Everything you Need to Know about Andrew Sullivan’s Paranoid Obsession

Behold the word cloud generated by the Daily Dish:

One of the strangest spectacles in American political journalism has been the instant, visceral and obsessive hatred–and I do mean hatred–Andrew Sullivan has displayed for Sarah Palin from the instant she appeared on the national stage. From the weird obsession with Trig Trutherism, to the need to analyze everything she says and does, to the continual need to chronicle such trivialities as Bristol’s dance career, the sheer stalker obsessiveness of Sullivan’s Palinoia has been a spectacle to behold. One can’t escape the sense that it’s about more than her (admittedly slipshod and self-aggrandizing) rhetoric. It’s certainly not about her imminent election to the White House (which ain’t never gonna happen). No, it’s more… well, uterine than all that. She seems to sum up in her very being something that I doubt even Sullivan can fully articulate, but which seems to have as much to do with her nature as a female as it has to do with her dumb rhetoric, her gold-digging disloyalty to her oath of office, and her exploitation of her role as demagogue du jour for the right. She is deeply shallow and a complete lightweight, and yet Sullivan can’t quit her. In this, he is much like the rest of the press, as Ross Douthat notes. But Sullivan is more. Nobody in American journalism manifests the level of sheer obsessiveness with her as he does. Nobody else made a spectacle of himself as a Trig Truther and still, to this day, thinks that it would have mattered even if he *had* proven his crazy obsessive theory to be true. It is this bizarre gynecological obsession that sets Sullivan apart from the run of the mill journalist who first sets Palin up as Somebody Important and then complains when Palin uses the attention the media draws to her to bask in the spotlight and complain about the media. Funnily enough, I’m not aware of any time that Palin has responded directly to Sullivan (though I don’t follow her very closely and could be missing quite a lot).

Anyway, all that is preface to noting that, one of the small benefits of Sullivan’s obsession is that, periodically, it will turn up fun little tidbits like this:

Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin

The problem is, you have to wade through 10,000 gallons of raw obsessiveness to pluck little diamonds like this out of the sewage.

I’ll be glad when the primaries are over and Palin is finally relegated to the FoxNews talk circuit where she will be happy pound the self-promotion drum and hunting bears with the Kardashians and/or Lindsay Lohan. She’s in it for Sarah Palin and the sooner the people who take her with such deadly seriousness on the fringes of Right and Left realize that, the better.