Andrew Sullivan’s hackles are up because of my post yesterday. He says he’s an independent voice and I’m trying to blacklist him because I’m not. Blah blah blah. He calls my charge of inconsistency “the usual crack,” lacking perhaps the self-awareness that the crack’s usual for a reason. The truth is that what he calls a blacklist at NRO is in fact a general attitude that arguing with Sullivan is not worth the effort because he argues in such sweeping bad faith that nothing good can be gained. Meanwhile, he wants credit for his intellectual integrity for engaging with NRO even when he disagrees with it. What a hero. Doesn’t he have to to “engage” with NRO? How else would he cherry-pick the facts to suit whatever new theory of the universe he’s invented this week?

Just a few very quick examples from off the top of my head (I know there are many more):

Derb used to be a bigot beyond the pale and NRO should lose him forthwith. Now Derb is a voice of reason. Ramesh is a theocon fanatic as demonstrated by his book, which Andrew did not read even as he criticized it — a practice Andrew denounced when employed even remotely against his own book. Sullivan repeats the tiresome insinuation that NR/NRO have been in lockstep with the administration when (as I have to point out from time to time) this is nonsense and further proof that Andrew reaches conclusions and then looks for facts. When I reviewed his book and it wasn’t up on the web, he asserted that we were trying to keep it secret or some such so as to not let the world hear his wake up call. When we put it on the web — as we’d always planned — he wrote a phone book of a post about how basically we were trying to censor him by posting it. Sullivan said that conservatives were rallying around Dinesh D’Souza. He said that NRO was standing by D’Souza. When the facts contradicted both these assertions in glorious splendor, he ignored the facts and wrote a review arguing that what he feels must be true must be true. He mutters something about blacklisting Bruce Bartlett, who continues to write for NRO (six pieces since last month ). Andrew now thinks my forthcoming book is indicative of something closed-minded and nefarious. I wish he’d said something when I explained my thesis to him in person over dinner in Adam’s Morgan a few years ago. Andrew wrote a few years ago that I was something like the most “fair-minded” conservative of my generation. He now insinuates I’m some kind of lap dog. I ask honest observers to ask, Who’s changed more, Sullivan or Goldberg? And if your answer is Goldberg, please cite some examples as I’ve done.*

In short, one should not confuse superficial “independence” with intellectual integrity, as so many of Andrew’s fans continue to do.

Oh, one last point. What Andrew calls “blacklisting” is in fact a reasonable reaction to too much unwarranted coverage of Sullivan in these parts — as countless readers keep telling me. Indeed, as one reader pointed out to me:

Jonah,
You might like to know that Google reports that (“andrew sullivan” jonah
2006 OR 2007) shows up 346 times on nationalreview.com, while (“jonah
goldberg” andrew 2007 OR 2006) shows up 53 times on
andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com. [In fairness, it looks like only the
past year’s worth of Andrew blog is indexed — but I’ve constructed the
search to account for that.]
Still — your blacklisting is clearly pathetic. Andrew’s, on the other
hand, is not too shabby.

I hereby promise to try harder. * I’d post links to my earlier examples, but it seems the switch to a different server has made searching for them too much of a pain. But if necessary, they can be dug up.