable give and take of ideas.

Let's say one of my kids takes a canoe out during a thunderstorm, and upon returning home, I realize this.  He pulls up to the dock, and I'm furious.  I bluster, "Are you out of your goddamn mind?"  On the other hand, someone disagrees with me about health insurance.  They're all for single payer.  I don't think it will provide an advantage to Americans on average, for a variety of reasons.  Do I ask that person whether he's retarded?  No.  The point of that would be . . . what?  Suasion?

On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan is just nuckin' futz.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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