Sullivan: Far be it from me to lay into someone who is less than starry eyed about the blogosphere. (I've never been particularly boosterish about the much-bandied influence of blogging, though it sure seemed Sullivan was when Howell Raines was forced out.) It's a good time to give it a rest, I think. I've toyed with the idea myself, though Razor's snippy attitude always brings me back to thrash him a bit more.

To be frank, Sullivan's site dropped off my own must-read list about 5 minutes after he went off the rails over the war/WMD/quagmire in Iraq stuff. For a prominent supporter of the war, he blanched pretty quickly when things turned rather war-like in Iraq. And I have no patience for his Kerry-istic critiques that imply or state that one only had to do this Iraq thing the right way, a way that was, it seems, obvious all along. Hogwash. It was Monday morning quarterbacking, nothing more.

The other thing that gets me is Sullivan's attitude toward the GOP. Now I make no claim to being Mr. Republican, but I'm realistic enough to see that socially liberal, market-minded independents can either assert themselves within the only major party that is not openly hostile to the free market, the GOP, or they can continue to wander in the third-party wilderness. Sullivan must have known how the GOP was going to play a marriage amendment. He's a Republican, after all. He must get the mailings. His attitude was a little too "how dare you" to be believable. Recall that the man Sully ended up endorsing, John Kerry, tried to claim that there was no daylight between himself and Bush on gay marriage.

I have to admit that a small part of my hostility is due to Sullivan's pledge drives. As I've said before, I get analysis as good as his for free, from any number of sharp sites. But if he wants to make money at it, I'd respect him more if he just made his site pay-only, competing with the likes of the Salon (chotle), the WSJ, or soon enough the NYT. Don't drag me through the drama of how hard you work and how much you pay for bandwidth, or any of that public broadcasting guilt trip. It's demeaning, and just not professional.

Oh, well. Good luck, Andrew. I hope you find yourself.

More: I think Razor nailed it: Becoming the darling of the non-religious GOP forced Sullivan into publishing apologetics. (Some of the early ones he wrote about Bush must really embarrass him now.) But part of the problem was that Sullivan did go squishy, did flip-flop. Like I said, the gay marriage thing didn't just come out of the blue, and the Dems sure didn't stick up for marriage rights, preferring to whimper in the corner. His endorsement of Kerry was the last straw. I fail to see how anyone with any sympathy for the GOP could warm to Kerry. In fact, I bet even Razor briefly considered voting for Bush. It may have been just a tiny flicker, but somewhere, deep down, some part of you said, "Am I really going to vote for this Massachusetts clown?"