Ahha! Ahha! Caught in the act! Who am I talking about? Andrew Sullivan!
For several weeks now, as a regular reader of andrewsullivan.com I’ve been watching Sullivan pillory my guy Al Gore for all manner of crimes, inconsistencies, villanies, violations of this canon and that. But now I’ve caught him.
In the course of a post gently attacking Rick Hertzberg’s most recent column in the New Yorker about the moral argument for Al Gore’s case, Sullivan writes:
The point of a Republican system of government is precisely to undermine the simple conflation of majority and morality.
Sounds right … But wait! Don’t we mean here ‘republican’ as in Machiavelli and Harrington and Sidney and Locke and Shaftesbury?
(Who are these people? Doesn’t matter. It’s Talking Points showing a little one-time-graduate-student- of-Early-Modern-English-history leg. Indulge him. It’s knowledge he can’t put to any other use.)
Back to my story.
What’s with the capital-R? You only use the capital-R when you’re talking about the Republican party. What’s going on here? A Freudian slip? Perhaps so.
P.S. Talking Points would like to stipulate that he chatted with Sullivan last week and Sullivan was perfectly charming. Sullivan is a Washington big-wig and Talking Points is, well … a small-wig. So he’s really hoping Sullivan will take this whole little outburst in good humor. Really hoping.
