I poured my heart out on this one. I decided he needed to know why exactly he lost a reader (incidentally -- who is willing to wade through his site to see if he's man enough to post my e-mail?):
Andrew,
I am sending you my last e-mail today, as I have made the momentous decision to stop reading your blog. I say momentous because what a person reads seeps into one's consciousness, and your thoughts will no longer be in my realm of thinking.
It was a good run. I started reading andrewsullivan.com in October 2004 (linked from buzzmachine.com, in case you're curious), and a lot of what you said resonated with me. You endorsed the Democrats in 2004 and 2006 as first to dethrone Bush and, having failed that, installing a Congress that would be a check on the president's power. Your principled impassioned plea against torture spoke of the American values of human rights we hold dear, and how the torture only serves as propaganda for the terrorists. On a more personal note, your eloquent advocacy for gay marriage convinced me of its merits (and I will predict that my Generation X will bring it to fruition in one form or another across the country), and your frank posts of living with HIV shed a light on this still largely hidden disease, at least for a Virginian suburbanite like me.
So what's gone wrong? It was something so small, so trivial that it doesn't seem even worthy of bringing up, yet I must. You used your God given talents of writing to condemn Barbara Boxer's innocent remarks about Condi Rice's family status. Andrew, we are in the midst of one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in our history, so it's not a surprise that the far right blogosphere is going to grab at something, anything, to keep our minds off Bush's immoral war. And yet, you fell for it. You spent multiple posts on it, and you elevated it to a character assassination on Senator Boxer, who is not responsible for one death, not one death, in Iraq, the way Condoleeza Rice most certainly is. I could only conclude that you were fishing for right winger traffic, yes the same people who villify you daily, and that is reprehensible.
And the final nail on the coffin. Your sad devotion to neoconservative ideology as evidenced in your branding of a real patriot, a decorated veteran who killed and got shot at for his country, one of the finest members of the United States Senate, and 120,000 votes shy of being President of the United States John Kerry, as a "disgrace" (not two steps short of calling him a traitor, Andrew) for merely talking to the former reformer President of Iran Khatami among many leaders from the Middle East at the Davos World Economic Summit, and telling the truth of what has become of our country's reputation in the world (he also told Mr. Khatami that Iran should suspend their nuclear enrichment, but I guess you weren't interested in hearing the whole story). What hit me like a ton of bricks is that if Bush attacked Iran tomorrow, you would not call that a disgrace. You'd express worry about Bush's competence in carrying out yet another war, but in the end, you support the principle of toppling yet another soverign nation by military means, even after Iraq has shown us what a disaster such actions bring. How do you get away with that thinking? By turning George Bush and Dick Cheney (who listened to the neocons in the first place) into scapegoats for the botched Iraq War, leaving the radical neocon ideas of "transformation" (i.e., endless bloodbath) in the Middle East intact. And I find that an irreconciliable difference between you and me. I simply will not, cannot, give your site one more hit to further such a misguided and immoral cause that leaves America LESS safe.
I will end, now, with the story of Brian Freeman, a West Point graduate, who is no longer with us, and how his life briefly intersected with Senator Kerry's, and moreso, how his death is one more insult to the troops by the U.S. government:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/01/26/kerry_ready_to_do_battle/ And in the comfortable confines of his stately Senate office, a worn-looking John Kerry took a chair by his fireplace and told a story.
"When Chris Dodd and I were in Iraq, we were in Loading Zone Washington waiting to get out," Kerry said, referring to his December trip and the helicopter pad in Baghdad.
"This young, good-looking soldier came up to us and introduced himself. Brian Freeman. He said, 'I've got to talk to you.'
"He talked about the war and how screwed up it all was. He was wonderfully articulate, smart -- a West Pointer. When he left, Dodd and I looked at each other and said, 'This guy has it all going for him.'
"I saw him at the Baghdad Airport 30 minutes later in a men's room, and we kept talking. He was going home for leave."
Kerry's voice softened as he added, "He went home to his wife, went back to Iraq, and he was killed last week."
And there he paused. In Kerry's mind, it was eerily similar to a situation some four decades earlier when one of his best friends from Vietnam returned from a leave spent with his wife and was killed.
"What I'm saying is that the motivation is pretty deep here," Kerry said. "We have to grapple with the president and get it right on Iraq." Well, it was worse than that, as this news broke out later in the week:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/27/ap/world/mainD8MTJD980.shtml In perhaps the boldest and most sophisticated attack in four years of warfare, gunmen speaking English, wearing U.S. military uniforms and carrying American weapons abducted four U.S. soldiers last week at the provincial headquarters in the Shiite holy city of Karbala and then shot them to death.
The U.S. military confirmed a report earlier Friday by The Associated Press that three of the soldiers were dead and one was mortally wounded with a gunshot to the head when they were found in a neighboring province, about 25 miles from the compound where they were captured. A fifth soldier was killed in the initial attack on the compound.
The new account contradicted a U.S. military statement on Jan. 20, the day of the raid on an Iraqi governor's office, that five soldiers were killed "repelling" the attack. Brian Freeman was one of those soldiers who was kidnapped and shot 25 miles away. What a horrifying death. And a DISGRACE that our government let this happen and lied about the circumstances of his death. The fact that you can't tell the difference between merely talking to other countries and disgraceful acts means we must part ways. And, so, I must bid you adieu.
Beachmom
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