A top-notch takedown

Andrew Sullivan lost all sense of proportion shortly after the Massachusetts Supreme Court created the right to homosexual marriage in that Commonwealth and the rest of the US did not rise up and cheer. He lost all rational thought sometime around the Abu Ghraib scandal when he effectively renounced his support for the overthrow of Saddam because of the actions of one small coterie of the Maryland National Guard (which was promptly and thoroughly investigated by the US military before CBS broke the story).

Much of the right-wing blogosphere quickly noticed that Sullivan had lost his bearings and has commented on it to some degree. Here at TKM, we have also commented about Sullivan's here, and here. The mainstream bloggers like Mickey Kaus and Instapundit only rapped Sullivan lightly on the knuckles from time to time.

Today, however, the normally reserved Instapundit gives Sullivan a complete beatdown -- one that should resonate. Here's a bit of that:

ANDREW SULLIVAN seems to think that I should be blogging more about Abu Ghraib, and less about the Newsweek scandal. Well, I think he should be blogging more (er, at least some) about the worse-than-Tiananmen massacre in Uzbekistan, and perhaps a bit less about gay marriage. But so what? What people blog about is none of my business. Andrew seems to feel differently, and beyond that seems to have endorsed the "fake but accurate" defense of Newsweek's reporting.

. . . Every war has its Abu Ghraibs -- and, usually, its Dresdens and its Atlantas, which this war has lacked, not because America didn't have the ability, but because it possessed a decency and restraint that gets small credit. When Andrew was a champion of the war on terror, writing about martial spirit and fifth columns composed of the "decadent left," did he believe that nothing like Abu Ghraib would happen, when such things (and much worse) happen in prisons across America (and everywhere else) on a daily basis? If so, he was writing out of an appalling ignorance.

. . . I confess, I find the question of what Andrew thinks less pressing than I used to.