15 Jan 2011 Christopher Caldwell’s Unfairness? No, Andrew Sullivan’s Chutzpah

Andrew Sullivan today is requesting a retraction from the Financial Times for publishing this line in a Christopher Caldwell article:

Many prominent people disheartened by the resurgence of the Republican party – notably the blogger Andrew Sullivan, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and the Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik – linked the shootings to Republican ideology or rhetoric…

Saying, “It’s important to push back against untruths as much as against incivility,” Sullivan says “The Financial Times needs to run a correction” because “Did I ever ‘link the shootings to Republican ideology or rhetoric’? Nope.”

But as a screen shot here makes clear, the very afternoon of the Tucson shooting, in a blog post then entitled “An Assassination: Live-Blogging,” Sullivan, referencing a Republican campaign ad, wrote, “The conflation of conservatism with the willingness to use violence depressingly deepens.”

Sullivan not only linked the violence just as Caldwell says, he was one of the first to publicly do so.

Sullivan’s chutzpah in denying the obvious is only exceeded by his chutzpah in demanding a retraction. As Sullivan himself says in another post today attacking Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush, “It’s the methodology of never regretting anything and never acknowledging error that brings it home.”