Back when Andrew Sullivan was a conservative, he sent lots of traffic this way with a number of links. So, I feel a certain sadness with his change of perspective over the last few years.

Andrew wrote a piece titled The Tea Tantrum Movement for The Atlantic. It is his take on the Tea Party protest movement based on an admitted hour or so of on-line research.

He professes to have emerged from his rigorous course of research perplexed, bothered and bewildered.

He describes the movement as “some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don’t feel part of the culture at all”. He calls it “adolescent, unserious hysteria”.

Andrew makes the error that most liberals insist upon, that this is a movement of the Republican Party. Had he looked at the existing documentation of the hundreds of Tea Parties already held, he would have clearly seen that the movement is made up of some very average people, people who have never “run” the country. Perhaps he did look, but chose not to engage his intellect.

He even manages to make a serious historical error. The men who conducted the original Tea Party were NOT illegal immigrants, but Englishmen fed up with having their rights trampled by a distant government.

That is the bone of contention for Americans today. Our government has grown distant and is failing to respect our rights, the rights we have enjoyed from the founding of this nation.

Andrew needed to come up with a few hundred words for his paying gig, so he slapped something on the wall with the hope it would stick. It’s brown, and sticky, and smells. I would have hope for a little more reflection and honesty from a man who I once admired.

In today’s Democrat & Chronicle is a column by George Will that was printed in larger papers yesterday. I read it and my jaw dropped. When did George Will become Andrew Sullivan?

Before Gen. David Petraeus’s report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq’s Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president’s and Petraeus’s standards of success.

The President has visited Baghdad several times. How is the success of the surge measured by his visit to Anbar rather than to Baghdad? Anbar is a success story and a place that both Iraqis and Americans can take a certain pride in have changed for the better. Baghdad itself is improving and is a far better place than it was six months ago. Yet, in these simple sentences Will somehow concludes that a visit to highlight a success story means the surge has failed.

Will goes on to say

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time — “breathing space,” the president says — for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Will characterizes Iraqi society as

a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds.

As a historian, Will certainly recognizes that all nations are born with a degree of chaos. Our own United States was “a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds” for generations, not just a handful of years. Just hours ago the Mormon Church released an expression of “profound regret” for the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1847. We cannot forget our Civil War a few years later. In the 1920’s more than one black community could attest to the existence of “a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds”.

Measuring Iraqi political reconciliation goes beyond the legislative efforts of the Iraqi national government. It is visible at the local and provincial levels. It is visible in the military and police. It is visible in the lack of a civil war despite all of the outside interference attempting to provoke one.

Will then uses some incorrect statements to bolster his argument.

First, measuring sectarian violence is problematic: The Post reports that a body with a bullet hole in the front of the skull is considered a victim of criminality; a hole in the back of the skull is evidence of sectarian violence. But even if violence is declining, that might be partly because violent sectarian cleansing has separated Sunni and Shiite communities. This homogenization of hostile factions — trained and armed by U.S. forces — may bear poisonous fruit in a full-blown civil war.

Multi-National Force-Iraq corrects the Post and Mr. Will:

Multi-National Force-Iraq defines ethno-sectarian murder as a murder committed by one ethnic/religious person/group directed at a different ethnic/religious person/group, where the primary motivation for the event is based on ethnicity or religious sect.

Ethno-sectarian violence is defined as an event and any associated civilian deaths caused by or during murders/executions, kidnappings, direct fire, indirect fire, and all types of explosive devices identified as being conducted by one ethnic/religious person/group directed at a different ethnic/religious person/group, where the primary motivation for the event is based on ethnicity or religious sect.

In our collection of data, a shot to the front or back of the head is not used to determine ethno-sectarian murder.

The number of ethno-sectarian murders has declined significantly since the height of the sectarian violence in December 2006.

Iraq-wide, the number of ethno-sectarian deaths has decreased by over 55 percent, and it would have decreased much further if it not for the casualties inflicted by barbaric al-Qaeda bombings attempting to reignite sectarian violence.

As for the accusation that sectarian forces are “trained and armed by U.S. forces”. Nonsense! This is merely the echoing of false statements made by the anti-war left. Will has no evidence that this is the case nor does the left.

As one milblogger pointed out, we have no need to arm anyone in Iraq with the vast amounts of arms that Saddam had purchased and stored before our liberation of that nation. Every household in Iraq is entitled to have an AK-47 for self-protection and most seem to have availed themselves of that right.

Will concludes with a repetition of the left’s claim that “the “gathering danger” of weapons of mass destruction — was fictitious” and writes

That is one reason this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president’s decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war — the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.

After more than four years of war, two questions persist: Is there an Iraq? Are there Iraqis?

1n 1780, four years after the Declaration of Independence, the United States was still involved in a war for its independence. One of our foremost generals defected to the British in that year and American militias opposing independence ravaged much of the south. In the following year, we adopted a new form of government, and eight years later we adopted a different form of government. Over 100,000 Americans fled the independent United States, many in fear for their lives. Democracy is hard and we should be very careful in holding the Iraqis to a schedule we were unable to meet.

As to the questions he closes with “Is there an Iraq? Are there Iraqis?”, I would suggest that the tens of millions of Iraqi citizens who have voted three times so far would put paid to that scurrilous canard. The thousands of Iraqis in the military and police who have died in the line of duty put paid to that scurrilous canard. And, sadly, the American dead such as Paul Smith, Jason Dunham, Amanda Pinson and Terrence Crowe, who died in the line of duty in this war, put paid to that scurrilous canard. Because, Mr. Will, if there is no Iraq and no nation that calls itself Iraqi, then all these heroes have died in vain.

I tossed Christopher Hitchens out of the pool of those I respect some time ago, for his mean spirited hatchet jobs on Bob Hope and Sister Teresa. He’s done another, on Pope Benedict, whom he can only refer to by his give name and not his religious one.

Curiously, he does not follow the same naming convention with regard to Byzantine Emperor Manuel II.

First, he cheap shots the title “Pope” by comparing the head of the Roman Catholic Church to that of the Coptic Church. There are well over 1 billion Roman Catholics in the world, and about 225 million Orthodox. In that 220 million are 30 million Copts. Hardly a fair comparison.

Of course, Hitchens repeats the lie that the Catholic Church was spread by violence.

There would have been no established Byzantine or Roman Christianity if the faith had not been spread and maintained and enforced by every kind of violence and cruelty and coercion.

That would be a surprise to the founders of the Church, which in the first 300 years saw the Church spread throughout the Roman Empire despite the most vicious of persecutions. And it would be a surprise to the Crusaders of the first Three Crusades, who, despite Hitchen’s calumny, did not sack Christian Byzantium. It would also be a surprise to Sister Leonella, had she not been murdered for HER beliefs.

In fact, Hitchens accepts the Islamic polemic that the Crusades were about the victimization of Islam. He forgets, or never knew, that the Crusades were launched to recover the Christian territories in the Middle East including the Holy Land which had been conquered, violently, by Islamic invaders.

Hitchens climbs on his atheistic high horse, disparaging the Pope’s perspective that reason and religion are compatible. He criticizes the Pope’s choice of philosophers in his speech. And, in a bizarre statement claims the Church would have destroyed the Reformation without recognizing in the least that the Reformation was faith based. In other words, it appears that he views the Reformation as a good thing so long as it poked a stick in the eye of Rome. His hatred of things Catholic blinds him to the contradiction here.

Rather than address the Moslem reaction to the speech, or the notion that the use of violence to advance faith is wrong, Hitchens concentrates his venom on the Pope and the Church. He purposely ignores the violence happening everywhere Islam borders another set of beliefs. There is a ring of fire around Islam, which its believers have set, and around which the blood of non-believers pools.

Oh, yes, Hitchens is a hateful man and a hate filled man. I wonder if he ever sees goodness in his life, or in the world? Just what sorts of morals and ethics does he respect?

The worm who mugged Mother Teresa and Bob Hope turns his filthy thoughts to Iraq, and the issue of news being distributed by the military to Iraqi media. Christopher Hitchens climbs on his high horse and pontificates based upon the New York Times story that I’ve already demonstrated is error filled and slanted. But Chrissy proceeds, none the less, since goodness and right are mere concepts in the real world.

His first charge is that it discredits Iraqi media at a delicate time in their development. Obviously he hasn’t read any Iraqi papers or any Iraqi bloggers. The beauty of the Iraqi media is that each and every outlet has a perspective. Some are very religious, some not. Some pro-American, some not. The Iraqis understand that it is pure fiction to believe that any media outlet has no opinion about the news. The Iraqis know which newspapers and broadcast stations support the United States. They’re not stooopid. And Chrissy overlooks the obvious in the Times. It clearly states that most of the stories were run under the banner of advertisement or editorial opinion. No deception there.

I have to wonder how he just knows that the Pentagon has no budget for media relations in Iraq. Because I read a dozen press releases from there a day, at least. Maybe he ought to call up Centcom and let them know that he doesn’t want to hear any of their news so they should stop making it.

He drags in the recent report that President Bush threatened to bomb Al Jazeera. He finds that thought reprehensible, as I would suspect, he would find the thought of bombing Radio Berlin or Tokyo Rose.

He then drags in the reported deaths of some Iraqi journalists from our fire. Of course, in his view the Brits would have done it better. Yes, the Brits have done so well with their empire, haven’t they? Yes, we can learn a lot from how the Brits ran their empire, creating the IRA, the MauMau, Ghandi, oh, hey, and the American Revolution.

Then he has the gall to suggest that fraud was committed and the American people were lied to. That would be why the program was public knowledge in June, and why both the Washington Post and BBC reported on aspects of it. Big bloody secret, that was!

Finally, he drags the bleeding body of Pat Tillman across the screen, proving to himself at least, that the Pentagon is a bunch of lying, thieving scoundrels. And to cap it off, he MAKES UP a story about Iraq to prove just how awful the Americans are.

I realize that some conservatives see Chrissy as a valued member of the club. I don’t. His greatest delight appears to be in tearing down not creating. He is a classic example of Old Europe, bitter at his betters and unable to construct anything of value from decaying prose.

Is he speaking of himself when he states:

Now any fool is entitled to say that a free Iraqi paper is a mouthpiece…

? His hodgepodge of accusations bolstered by errors and innuendo might have earned him his salary for today’s column, but that’s all it earned him.

Just for your information, France, Germany, and the rest of Old Europe: The President of the United States is under no obligation to obtain your approval of any of his appointments. Nor, would we expect you to obtain ours in similar circumstances.

So, butt the hell out!