So Andrew Sullivan has moved to the Atlantic. In certain circles this has caused a bit of a stir. Certainly Time can't be too thrilled, apparently their web traffic has been up and this is probably not one of the cuts they had in mind - though, all things considered, they are being awfully generous about the whole thing. On the flip side, one can only imagine the delight of the humble Atlantic website, the sudden online recipient of eighty three percent of Sullivan's 75,000 average daily readership. Speaking personally, however, I must confess this move does not affect my and Andrew's relationship in any great way. Time. The Atlantic. Whatever. Where Andrew is concerned the location is moot - I would follow him anywhere.
Yet, as I re-bookmarked his page for the second time in a year, I did begin to wonder how this devotion had come to pass - how do I currently find myself trudging around the blogsphere crushing on a gay, BEARded, Republican?
It started innocently enough.
Back in late 2003, at the behest of a friend, I began to regularly read Talking Points Memo. As I recall there was very little on that blog with which I could find argument. And eventually this became a problem. I got bored. My eyes began to wander. I wanted to know what the other side was saying that was so compelling that almost half the country was in agreement with it.
I don't remember how I found Andrew, initially. I do know that it certainly wasn't love at first site. In the beginning, he was merely a foil for all the liberal views I found so familiar. He was pro-war, pro-President, and pro-life. If this was what was out there, I was staying put. But I kept coming back...just in case. Slowly I realized there was no Fox News-ness going on here. No O'Reilly factoring in to any of his arguments. Here was a man thinking his way through the grey areas of a political landscape so easily painted in black and white. Here was a man who wasn't afraid to turn and say to his passengers (long before the cliff we were hurtling towards became more universally apparent) we might be on the wrong road, it's time to turn around. I'd found a man who wasn't afraid to change his mind - some called it another case of flip-flopping, still others dredged up his somewhat controversial tenure at The New Republic - but past transgressions mattered little to me...it was all about how he treated me. And, I thought he was brave. I thought he was displaying the kind of thinking process so desperately lacking in most aspects of the political landscape. So I stuck around. And he didn't disappoint. By the election Andrew had been moved out of my bookmark list and was now front and center on my bookmark bar. Where he has since remained.
Like any relationship we've had our ups and downs. Not long after the election he faked me out with a book leave (not that he didn't write the book, but at the time he seemed to suggest he was retiring the blog to do so) . Lately, the in-depth discussions of Faith, though interesting, have challenged the limits of my attention span. But then he reappears with little zingers like this and I am once again stalling conversations at Russ Feingold -minded lunch tables and dinner parties by singing his praises. So off to the Atlantic I go. Home, after all, is where the heart is.