Andrew Sullivan Gets it Wrong on Communists and Conservatives

Andrew Sullivan has this to say about conservatives and today's New York Times story on China's '50s-era terror manual:

Go to Memeorandum and check out the blogs commenting on the NYT exclusive on the undisputed fact that the Bush administration knowingly used Communist torture techniques against prisoners in wartime. You will find no right-of-center blogs commenting. It's an astonishing story - especially for any anti-Communist conservative who fought the good fight during the Cold War. But they won't mention it. I guess when a Republican administration copies communists, conservative writers need to copy Stalinists.

For a journalist of Sullivan's caliber, this is sleazy blogging.

First, Sullivan left only the generic Memeorandum link, and not an article-specific Memeorandum citation, like this one.

Further, Memeorandum citations are dynamic. That is, where multiple articles on a topic are in play at any given time, Memeorandum's aggregator-bot will locate different blog posts (which might include a number of germane, interrelated links) to various locations on the main page.

Thus, at the time of this writing, my essay, "What Should Be Done About Torture?", was linked to the Memorandum citation for Christopher Hitchens' Vanity Fair story, "Believe Me, It's Torture."

I wrote my entry this morning, however, and at that time my piece was linked along with Captain Ed's, "ChiCom tactics used at Gitmo?" (the earlier Memeorandum link is here). In that entry, the Captain argues that actual U.S. military trainers "had no awareness of the origin of their material," and the controversy "should be a matter for closed-session investigations by Congress and the DoD."

Now, it's natural that on the most hot-button and politically significant news stories of the day, partisans on the opposite sides of the left-right divide will jump on breaking news articles that bolster their agenda. No harm, no foul...

What's troubling here is how Sullivan desperately strains to paint conservatives as Stalinist propagandists - a move that only ends up being, for Sullivan, a pathetic display of partisanship, a blatantly underhanded and unsustainable attempt to smear the right-wing blogosphere.