More evidence (as if more were needed) that Conor Friedersdorf is a narcissist

Arguing with a narcissist is pointless, because the narcissist doesn't really care about the merits on either side of the argument. The ultimate point of the narcissist's argument is his own superiority (cf., Charles Johnson).

So it is with Conor Friedersdorf and the question of whether Sarah Palin's supporters are motivated by ressentiment. Julian Sanchez argued so last week, offering little more than a highhanded rehash of the ancient Adorno/Hofstadter psychoanalytic putdown of conservatism -- "status anxiety," blah, blah, blah -- which required in response that the knife be thrust to the hilt. ("When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way.")

It happened that Sanchez had linked Conor Friedersdorf's guest-blog at the Daily Dish, Palin-Hater HQ since the day she was announced as John McCain's running mate. And today Friedersdorf returned to the subject with the telling assertion that Sanchez's critics merely prove that he, Conor, was right:

When the Rebuttals Prove Your Point
In the last couple days, Julian Sanchez and I wrote posts arguing that a vocal group on the right are engaging in what Mr. Sanchez terms "the politics of ressentiment." . . .
It is noteworthy that both of us used the words "inferiority complex" in our posts . . .

(Is "noteworthy" a synonym for "tautological"?)

Indeed, explicit in our posts is the assumption that their "complex" is irrational. "Mark Levin, a man intelligent enough that he needn't have an inferiority complex," I wrote, "for some reason adopts the rhetorical style of the classic insecure bully -- juvenile name calling, constant self-aggrandizement, vituperative outbursts." . . .

Read the whole thing, or don't, if you wish to avoid the annoyance. In his first two paragraphs, Friedersdorf employs six first-person singular pronouns, a giveaway of his narcissistic purpose, his objective being to demonstrate his own superiority to . . . well, everyone, really.

Conor is engaged in the politics of aspiration, aiming to win acceptance by the elite as a certified intellectual, a pundit. This requires that he shoulder the heavy burden of fiercely defending his own reputation. It won't do to allow Sanchez to one-up him and steal his thunder. Therefore "I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . my . . . I."

Sanchez's argument was wrong, but it was at least interesting and eloquent in its wrongness -- a lively read, no matter how infuriatingly smug its underlying assumptions. By contrast, the writing in Conor's posts (both the original and its sequel) is lifelessly leaden, weighed down by a stultifying self-seriousness.

Conor's arguments aren't actually about Sarah Palin or her supporters (or Matt Continetti's defense of Palin). Conor is arguing on behalf of Conor: Take Me Seriously, Dammit!

Good luck with that.

UPDATE: Via Instapundit, we find Ann Althouse engaged with another Daily Dish problem: Is you is or is you ain't Sully? Under fire from Lachlan Markay of Newsbusters, the former pseudo-Sully Patrick Appel responds:

Lachlan Markay pretends that my doing research for Andrew is the same as Lynn Vincent writing Sarah Palin's book.

Well, don't that beat all? There was never any deception involved in Lynn's collaboration with Palin, and it is the question of deception -- How much surreptitious work did others do under Sully's byline? -- that is at issue here. Ah, remember those halcyon days when Sully excoriated Rick Bragg for employing uncredited stringers?

Rick Bragg's self-righteous and self-pitying defense of his dubious journalistic methods appears to have been the last straw for some others at the NYT.

"Dubious journalistic methods," said Sully, who now employs ghostbloggers to perform mere punditry -- and then goes on vacation, leaving his erstwhile alter-ego to defend the practice!

Glenn Greenwald's sockpuppets must be laughing themselves silly over this . . .

Is Andrew Sullivan an anti-Semite?

I certainly don't think so, and consider it terribly unfortunate that Sullivan has exposed himself to this damaging accusation through his reflexive enthusiasm for all things Obama -- just as he once was denounced as a "neocon" because of his reflexive enthusiasm for all things Bush.

Sullivan got over his unrequited Dubya man-crush, and maybe his current see-no-evil attitude toward Israel's enemies will fade if Sullivan discovers that his new presidential idol also has feet of clay. So while I have called Sullivan a menace to society and advocated his deportation, he's probably not a Holocaust denier or a peddler of blood libel.

My friend Dan Riehl called attention to this accusation against Sullivan, by way of firing a shot at Conor Friedersdorf. I've fired my share of shots at Conor, but I certainly would never accuse him of Jew-hating. The extremely toxic nature of the "anti-Semite" label is such that I am extremely hesitant to apply it.

Consider the case of Taki Theodoracopulos, for example. Taki has been called an anti-Semite so often that some people accept the accusation at face value. But when National Review published David Frum's "Unpatriotic Conservatives" -- one of many ill-advised editorial decisions in the erratic career of Rich Lowry -- Taki responded in memorable fashion:

If this bum Frum thinks he's the only one who cannot see a belt without hitting below it, he's got another thing coming. . . . He is a cheap Canadian careerist who jumped on the neocon bandwagon and is now using anti-Semitism as a stick to beat us with. Mind you, to be called "unpatriotic" and an "anti-Semite" by this shameless publicity hound has to be a compliment.

Because Taki is independently wealthy, he has no need to fear that his career will be damaged by these accusations, and so he seldom even bothers to notice the charges and only rarely responds to them. This has, unfortunately, resulted in Taki's name being used -- as my own name has sometimes been used -- as a sort of Rosetta Stone that allows liberal mind-readers to decrypt the otherwise Secret Code Of Hate that allegedly unites the Right.

This business of liberals trying to tell conservatives who is "acceptable" has bothered me for years, and I don't like it any better when conservatives play the same game. Despite Frum's misguided centrist tendencies, for example, I have risked my populist street-cred by continuing to be his friend (unlike David Brooks, who is the Living Embodiment Of All Things Unholy.) If I can be Frum's friend, shall I allow him to say that Taki is "unacceptable"?

My own indirect connection with Taki has horrified some of my friends, though the explanation is innocent enough. A couple years ago, I was invited to speak about media bias in a panel discussion of the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, where Duke graduate student Richard Spencer was one of my fellow panelists. Spencer subsequently became editor of Taki's Magazine.

When I got an itch to write about "Melissa Beech," who boasted in a Daily Beast column about being a rich man's mistress, it seemed a good time to accept Spencer's longstanding invitation to publish at Taki's (whose proprietor is reputed to have had many mistresses). That first article led to my writing a series a columns about love, sex and marriage at Taki's, a series I hope to continue now that election season is over.

Did I fear the accusation that, by publishing at Taki's Magazine, I was thereby endorsing the alleged anti-Semitism of Taki or some of his magazine's other contributors? Of course not. My philo-Semitic bona fides are so impregnable that I rather suspect Taki and Spencer have caught more grief than I have: "How dare you publish that Jew-loving Zionist fanatic?"

My Zionist fanaticism -- Netanyahu is a pacifist squish by comparison -- once led me to advance a bit of strategic military advice for the IDF, a war-game scenario contingent upon the hypothetical event of my becoming the first Gentile prime minister of Israel.

You might suppose that a thought-experiment so farfetched would be immune to misinterpretation -- as fools often misinterpret hypotheticals -- as wishful thinking, but you would be wrong. Andrew Sullivan gave me a Malkin Award nomination (my third such honor, though I may have lost count) and Sully has subsequently accused me of advocating genocide of the Palestinians.

"Peace Through Genocide" might be profitably marketed as the title of a comic novel by Chris Buckley, or as one of those ironic T-shirt slogans beloved by clever university students, but it clearly has shortcomings as a serious policy proposal.

It should therefore be unnecessary for me to deny that I am advocate of Palestinian genocide but, alas, there is the problem of the irony-impaired Andrew Sullivan, who has spent 15 months fomenting bizarre speculations about Sarah Palin's uterus. To be accused of genocidal hatred by such a notorious fool is an accusation that requires no denial.

Having been slimed by Sully for the indulgence of a far-fetched hypothetical, let me take another wild risk:

If Conor Friedersdorf were a wealthy Greek shipping magnate, so that he could speak his mind without fear of career repercussion, what would he say about Jews?

Nothing bad, I hope, and so I gladly stipulate that Conor Friedersdorf is no more a Jew-hater than Taki.

Or Pat Buchanan. Or Joe Sobran. Or Paul Gottfried. IYKWIMAITYD. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.

UPDATE: Ann Altstein Altberg Althouse calls Sully a liar. Sarah Palin's Uterus agrees. Yehuda reveals that Palin's uterus is . . . the Mossad!

Reaganite Republican suspects the Learned Elders of Sullivanism have fomented this blog-war.