Friday links! Return to normalcy edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments
Warren G. Harding and some skank

Warren G. Harding and some prime postwar tail

Back in 1920, self-made newspaper publisher and beloved milquetoast Warren G. Harding ran for President promising a “return to normalcy”—the resumption of American life as it was lived before World War I. Ask Scott Fitzgerald how that worked out. The past is past, and its very passage confirms our endorsement of the process that carries it away from us. Even when we return to normalcy—or, if you’re a jerk, “normality“—we do so remembering the weirdicy that came before, and we are changed. Today is Friday, and United has returned me to Missoula in a mere 13 hours. My fish are somehow alive, thanks to Ben al-Fowlkes, and I am standing at my desk as if nothing happened. Fortunately for the links, however, a bunch of stuff went down. Won’t you settle in with the uneasy memory of one who has woken from a dream with me?

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Andrew Sullivan: Canary in the mine

By Dan Brooks in conservatism, glenn beck, health care, help me kill zombies, new york times, populism, Reactionary Populism, representative democracy, sarah palin, widespread dumbening 8 Comments
Conservative Atlantic Monthly blogger Andrew Sullivan has publicly repudiated the right.

Conservative Atlantic Monthly blogger Andrew Sullivan has repudiated the American right, finally freeing him to publicly wear these glasses.

We here in the Combat! offices read Andrew Sullivan a lot, but we don’t get to link to him as often as we’d like to, probably because he doesn’t spend enough time saying things that are completely insane. A Tory transplant from the UK, Sullivan has identified as a conservative for most of his career,  despite his sexual preference (dudes) and his tendency to support centrist Democrats in second-term Presidential elections (Bush-to-Clinton, Bush II-to-Kerry.) Basically, Sullivan’s conservative principles guide his political affiliations, not the other way around. Until Tuesday, he’d managed to lean left and right while remaining publicly aligned with the Republican side of the American political spectrum. All that changed with this blog post, in which Sullivan announces that he can no longer support “the movement that goes by the name ‘conservative’ in America.” His public repudiation of the American right—and, by implication, the GOP—is seismic coming from a man who prides himself on being “of no party or clique.” It’s also an indicator of how far the Republican Party has drifted from anything that an informed, reasonable American who is not himself a politician would want to endorse.

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