Norman Podhoretz crosses the Daily Ditch, part 3

Andrew Sullivan has become such a crude polemicist that he long ago ceased to be worth reading. Norman Podhoretz in particular has become Sullivan’s own pons asinorum. See, for example, “Norman Podhoretz crosses the Daily Ditch” and “Norman Podhoretz crosses the Daily Ditch: Andrew Sullivan strikes again.”
Yesterday Sullivan posted a short item on our Book of the Year Award to Podhoretz and CPAC’s blogger of the year award to Ace of Spades. He gave his post the clever title “Loony right watch.” Sullivan’s polemics are not exactly models of wit. He then passed severe judgment upon us all: “When reality begins to intrude, they just seal it off.”
Linking to our Book of the Year post, Sullivan took offense that Podhoretz is “get[ting] a small fortune from Powerline.” You can see why that might upset him. The linked Power Line post states in the second sentence, however, that the small fortune is going in Podhoetz’s honor to charity: “Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous benefactor, a contribution of $25,000 will be made in honor of the author to Soldiers’ Angels, thus giving the award a larger financial component than any of the major book awards.”
Sullivan takes Orwell’s epigram as his motto: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” But does the struggle need to be made quite this hard?
JOHN adds: Andrew hasn’t just gotten crude, he’s also gotten lazy. I think it’s pretty obvious that, as in this case, he frequently doesn’t bother to read the posts to which he links. In this instance, he probably just read a brief quote or a one-sentence summary on another site about our Book of the Year award, and couldn’t take the trouble to read what we actually wrote about it. This helps to explain why he is so frequently wrong.