Is it Hugh or is it Sid?
Here are the top ten reasons why, contrary to Andrew Sullivan's nasty aside, Hugh Hewitt is not the Sid Blumenthal of the Bush administration:
10. Hugh has not been called before a grand jury.
9. Hugh believes in people; Sid believes in conspiracies.
8. Both have great hair, but Hugh's is gray.
7. Hugh is a gentleman (see his response to Sullivan); Sid's nickname is "Vicious."
6. The president Hugh supports is a gentleman.
5. Hugh advances the policies of President Bush because he agrees with them; Sid advanced the misconduct of President Clinton because he was on the payroll.
4. Sid demonizes those with whom he disagrees; Hugh invites them on his radio show for a discussion.
3. Sid is a name-dropper; Hugh isn't, except for the occasional Catholic Bishop.
2. Hugh didn't compare our liberation of Fallujah to the Nazi's siege of Stalingrad; or America's handling of terrorist detainees to Stalin's gulag.
1. Hugh has a massive nationwide U.S. audience (sort of like Sullivan once did); Sid is read, if at all, in a few precincts of England and Germany.
JOHN adds: Awesome job. I'll only add that Hugh is possibly the least vicious man I know. It takes a curious sort of myopia to be unable to distinguish Hugh from the appalling Sid Blumenthal.
SCOTT adds: Andrew thinks he has "hit a nerve" with his likening of Hugh Hewitt to Sidney Blumenthal. I think he has simply demonstrated once again why he has become such a crashing bore. He has also demonstrated that he isn't exactly a fair controversialist, asserting that "Powerline believes that the Iraq war has been conducted flawlessly and that the feds did a perfect job with Katrina." But, hey, he's got a column in Time, and a column in the Sunday Times of London ("the biggest Sunday circulation in the UK")!
Before we leave the subject of Hewitt versus Blumenthal, reader John Casey offers reason 10a:
Hugh wasn’t called back by a grand jury to be questioned as to why he lied in the press about his previous grand jury appearance.For an account of Blumenthal's despicable behavior in connection with his grand jury appearances, see Michael Isikoff's Slate review of Blumenthal's Clinton book: "Insidious Sid."
JOHN adds: I want to add a brief response to Andrew's characterization of his differences of opinion with us. While his comment was no doubt offhand, I do think it sheds light on where we part company.
We certainly have never written anything that suggests we think the Iraq war has been "conducted flawlessly." I don't suppose any war ever has been. But I do think that it has been conducted intelligently and successfully, and with remarkably few casualties among our military personnel. (If you doubt that last point, read this post and the bar chart that Dafydd ab Hugh has on Big Lizards,)
As to Hurricane Katrina, once again, I don't know when we ever said that the "feds did a perfect job." I doubt that any disaster relief effort has ever been perfect. What we have said is that the attacks on the federal government's performance have been long on hysteria and short on specifics, and it is not at all clear that the response to Hurricane Katrina was any slower or less effective than the responses to past natural disasters of similar magnitude. Andrew is a bright guy, so I am sure he understands the difference between "perfect" and "not obviously below average."
I was an admirer of Andrew's for a long time--in truth, I still am--but it seems to me that ever since he decided, for whatever reasons, to turn his back on the Bush administration, his writing has lacked coherence.
PAUL adds: If anyone hit a nerve, it must have been me with the crack about Sullivan's readership (as opposed to Time Magazine's). Sullivan's dishonest reaction, to falsely state that we think the administration's conduct of the war and the Katrina relief effort has been perfect, provides a better explanation for his decline than the more general, self-congratulatory one he provides -- his attempt to "piss off" conservatives.
In any case, Sullivan got some attention today, which may have been what his cheap shot at Hugh was all about.
