{"id":1874,"date":"2011-01-21T10:18:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-21T10:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2011\/01\/everything-you-need-to-know-about-andrew-sullivans-paranoid-obsession\/"},"modified":"2014-12-31T14:32:12","modified_gmt":"2014-12-31T21:32:12","slug":"everything-you-need-to-know-about-andrew-sullivans-paranoid-obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2011\/01\/everything-you-need-to-know-about-andrew-sullivans-paranoid-obsession.html","title":{"rendered":"Everything you Need to Know about Andrew Sullivan&#8217;s Paranoid Obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>Behold the <a href=\"http:\/\/andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com\/the_daily_dish\/2011\/01\/the-dish-cloud.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">word cloud generated by the Daily Dish<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>One of the strangest spectacles in American political journalism has been the instant, visceral and obsessive hatred\u2013and I do mean hatred\u2013Andrew 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\u2019s dance career, the sheer stalker obsessiveness of Sullivan\u2019s Palinoia has been a spectacle to behold. One can\u2019t escape the sense that it\u2019s about more than her (admittedly slipshod and self-aggrandizing) rhetoric. It\u2019s certainly not about her imminent election to the White House (which ain\u2019t never gonna happen). No, it\u2019s more\u2026 well, <i>uterine <\/i>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\u2019t quit her. In this, he is much like the rest of the press, as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/01\/17\/opinion\/17douthat.html?_r=1&amp;adxnnl=1&amp;ref=rossdouthat&amp;adxnnlx=1295633024-6T4sTskQr\/kaZ7aLlxwj7g\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Ross Douthat notes<\/a>. 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\u2019m not aware of any time that Palin has responded directly to Sullivan (though I don\u2019t follow her very closely and could be missing quite a lot).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, all that is preface to noting that, one of the small benefits of Sullivan\u2019s obsession is that, periodically, it will turn up fun little tidbits like this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theonion.com\/articles\/morbid-curiosity-leading-many-voters-to-support-pa,18865\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin\" class=\" decorated-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The problem is, you have to wade through 10,000 gallons of raw obsessiveness to pluck little diamonds like this out of the sewage.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2013and I do mean hatred\u2013Andrew 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Everything you Need to Know about Andrew Sullivan&#039;s Paranoid Obsession<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Behold the word cloud generated by the Daily Dish:One of the strangest spectacles in American political journalism has been the instant, visceral and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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