I get turned off by knee-jerk conservatives (or liberals), but I also get very annoyed with the people who praise themselves as Courageous Martyrs for saying things that buck the party line…

While it’s very seductive to have people call you brave, and I don’t mean to be rude to people who are trying to compliment me, I utterly reject any such notion as ridiculous. If you’re going to regularly spout opinions, you have to be ready to have people disagree, from whatever side. That just comes with the territory.

The worst is when these self-described paragons of integrity abandon all their principles out of pique, and run to the other side. I do not respect Sullivan because I think he has no core principles. To me, he seems to crave adulation, and when he didn’t get it from the right, he ran to the left and positioned himself as a supposedly “courageous” conservative — a Fearless Man unafraid to Speak the Truth.