I’m gonna take a break from writing about Andrew Sullivan for a little while. However, I would like to correct one thing before I take my leave. Andrew calls Hugh Hewitt the “Sidney Blumenthal of the Bush Administration.”
I probably agree with Hewitt’s critics on many points. I think he is too much a Republican and not enough of a conservative and as such he often bends his intellectual skills to the task at hand the way good lawyers often do. But Hewitt is nothing like Blumenthal. Blumenthal is a vile and deceitful whisperer who spreads things in secret he could not write without being sued. Hewitt’s positions are clear and he’s never pretended to be anything but what he is. Blumenthal, in mufti as a real journalist at the New Yorker covering the Dole campaign, aided the Clinton campaign. Blumenthal, as a federal employee of the President of the United States, was a professional character assassin who — as a matter of policy — lied with breathless abandon. He is, as the late Michael Kelly noted, a human ferret. One can call Hugh Hewitt a dishonest and hackish partisan (which I am not doing), but let us not slander dishonest hacks by saying they are no better than Sid Blumenthal.