Almost four years ago, less than a week after 9/11, Andrew Sullivan made this especially disturbing attack on the patriotically incorrect:

The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column. But by striking at the heart of New York City, the terrorists ensured that at least one deep segment of the country ill-disposed toward a new president is now the most passionate in his defense.

As someone who lives in one of those coastal enclaves (Los Angeles) and matriculated at another (Berkeley), I took that very personally. Having studied American history, I knew that civil liberties are often a casualty of war, and Sullivan's broadside set off alarms to those of us who were not willing to bow down unquestioningly at the feet of our Maximum Leader. The sentiments expressed in that column was one of the reasons I decided to start this website back in April of 2002.

Having said that, I cannot think of anything that is less important to the issues of 1) Gay civil rights; 2) our use of torture and human rights deprivations at Abu Ghraib, G-mo and elsewhere; 3) the efforts by the Bush Administration to quash the free press when it attempts to look behind the curtains; 4) the troubling state of the Catholic Church, and its declining moral relevance; and 5) whatever else he may be expounding on this week, than what Andrew Sullivan wrote four days after the collapse of the Towers. Certainly, Sullivan's opinions carry no greater weight by how far he has apparently traveled in the past four years, but neither are his eloquent opinions on the above issues diminished in any way by what he said just after the Towers collapsed.

OK, so he had a louder megaphone than the rest of us did four years ago, and in the heat of the moment, he was too quick to find a scapegoat. Like so many other people, he was hopeful when he should have been skeptical, and he got suckered by the Bushies. All of that might be an interesting chapter to his biography, but it also just so happens that the GayCatholicTory is writing the most interesting s*** in the blogosphere lately. What he said four years ago should be no more germane to the present topics than Earl Warren's support for the internment of the Japanese during WWII was at the time of the Brown decision, or Robert Byrd's opinions on civil rights six decades ago are during today's filibuster debate. Grow up.