In the post-9/11 period and during the war in Iraq, Andrew Sullivan viciously attacked dissenters. But as my former Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz points out, Sullivan has reversed his position and has now offered a confession of sorts:
In the last few years, I have gone from lionizing this president's courage and fortitude to being dismayed at his incompetence and now to being resigned to mistrusting every word he speaks. I have never hated him. But now I can see, at least, that he is a liar on some of the gravest issues before the country. He doesn't trust us with the truth. Some lies, to be sure, are inevitable - even necessary - in wartime. But when you're lying not to keep the enemy off-balance, but to maximize your own political fortunes at home, you forfeit the respect of people who would otherwise support you - and the important battle you have been tasked to wage.
Now he can see the president is misleading us to maximize his political fortunes? As Ben writes, better late than never. But let me refresh Sullivan's memory about what a New Republic article that he wrote back in 2001. As I wrote for Spinsanity, Sullivan lauded President Bush for misleading the public about his economic policies:
Some commentators--at this magazine and elsewhere--get steamed because Bush has obscured this figure [15.6%, the percentage of GDP the government will consume in 2011 under the Bush budget] or claimed his tax cut will cost less than it actually will, or because he is using Medicare surplus money today that will be needed tomorrow and beyond. Many of these arguments have merit--but they miss the deeper point. The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of "compassionate conservatism" shows how uphill the struggle is.
Yes, some of the time he is full of it on his economic policies. But a certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state. Conservatives learned that lesson twice. They learned it when Ronald Reagan's deficits proved to be an effective drag on federal spending (Stockman was right!)--in fact the only effective drag human beings have ever found. And they learned it when they tried to be honest about taking on the federal leviathan in 1994 and got creamed by Democrats striking the fear of God into every senior, child, and parent in America. Bush and Karl Rove are no dummies. They have rightly judged that, in a culture of ineluctable government expansion, where every new plateau of public spending is simply the baseline for the next expansion, a rhetorical smoke screen is sometimes necessary. I just hope the smoke doesn't clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again.
The message is that it's ok to mislead the public in the service of goals that Sullivan agrees with. I hope he will repudiate this statement next.
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