Virtually Abnormal

So now Sullivan is shutting down his blog to devote single-minded focus to the greatest threat mankind has ever faced: Sarah Palin. He does this out of solemn devotion to the truth, he says, and not because he has been crazily obsessed with her from the very first second her face appeared on the national scene and in advance of his ever knowing any actual facts about her.

It really is fascinating to watch a hatred in search of a rationale, but a reasonably clear-headed scan of Sullivan’s archives will reveal exactly that when it comes to Palin. It was a pre-rational thing. He hated her guts from the moment he saw her. He spent more time than any rational person possibly could have pursuing and defending the utterly loony Trig Truther Conspiracy Theories because his pre-rational, visceral hatred of her *had* to find anything and everything that might be a useful weapon against her. As it happens, he’s found some stuff (she lies a lot as he loves to document and she’s not the sharpest pencil in the drawer), but the key thing here is that all this is ex post facto to the hatred. The obsession with Trig Trutherism is the dead giveaway here. He beat that horse till it died and went on to defend beating it long after it was dead, because the hatred could not admit to being pre-rational and visceral. He had to tell himself and us that he was being a great journalist and trying to get to the bottom of The TRVTH about Palin, not medicating a deep and visceral hatred of her that he himself seems unable to fully grasp.

Today’s stunt is just more rationalization of that fact.

Now, it may well be that his ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration on Palin’s hastily-ghostwritten bit of self-promotion will turn up more of what we normal people already know and acknowledge: that she’s a woman with a tenuous relationship to honesty who isn’t too bright and who is obviously not suited to be President. The thing is: normal people will not be suspending all normal daily activity in the icy and obsessive pursuit of stomping her book into the dirt until there is nothing left of it and then turning, if possible, to rend her in pieces and utter barbaric yawps of triumph over her twitching corpse with a green light of insanity glittering in our eyes. Most of us have, like, lives and stuff. But this is, for some reason, a maniacal personal vendetta for Sully. He. can’t. stop. And so he has to rationalize to himself and the rest of us that he is a noble hero whose only thought is for the health of the Republic. Otherwise, it means taking some time to look within and ask where the pre-rational and visceral hatred arises, very much in advance of his ever actually knowing anything about her.

Sullivan’s Corollary to the Nancy Kerrigan Principle: Just because your hatred of somebody leads you to discover some dirt on your enemy doesn’t mean you are a hero, or even particularly rational.