Tuesday, March 21, 2006

He gets letters

We're still catching up on yesterday's material which got stalled with the Blogger outage, but we wanted to make note of an odd reader e-mail printed by Andrew Sullivan yesterday. It criticises him for alleged betrayal of the conservative cause:

"Your blood-and-thunder, hateful tirades against our commander-in-chief in time of war and at a vulnerable point IN that war ... firmly in the camp of Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin and the Hollyweird left in general ... Gays cannot sacrifice enough of their sexual self-interest to adhere to an ideology as austere as conservatism ... There is a long, proud history of betrayal in the homosexual community, whose most celebrated example - the locus classicus, if you prefer - is Philby and his crew. Congratulations on joining that fine tradition!"

There's something odd about the style. It begins with the standard Hannity-Limbaugh style usages, then a weird homage to monastic conservatism, a Latin phrase, and a Kim Philby reference. That's not an obvious combination; bits of it are reminiscent of John Derbyshire but it really requires a mix of being steeped in American reactionary rhetoric but with a good bit of English polemical skill also in there. Who could meet such a description? We were led by Sullywatch to a post on the Gay Patriot blog, where at least one commenter is wondering the same thing -- their suspect being one of the regulars in the comment section of that blog. A minor mystery, of course, but one to keep in the records.

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