WASHINGTON — The Ann Coulter of blogging has a new job.
Given how Ms. Brown detests Sarah Palin this hire makes perfect sense.
There’s no way Brown and the Daily Beast would care about Sullivan’s pathological hatred of Sarah Palin or his fictional tales of fake pregnancy. His countless hit pieces on Palin fit Brown’s editorial policy perfectly.
Not that Sarah Palin isn’t deserving of a lot of incoming criticism. Who can’t wait for her foreign policy trip to India? The punch lines write themselves.
Tina Brown is a big Hillary Clinton fan, but this is not an issue anymore either, because she’s out of politics, so Sullivan doesn’t have Hillary to kick around anymore.
When Howard Kurtz and Ben Smith wrote about Andrew Sullivan’s hire by Tina Brown on Twitter during the Oscars Sunday night lauding it, I could think on only one response. Needless to say, neither men responded, though Smith did mention Sullivan’s Palin hatred briefly on Politico: His status as a media property — driven by the fact that he almost undoubtedly has a larger audience than any other individual blogger in or around politics — also appears undented by his undisguised loathing for Sarah Palin, and Palin’s own unpopularity means that there’s little cost to the NewsBeast for taking on that bit of baggage. He also tweeted erroneously that if Palin were more popular Sullivan might have been passed over.
But Brown smartly wants eyes on the Daily Beast and isn’t worried about technicalities, so either way she sees it as a marketing win.
That Mr. Sullivan also wrote one of the most laughable pieces about Barack Obama, lauding his face, is something that people seldom mention anymore. That a grown man could be so utterly suckered to write such drivel is one thing. That it would turn out to be one of the worst pieces of political analysis is now election ’08 history. Sullivan’s vitriol at being duped was evident recently, though the only real embarrassment in the writing is that it took Andrew Sullivan until February 2011 to get a clue.
I feel about Andrew Sullivan the way I do about Ann Coulter, whose marketing and financial success defies the odds and good taste all the time. The sheer energy of output and never ending arrogance what keeps both afloat. Sullivan is not a political analyst, but a writer on speed with a great staff. However, you’ve got to admire anyone who can continue to make money, gain notoriety and success in a new media landscape that eats people up and spits them out daily.
Mr. Sullivan will be quite entertaining to read when Sarah Palin jumps to presidential candidate, though her latest numbers in Iowa spell big trouble in a state that she simply has to win.
Taylor Marsh is a political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.
Paul Szep cartoon posted with permission.