  Andrew Sullivan has posted yet another of his whiny diatribes about the New York Times at his website this morning. One would think that a journalist as rich and successful as Sullivan would find it unbecoming to launch vicious personal attacks on his former bosses over and over again, but not our Andy. It doesn't embarrass him at all. He loves playing the victim. Sullivan has complained relentlessly about how mean Howell Raines was to him when he worked for Raines at the Times. In his latest assault, he tries to wrap his whining in populist terms. He pretends that Raines is an elitist liberal (have any of you heard this routine before? ), and that Sullivan, staunch conservative and defender of the common American, was a target who suffered needlessly because he loves America and Raines hates it. So Andy took a blow for the common man. I'm not buying it. No jounalist in America moves in more elite circles than Sullivan. This is a guy who spends his evenings "chez Hitch" (his term) in mutual congratulatory adulation with his fellow liberal-hating expatriate Brit, Christopher Hitchens.
The only relation these two have with your average American is that they support sending them overseas to die for the Bush administration. Sullivan can be a penetrating and intelligent writer, when he isn't consumed with pettiness and score-settling. I recently finished his "Love Undetectable," and it was a moving book, beautifully written and argued. It almost made me see Sullivan as more than an insufferably smug, self-aggrandizing, censorious hypocrite, until I read such penetrating work as his recent essay, "Bush's Comeback?
" This is a guy so determined to be right that he will not acknowledge anything that goes contrary to his hero-worship of George W. Bush. In fact, the only thing that bothers Andy about Dubya is when the latter starts messing around with gay rights. Bush can cost us millions of jobs, shatter our alliances, destroy our military, stop stem cell research, limit abortion rights, lie about WMD--anything he wants, as far as Andy is concerned, except limit the rights of gays. What can one say about a "thinker" who only cares about things that affect him? Remember what Andy's other hero, Margaret Thatcher, once said: "There is no society; there are only individuals. " Maybe that's Andy's philosophy after all. 
