Re: Sullivan

Attention  Jim Manzi at The Corner:

Here is Andrew Sullivan responding to Ezra Klein’s paean to socialized health care in the U.K.:

One reason I’m a conservative is the British National Health Service. Until you have lived under socialism, it sounds like a great idea. It isn’t misery – although watching my parents go through the system lately has been nerve-wracking – but there is a basic assumption. The government collective decides everything. You, the individual patient, and you, the individual doctor, are the least of their concerns. I prefer freedom and the market to rationalism and the collective. That’s why I live here.

I know a lot of readers here have a big problem with Andrew, but ask yourself a practical question: Shouldn’t you, at a minimum, want a tactical alliance with somebody who believes this?

(Low growl)

Look, Jim… If Saint Andrew the Incontinent was willing to allow himself to follow that logical pattern he establishes in your quote to it’s logical conclusion,  in the rest of his positions on the social and political, perhaps. As it is, no.

Examples: Sullivan claims he’s for Smaller government, Less government spending, Lower taxes, Equality before the law , Political Accountability  and yet, he votes for John Kerry, and Barack Obama.

When we see the Mayors of SanFransisco. and New Paltz get off scot free, in their extra-legal pursuit of homosexual “marriage”, while the rest of us are subject to prosecution for other lawbreaking and bending,  Sullivan cheers. Yet, how does Sullivan justify this in terms of “Equality Before the Law?” 

When a Englishman who claims Roman Catholicism and yet has been stumping for homosexual marriage at the cost of all else, for the last five years at least, comes along and tries to redefine what is and is not an American Conservative to fit his own myopic world vision… well…You’ll forgive me, that I don’t stand up and salute his ‘conservatism’.

Sullivan’s attempts at a public self-justification by constant re-definition of what constitutes conservatism, are no more impressive than are Teddy Kennedy’s complaints of simulated drownings at Abu Girabe, and for the same reason.

You see, there’s a reason Sullivan can’t bring himself to take those conservative principles of freedom to their logical conclusion.  Sullivan is acting out of consequentialism, not conservatism.  He’s discovered that he likes the consequences of conservatism insofar as healthcare, in this case, is concerned… He is not operating from a foundationally conservative conviction, not anything resembling first principles. He’s merely making an argument that on singular issues, happens to at least slightly parallel  conservatism.   Witness, please, that whenever something within conservatism happens to run afoul of the hoosexual agenda, for example, Sullivan will change the flag he’s flying under faster than a fashion model changes clothes.

Until he can get beyond that inconstancy, he’s worse than useless to conservatism, he’s a threat to it.