Amazing Fucking Creskin

Jim Boulet, a lesser Cornerite, could have told you Andrew Sullivan was going to support John Kerry months ago:

Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review Online, "The Corner," March 19, 2004:"I do wish Sullivan would save time and come out for Kerry now. In just a matter of time he will come up with the rationalizations ..."...Had Bush only backed gay marriage, one suspects, Andrew might well have sung a different tune....

Cheers to you for telling someone how he's supposed to think. There is, I suppose, a kernel of truth to this, in that once he decided not to support Bush, Andrew's supporting Kerry became that much more probable an outcome. But to suggest that his endorsement of Kerry isn't the result of genuine introspection and soul-searching, but instead a totally predictable consequence of his single-minded obsession with something as silly as his own civil rights as a gay man [who needs 'em anyway?--ed.] is an infantilizing smear. The fact of the matter is that Andrew Sullivan gave a lot more thought as to whom to support in this election than this smug apparatchik could ever hope to.

Wait, though. It gets better, by which I mean worse. Boulet cherrypicks one graf from Sullivan's endorsement piece to prove that his support for Kerry is entirely premised on the gay marriage issue:

Had Bush only backed gay marriage, one suspects, Andrew might well have sung a different tune:

[Bush] ran for election as a social moderate. But every single question in domestic social policy has been resolved to favor the hard-core religious right. His proposal to amend the constitution to deny an entire minority equal rights under the law is one of the most extreme, unnecessary, and divisive measures ever proposed in this country.

So presumably, Andrew's criticisms of Bush's Iraq policy, of which he was a staunch defender until the evidence of administrative conduct unbecoming a president became so transparent and ubiquitous that only a hack like Boulet could ignore it, are just a cosmetic overhaul of his only real complaint, which is that Bush opposes gay marriage. And Boulet improves on the unimprovable:

Curious. Bush acts to defend the nation's marriage laws from a few judges run amuck and Bush is the problem? Bush still believes in all that "government by the people" stuff we learned in school, while Andrew Sullivan is a "by any means necessary" revolutionary on homosexual matters and Bush is the extremist?

Allow me to translate: Why couldn't Andrew stop being such a faggot and stand with George W. Bush and the troops?

Now allow me to translate cross-temporally: Curious. George Wallace acts to defend his state's education laws from a few judges run amuck and Wallace is the problem? Wallace believes in all that "government by the people" stuff we learned in school, while [insert decent-on-race Republican] is a "by any means necessary" revolutionary on racial matters and Wallace is the extremist?

[The situations aren't analogous. You're forgetting that gays aren't people.--ed.]