Andrew Sullivan quits blogging; I shall cry no rivers for Sully's #hypocrisy

So Andrew Sullivan is giving up blogging? Boo hoo.

Because, Sully, I'm going to deconstruct your farewell post just like I was PolitiFact.

Let's start here:

(W)e experienced 9/11 together in real time – and all the fraught months and years after; and then the Iraq War; and the gay marriage struggles of the last fifteen historic years. We endured the Bush re-election together

A funny statement to make, as I just Tweeted Sully. Yes, per Wiki, he "repented" in time to vote for John Kerry in 2004. However, he was dumb enough to support a moral conservative in the first place in 2000.

Beyond that, his "four cardinal sins" on supporting the Iraq War in the first place show someone shockingly ignorant of geopolitics in general and the Arab world in particular, thus invoking some sort of Peter Principle issues.

Of course, that same general lack of brilliance led him to name his own personal "journalism" awards after Brat Pack "journalists" Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein.

Of course, as Wiki also reminds, and I do too, only more bluntly, that's due to Sully's "Bell Curve" infatuation, which I must say is high-grade racialism and nothing less.

And, that led to some blog spoofing by me, here, for the blog post where my Photoshopping above first appeared.

That in turn was part of his general work for a racist magazine, which is what The New Republic was. Hell, maybe he was having gay sex with Marty Peretz (who is far more nutty than painted at that link) for all I know.

Speaking of, and back to that part of his farewell.

He wasn't fighting the struggles for gay marriage 15 years ago. As Wiki reminds, per this Salon piece, 12 years ago he was fighting the fight on the down low for bearback gay sex at a time when AIDS concerns in the gay community were still pretty damned high. (Showing the weirdness of Salon at times, two years earlier, another writer defended him.)

Yeah, he eventually got married. But, not until three years after Massachusetts legalized gay marriage. So, again, Sully, not in front on that fight.

It's all part of Sully's seeming hypocrisy, the hypocrisy that makes him at least as much a "cafeteria Catholic" as a John Kerry.

Next?

This:

You were there when I couldn’t believe Palin’s fantasies.

What about your own fantasies, namely that Bristol Palin was Trigg Palin's mom? I eventually repented of following you and the "Palin Deception" website down that rabbithole, finding more reasonable possible explanations for Sarah's nuttery around Trigg's birth. But you, apparently, never did. 

Then this:

You were there when … we live-blogged the Green Revolution for an entire month.

Ahh, yes, when Twitter was supposedly the force overturning Iran, then the whole non-democratic world.

That was a conceit that was being refuted even as Sully mouthed it. I tackled some of that nonsense here.

It's all part of Sully's seeming hypocrisy, the hypocrisy that makes him at least as much a "cafeteria Catholic" as a John Kerry.

I don't begrudge at all his personal reasons for leaving. But, per the hypocrisy, he probably was about to fracture his spine figuring out new ways to triangulate himself.

Also, I don't get some liberals who think he's the bees' knees.

Was money the reason to quit?

I am not sure.

His last post says he was making $1 million revenue/year. Now, deducting for assistance (staff of about 10 at peak, perhaps; 7 non-Sully plus one intern listed now) ... overhead, etc., could he afford all this? Assume Sully paid himself $150K. The seven others, on average, about $80K. That’s $700K; whatever he paid the intern and overhead... yea, he was making money. Maybe not as rich as whatever Atlantic paid him before, but I don’t think he was going broke.

On the other hand, a WaPost story says he took no salary in the first year. And, it's not clear how well he maintained his renewal rate. Matthew Ingram talked about some of this early on.

On the third hand, he doesn't mention finances as a reason to throw in the towel.

Beyond that, I don't get why he had so many followers.

Half of what he posted was too short for even a Tumblr. That's why, beyond not agreeing with much of what he said, I don't get why that many people would pay to read him. In that way, he reminded me of Duncan Black, aka Atrios, running the blog Eschaton, which, while more liberal than Sully, years ago became just as short if not shorter on a regular basis.

The only sidebar to this is that it shows his vaunted tip jar/self-subscription model for blogging may not be such a model. Here is my original thoughts on his setting up his subscription model riff on a tip jar. I didn't think about it at the time, but, on the model he proposed, it's "interesting" that he missed the whole "tragedy of the commons" angle.

Actually, it's not "interesting" — it's really a "no duh." Libertarian types in general refuse to acknowledge such a thing even exist. I love the sound of petards hoisting in the morning!