Andrew Sullivan dribbles this bit of sarcasm about Michael Novak's florid praise of President Bush:
No, that wasn't a recent quote from an obscure North Korean sports stadium.
That's right! At the National Review you can find the equivalent of totalitarian North Korean toadies in fear of their lives praising the insane Kim Jong-il, who controls his people with starvation and routinely threatens to nuke us.
Because, you know, Jong-il is just like George Bush!
This is why I don't much care for identity politics. It turns you into a person with a peculiarly distorted ideation, like a balloon with a soft spot that's gotten all bulged out and oddly-shaped. It removes the Clever Filter, which non-fixated people use to discern whether their cleverness is actual cleverness, or merely a window into their thoughts. Andrew resents the fact that gays are being used by the Bush administration in a cynical bid to bring out those four million evangelicals who didn't show up at the polls in 2000 and gave Karl Rove those anxious hair follicles. As well he should.
But that doesn't mean that a hyperbolic comparison between Bush and a delusional, murderous dictator should pass without comment, particularly when it's made by someone who has previously been enamored with the president.
I don't believe that supporting a discrimintaory constitutional amendment for reasons of political expediency is a testament to good character or a commendable moral stance. Especially if you do so while knowing full well that it doesn't have a sexually reassigned lesbian biker's chance in Appalachia of passing. However--and I say this despite my own predilections--neither do I believe that the issue in question surpasses the importance of the threat of Islamofascist terror and the effective prosecution of a war against its practitioners and supporters. Not even close.
I believe that the long-term trend in this country is towards the elimination of all officially-sanctioned discrimination. It won't happen during a second Bush administration, but it will happen eventually. The fact that the elimination of discrimination towards gays isn't happening fast enough for Andrew is, quite honestly, too damn bad.
Andrew lays down his defense by writing that readers are "invited to send in suck-uppery of either Kerry or Bush in this ra-ra campaign," and I'm assuming that means he's somewhat disinclined to locate some Kerry suck-uppery himself.
The needs of Andrew's personal identity have obscured his judgment about the immediate needs of the polity as a whole. Kerry is not the man to fight the war that needs to be fought, and Bush's political bigotry doesn't change that.
