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YOUR DONATIONS AT WORK
Andrew Sullivan pulled in close to $80,000 during his 2002 pledge drive. By some estimates, he raised another $120,000 during other annual drives. Those who’ve donated (I’m among them) may therefore be a little disillusioned by this:
After much hemming and hawing, I’ve decided to put the blog as you’ve known it on hiatus for a few months. The Dish will still exist, the site will be updated weekly with new feature articles, and I’ll still post when I feel like it. But it won’t have the regularity or content of the past four and a half years. Why? The simple answer is that I want to take a breather, to write a long-overdue book, to read some more, travel to Europe and the Middle East, and work on some longer projects. Much as I would like to do everything, I’ve been unable to give the blog my full attention and make any progress on a book (and I’m two years behind) ...
I’m going to turn this into a far more occasional operation for a while. I’ll keep posting when the feeling grabs me; but I’m no longer going to promise the kind of daily attention to the news that I have practised so far.
Planning his vacation, Sullivan thanks readers for “the financial support that has kept this blog alive and well.â€? (Two hundred grand and he still couldn’t afford a blogroll? Way to share the bloggy wealth, Andrew.) Other sites—many other sites—have done more with less.
Sullivan’s massive blog earnings have ended up funding a Euro-Middle Eastern stroll with time off to write a book. His next pledge drive might deliver a substantially lower return.
Sullivan’s blog was brilliant back in 2001 and 2002 but he has kind of lost the plot, I hope his break enables him to get back to his best. I don’t simply mean that he backed John Kerry therefore I don’t like him, other bloggers like Mickey Kaus did likewise, but in Sullivan’s case he seems to make his conclusion and the try to twist the arguments to fit, rather than his decisions flowing from his arguments. And he became quite nasty to people who had previously gone out of their way to defend him.
Before being too PO’d, we should find out where the money has gone. Clearly Sully will have had expenses associated with maintaining the blog, and I bet his bandwith costs are high. He has also obviously spent a fair amount of his own time on it. Is stuff paid into Paypal part of his income and therefore taxed? To have any idea of whether we should be complaining we should at least get answers to these questions.
(I didn’t donate to Sully’s blog as it happens).
My message to Sullivan:
Go ahead, Andrew, take a few months. Heck, take a year. Or however long it takes to pull your head out of your ass. Then maybe I’ll start reading your site again.
Posted by Joe Bonforte on 2005 02 01 at 12:24 PM • permalinkI too donated to Sullivan at least three times as I remember. That’s $300.00. Since then I have revised my thinking on contributions because basically I think Andrew’s head became so large after receiving all that money from perfect strangers, it caused him to disconnect completely from reality. Too bad because he writes wonderfully well, is knowledgeable and well educated and can be very funny at times.
By the time gay marriage issue erupted and his hatred for Bush became visceral, he was too far gone to read any longer and his blog was excised from my morning blog reads. Perhaps he’s closing down his blog because his readership plummeted. Be interesting to know how his 180 degree turnabout affected the number of hits he got per day.
I’m amazed that anyone ever gave smug, self-important Sully money…let alone $300! That kind of cash could have actually helped a deserving person.
I saw him on the Tina Brown CNBC show last week, when he tried to expound upon why Passion of the Christ was the ‘worst movie ever made.’ Fellow gasbag Brown told him to stuff it.
Wow, people actually give money to bloggers? $300? Maybe I should get a Pay Pal account and post more often.
Posted by Evil Pundit on 2005 02 01 at 01:40 PM • permalinkI stopped reading Sullivan just after I started reading Tim Blair, Fearless Leader. I began to see a disturbing parallel between Sullivan and Margo: the more they wrote, the more warped they became.
Sullivan might play the outsider, but he’s got an insider mentality: self-absorbed, flighty and too driven by impulse to be taken seriously.
Posted by Gary from Jersey on 2005 02 01 at 01:58 PM • permalinkI donated twenty-five bucks to Andrew’s site and - within twenty minutes, I swear! - he began droning on about the Catholic Church, gay marriage, and other long, endless rants that could bore the freshly embalmed. At least I didn’t pop $300; I saved that for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. [Butch gloats.]
I never donated to him, I really liked him when I first started reading his stuff, but I just had to stop reading him when he went nutso over the gay marriage issue. I know it’s important to him, but it seemed important to the exclusion of every single other consideration of what was going on in the world.
Then when his donation drives got to be such a big deal and he seemed so casual about the fact that he had a winter home and summer home… um sorry, but I work like a maniac and I can’t even afford the car I would like to drive, much less 2 places of residence. Then he would take a month off directly after a pledge drive! Seems to be a bit arrogant to me. (I mean if you’re going to take a vacation, don’t make it look as if you’re collecting hard earned money from your readers in order to finance it… I’m just sayin’)
Now after all these people have donated money, he’s lost his interest in blogging and is going to head to Europe for a little R&R… Not even having donated, this is annoying. And I think if I had donated, I would consider it to be because I wanted him to continue - not just take the money and run. But hey, at least those donating know now what they’ve paid for…
Right you are bc. Not to be flip, but his torture posts have themselves been truly tortuous.
Andrew once mentioned that his most vivid impression of Iraq was those pictures of Abu Ghraib. How about the image of the poor guy with the grenade strapped to his body being blown up, on camera. Now that was vivid - not to mention indescribably cruel.
He did a good job deconstructing howell raines and the nyt’s.
Although, I also became a less frequent visitor to his site until I stopped altogether after the election. One reason I stopped, aside from the ones already specified, was he hid the fact, by not linking to them from his website, that he had already written articles saying he was supporting kerry. Which was pointed out on NRO’s “The Corner”. A deception that would be right at home at the nyt’s and the rest of the msm.
In the end he became just another Henny Penny.
I won’t miss him one little bit. He’s a tool.
I read him for a few weeks and he was OK but then slid off the edge of reason.
Posted by Fluent Idiot on 2005 02 01 at 07:15 PM • permalinkHey guys, we’re a couple of old geezers and can afford to support causes we like, we’re not younguns with families to support like most of you.
The Swift Boat vets got a very nice check along with a note of our appreciation.
I don’t do paypal. Had a lot of problems with it on a different matter and stay as far away as I can from them.
Actually, he’s only trying to go on vacation. When last seen he was at Kennedy airport, running back and forth between gates at opposite ends of the terminal, unable to decide on a destination…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 02 01 at 08:46 PM • permalinkSorry, I’m like a broken record with this message whenever a Sullivan thread appears over at Little Green Footballs, but I have to add it here. I know it’s the cool thing to claim “oh, I stopped reading Sullivan when he, suddenly, without warning, started blogging about gay rights issues that were in the news!”. Well, if you didn’t realize that Sullivan has been writing about gay rights issues for many years and this somehow became distasteful to you when you figured it out, it’s really no one’s fault but your own for not doing a little research. Bloggers write from a personal and partisan standpoint; Sullivan was not a news organization, he was a man with his own interests, beliefs and stances on the issues. It’s fine if you didn’t like what he wrote, just move along. But don’t pretend that you weren’t aware of one of the main threads of Sullivan’s narrative, or pretend like your indignation is somehow special. That would be like me saying “I liked Tim Blair’s political writing, but I just got tired of having his Australia obsession shoved in my face all the time. It began to really colour his whole world-view. I know he’s Australian and all, but come on!”
THAT SAID, I don’t really like Andrew Sullivan’s site, though I used to read it extensively in the past. My attention started to wander before it became the cool thing to stop reading him though I probably quit altogether when a lot of other people did, when he declared for John Kerry in the US election. Since I basically share his stance on the gay marriage thing (being gay myself and all), I always read his writing on the subject with great interest, and I really feel that those subjects are really his strongest contribution to political though. There are not a lot of people writing from a positive centrist/conservative position about homosexuality in the world of letters, so his voice was/is a valuable one. It’s his writings about geopolitics that became muddled and his inability to stand behind his decisions that started to chafe. I certainly understand being conflicted as someone who has supported the Bush administration in their geopolitical strategies and absolutely rejected their social policy (though Bush hasn’t really articulated social policy related to gay rights that has particularly bothered me, that comes more from other elements of the Republican party. Bush has been downright vague and disinterested in it, as he should be seeing as there’s a war on). But Sullivan should have been able to maintain that cognitive dissonance, and understand the need to have a strong leadership on international and security issues and be able to separate foreign policy from domestic social policy.
But one of my main reasons for becoming disillusioned with Sullivan was the one Mr Blair articulates. The first time Sully raised all that cash and then proceeded to “go lie in the hammock” I sort of turned sour. There are plenty of bloggers who write with as much (or more) verve and with more dedication than Mr Sullivan (like Tim for instance!) who get almost nothing for their efforts. I eventually decided that there was no reason to put up with Sullivan’s begging for cash and his laziness when there are plenty of better writers out there who deserve my readership. I like writers who are fearless, and Sullivan started walking on eggshells too much for my taste.
Speaking personally Goldsmith I didn’t stop reading him because he was gay or started concentrating on gay marriages. I couldn’t give a fat rat’s cleacker about it.
He simply lost the plot and was no longer interesting. He was only marginal at best anyway.
Posted by Fluent Idiot on 2005 02 01 at 09:26 PM • permalinkcan someone start a support group for recovering sullivan supporters?
Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2005 02 01 at 09:36 PM • permalinkSullivan is a cautionary tale. He may be a good writer on some issues, and his blogging used to be readable, but with constant posting he became exposed in such a way that I came to see him as a vacillating hysteric for whom the glass is perpetually half-empty. His postings seem like a slow-motion breakdown to me. Watching him lash out at other bloggers who have treated him with kid gloves is sad. He is a bringdown to the live patients now. Maybe he will come back and produce readable work, but I will find it hard to take him seriously again. If I was only exposed to his op-ed’s, I am not sure that this picture I have of him would have come into focus as it has.
On Saturday I wrote “I’d rather plunge my head into boiling chip fat than read Andrew Sullivan,” and a couple of days later he throws in the towel. You’re welcome, everyone.
Sorry to hear that some of you got stitched up, though. I’d assumed these money-for-Sullivan scams involved oil pipelines, and Nigerians in suits; you’re telling me that all he did was put a Paypal box there, and people just clicked it and sent him free money? It’s so simple it’s brilliant!
I shall miss those emails of the day from his readers. They were wonderful, absolutely the dreariest things on the whole internet.
Posted by harry hutton on 2005 02 01 at 11:53 PM • permalinkGoldsmith - I believe I said I stopped reading him when it seemed as if the “only” thing he could blog about was the gay marriage issue. Not because he blogged on gay issues. When I first started reading him, he had all sorts of posts ranging over many world affairs and yes that included gay issues. I had no problem with that… but when it became, for all practical purposes, his sole topic - he seemed at that point to lose his grip.
I stopped reading him for a while, thinking he would eventually move on. (not being gay, I have only a limited interest in gay issues - I don’t mind keeping up with them, but I want to read about other things too - if you know what I mean) Well, he did move on, but the gay marriage issue seems to have pushed him in some strange direction. Where I used to find he was straightforward and fairly logical - he seemed to have jumped off the deep end and I could no longer relate to anything he was writing… too bad because he is an extremely talented writer.
Hah! I get to enjoy the generous gift Sullivan is giving punditry by removing himself from it, and it didn’t cost me a thing! Suckers!
I’m not convinced he was ever a good writer. His windy rhetoric made us feel good for awhile, before it became impossible to ignore how ridiculous it was. Sullivan defined “conservative” as taxing gasoline and whatever Kerry seemed to be doing at the moment. He made up what he lacked in substance by turning up the volume.
I agree with him on the issue of gay marriage, even, but that doesn’t magically make him coherent. Boi From Troy wrote the best comment I’ve seen in the deep, deep sea of posts about how people are sick to death of Andrew Sullivan.
“Indeed the crime is that Andrew Sullivan has no idea, yet he decides to go out and speak as if he did.
If you have a 32mb Win95 dialup Netscape 4.0 (neither an early adopter nor an early lender be), you get great service by unchecking ``Automtically Load Images’’ and ``JavaScript’’ and check ``Use My Own Colors.’’ The result is fast text only, most blogs look the same, no ads, no images you don’t click on, and Sullivan’s site is dark blue on purple and completely unreadable, owing I suppose to some elaborate custom Sullivan feature, which discouraged reading right from the beginning, so you never got the habit. All you know about him is what Jonah Goldberg complained about that day
I’m with Sortelli, I don’t really think Sullivan is a good writer. What attracted me to him was, as I said, that he filled a niche that desperately needs filled: a rationalist moderate and someone who writes from the perspective of a gay male without adopting the ironic bitterness, the urban decadent fabulist persona, nor histrionic “queer theory” politics that usually accompany this perspective. But Sullivan’s ideas never seemed particularly original or illuminating, just acceptable and his writing seemed false: dry, pedestrian pieces barded with layers of NPR-style sentimentalist poetics. He tried to be the “outsider” iconoclast for the “never leaves a metropolitan area” set, but never being too uppity for fear of losing the lucrative job of blather supplier to some of the widest read publications in the world. All I can say is, I am glad I never gave him any money. I sure doesn’t take 120,000 dollars a year to run a website that short on actual content (that ran using the Blogger system for Christ’s sake), and as Tim said, without even a blogroll to share the love. He wouldn’t even print the names of his letter writers. God forbid it be about anyone other than Andrew.
Heh, you know, when someone talks about how they got sick of Sullivan because of the gay marriage issue, I think they really mean the moment Sullivan stopped filling the niche that attracted people to him and started being the ironically bitter urban decadent fabulist persona full of histronic queer theory politics because LICOLN WAS GAY HOW DARE ANYONE QUESTION THAT SO OBVIOUS CONCLUSION???? GOBSMACKINGLY VILE!!!!
Hey, if I’d banked $200,000… I’d also be taking an extended vacation!!!
Posted by nofixedabode on 2005 02 02 at 07:43 AM • permalinkhmm, send me $200,000 and i’ll stay at work. i promise.
Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2005 02 02 at 08:04 AM • permalinkThe problem was not that Sullivan wrote too often about gay issues, it’s that as soon as Bush came out in (mild) support of the FMA, Sully shifted in about a day from defending Bush to excorciating him on every aspect of his presidency. Since then (and his unacknowledged shift from pro-war in Iraq to anti has also highlighted this), Sullivan comes across as driven by emotional urges, rather than analytic thought. I have no use for that in a writer.
The other problem with Sullivan is that he is a Beltway insider. His call for increased gas taxes (because he doesn’t need to drive anywhere) was typical. In the Beltway, it’s all about who you know and how much power you have. That’s why Sully never feels the need to cite other bloggers and doesn’t feel obligated to tell his readers how much of their donation money is still sitting around. When he does leave D.C., he goes to Provincetown, which is about as East Coast as you can get without falling into the Atlantic ocean.
“Well, if you didn’t realize that Sullivan has been writing about gay rights issues for many years”
Goldsmith, please read what we said: we “used to read his blog” so of course we all knew he wrote about gay issues as well. The time we all left him was when he started to mainly write about gay mariage, began threatening to switch to Kerry for that reason (alone?) and generally sound like a nutcase.
Quite another thing is that switching to Kerry after getting such massive donations from Republican voters (who else?) sounds dead wrong in my ears! When bought, he should stay bought. :)
I stopped reading Sullivan not only because the gay marriage issue became overriding for him, but also because he went wobbly on Iraq. A few looted vases and 1,200 KIA in a year would have been considered irrationally optimistic before the shooting started. Sully went irrationally pessimistic after. That’s unserious.
Besides, my blog reading is pretty full with Instapundit, Blair, Damian Penny and Whacking Day. That covers the Anglosphere well enough.
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Sullivan is the only blogger I’ve ever donated to, for reasons I no longer remember. I wish he had been more honest about the fact that gay marriage trumps every single other issue for him. I would’ve kept my twenty bucks.