Andrew Sullivan Meets The Resistance

Andrew Sullivan, a conservative Tory Catholic gay blogger for Time, has spent the last two years disappointed with George Bush, and has written a book about it. I was reading one of his reader responses, and it resonated with me enough that I decided to reprint it. Amen!

A longtime reader [of Andrew Sullivan] writes:

Why do you think the anger of the left - the decent left - is any less than yours? Do you think we feel less betrayed? Wrong. Do you think we are less betrayed? Wrong.

Like your African-American friends, many of us on the left knew the WMD argument was game. I wrote you years ago that the WMD was a set-up; that they knew it; that they lied about it; that they believed they'd find some old munitions left over from the first Gulf War that they could hold up and justify themselves with; that they were shocked shitless when they found the whole country swept clean and they were left standing there speechless like the idiots they are. But even I never suspected the level of incompetence and perfidy they've shown since - to the American people, and to the Iraqis.

Do I blame you for being mad? Not a bit. But keep in mind that those of us on the left who saw this coming - and saw a hundred other issues coming, from abrogation of the wall between church and state to the ballooning deficit - we have spent the last five years being called every ugly, vicious name in the book because we tried to stop this, because we tried to warn the American people: haters, traitors, pussies, weenies, liars, partisans, hacks, wacks, radicals, commies, atheists, morally confused, mentally challenged and anything, anything except patriots who love this country and everything it stands for - or ought to stand for. Even the name "liberal", that honorable word, has been made into a curse. So don't tell me the anger of the betrayed and decent right and center is deeper. Just tell us thanks for keeping the faith, for fighting the good fight. Just for once, call us brothers and sisters.

By the way, Matthew Yglesias has a terrifically smart review of Mr. Sullivan's book right here.

And for some reason everything I write now looks italic. HTML: what's up with that?