Andrew Sullivan made a fool of himself on ABC's This Week Sunday.
For the entertainment pleasure of viewers, George Will and PBS's Gwen Ifill assisted the Obama-loving Daily Beast columnist (video follows with transcript and commentary):
NICOLLE WALLACE, FORMER PRESIDENT BUSH ADVISER: But I think that Obama has undermined his own attacks on Romney by not being able to -- by, frankly, flip-flopping.
(CROSSTALK)
ANDREW SULLIVAN, DAILY BEAST: Well, I'm sorry, but Romney was a severe conservative from January to October, and now he's a new candidate. What I'm amazed at is why Republicans aren't scared about what he'll be in January or July.
WALLACE: Because we feel that whatever it is, is better than Obama.
SULLIVAN: But how do you know that? Because he's supporting what will be a massive increase in debt. His math will balloon the debt, just like Bush did: tax cuts, increase in spending, and no details on how -- increase in defense spending, and no details about how to balance the budget?
Will later pounced on this stupidity:
GEORGE WILL: Andrew, if I just heard Andrew right, he said vote against Romney because he would balloon the deficit. That's an odd argument for voting for the man who added $5 trillion to the deficit. That's Mr. Obama.
Indeed it is. But Sullivan wasn't done making a fool of himself.
After a commercial break, he stuck his foot in his mouth again only to have PBS's Gwen Ifill disagree with his absurdity:
SULLIVAN: If Virginia and Florida go back to the Republicans, it's the confederacy, entirely. You put the map of the Civil War over this electoral map, you've got the Civil War.
GWEN IFILL, PBS: I don't know.
Yes, that was PBS's Gwen Ifill saying "I don't know" to Sullivan's preposterous claim that the south will become the Confederacy again if Virginia and Florida vote for Romney.
But she was neither done pushing back on Sullivan's inanities nor alone:
STEPHANOPOULOS: You're rolling your eyes, George.
SULLIVAN: Am I wrong?
WILL: You are, and I'll say why.
(LAUGHTER)
WILL: Democrats have been losing the white vote constantly since 1964, so that's not new.
IFILL: John Kerry lost the white vote.
Yes, that was PBS's Ifill backing Will up in exposing Sullivan's absurdity. But George wasn't finished:
WILL: Here's -- right. Here's what we're trying to talk about. 2008, from Obama, gets that many white votes. This time, the polls indicating may get this many. We're trying to explain this difference. Now, there are two possible explanations. A lot of white people who voted for Obama in 2008 watched him govern for four years and said, "Not so good. Let's try someone else." The alternative, the confederacy hypothesis, is those people somehow for some reason in the last four years became racist.
WILL: It sounds like it.
SULLIVAN: Please. No, no, no. I'm just pointing out the fact that the white people who've changed their minds happen to be in Virginia and Florida. And if you actually look at the map...
WILL: But that is not true.
IFILL: I don't think that's true.
Yes, that was PBS's Gwen Ifill once again backing Will's exposition of Sullivan's nonsense:
SULLIVAN: ... they were the only two states...
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: Let me just point...
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: ...it's the southernization of the Republican Party. They were the only two states in 2008 that violated the Confederacy rule.
WILL: Andrew made an empirical statement that is checkable and false, which is that the people moving, or the white people moving away are in those two states.That's not true.
No it's not, and the polls reflect it.
But Sullivan as we've seen over the years doesn't concern himself with facts.
Consider that at the beginning of this Roundtable discussion, he actually said, "For the last three weeks, the state polls, the swing state polls have basically not changed. If you look at the state polls, they're the same they were three weeks ago."
Yes, this so-called "journalist" is so in the tank for the current White House resident that he believes swing state polls haven't changed since the first debate.
Given this level of advocacy, programs like This Week should seriously reconsider inviting Sullivan on to speak such demonstrable falsehoods.
It just adds to the dumbing-down of the population.
