Matt Taibbi on the Sullivan/Palin feud:
Getting back to the present, even though Andrew Sullivan is a Republican, it’s not hard to see why Sarah Palin lumps him in with the left. Sullivan is gay, has probably been to a non-Christian bookstore more than once in the past six months, uses multi-syllabic words, is a member of the media and, most importantly, hates Sarah Palin. It may sound like a mistake to say that it was reporters “on the left” who harped on the whole Trig business, but it’s not a mistake if she’s using the word “left” in the sense of “Godless east-coast intellectual watcher of subtitled movies who disagrees with me,” which is where we’ve allowed this word to go.Sullivan's not a Republican, but the rest is all true. It reminds me a bit of Bill O'Reilly's measure of how "left-wing" someone is, the sole criteria seemingly being "how much they hate Bill O'Reilly."Anyway, the kicker in all of this is that we now have a left-right controversy that has nothing to do with either the left or the right. What we have here is the nutty Birther movement dueling with a mostly imaginary Trig-conspiracy movement that the Birthers believe comes from the left, or at least their idea of left, anyway. This battle will be hard-fought, prolonged, and ridiculous, sort of like that fight sequence in Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen struggles with the pillow thrown in his face. I imagine this will also be a good preview of the kind of thing that will pass for “left-right debate” in 2012. God, I love politics in this country!