"The blog is also now unending: you can scroll down indefinitely if you so wish..."

A nice feature at Andrew Sullivan's newly independent blog. This means that the blog is set to have a  number of posts on the page when you click there, but if you want more, you don't have to click to an "older posts" page (as you do here), it automatically provides new posts as you scroll. This gives a vivid depiction of what a blog really is: a pile of posts one on top of the other. For example, my blog is a stack of 32,381 posts.

Sullivan has also moved his archive, which goes back to January 2001: "I have given a sharp dagger for anyone who wants to make me look foolish – so have at it." I don't think the archive makes him look foolish. I read him all the time back then, when he called himself conservative and tried to define conservatism in new ways. Or is the appearance of foolishness not in what those old opinions were, but in the later deviations? Would you read the sort of person who would go 12 years without contradicting himself?

The Dictionary of Received Ideas — my imagined modern American version of it — has this under "contradiction":

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

That's the reflexive quotation but you can keep scrolling in that poem, Walt Whitman's tall stack of lines:

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through
with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too
late?

I wait on the door-slab....

"The good thing is that this is so insipidly solipsistic that I think she's going to have ruined the Vagina book like Cutthroat Island destroyed the pirate film."

"Might be 15 years before someone gambles with Vaginas of the Caribbean."

Also at that link: "My Vagina is Large; It Contains Multitudes. Who knew the female sex-organ was so chatty?"

***

The passage...

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

... has 19 highlighters in my Kindle version of "Leaves of Grass."

Hey, remember the role of "Leaves of Grass" in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal?

Feb. 28: After she attended the taping of Clinton's radio show, she had her picture taken with him. He told her to see his secretary Betty Currie because he had something for her. Currie accompanied Lewinsky into the study next to the Oval Office. Then Currie walked into the nearby pantry, where she waited for about 15 minutes while Lewinsky and the president had a sexual encounter -- their first in 11 months. Then he gave her a hat pin and Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Lewinsky later discovered that the blue dress she had worn that day was stained with his semen.

Speaking of containing multitudes!

"Can you believe this? I’m the President of the whole fucking United States!"

A real quote, by a real President, shortly after election. Which one?

ADDED: This quote got me thinking of the poet's lines:

I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
I show that size is only development.

Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?
It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.

Obama's not megalomaniacal. He's Whitmanesque.

Blogs Anne Trubek.

He strode on the stage alone, addressed us alone, and left alone. The families joined him, but after they left he lingered, waving, alone. I am a singular figure, he was saying, but I am also all of you.

Singular and many. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman wrote....

Like Whitman, Obama is wholly himself and the embodiment of us. Both meld individual self with national identity....

Meld individual self with national identity... Hmm. It's one thing for a poet to do that, but for a political leader? I will refrain from naming the leaders that spring to mind. The embodiment of us.... But what if I don't want to be embodied?

At Grant Park, Obama was evidence that, as Whitman wrote in the preface to his epic “Leaves of Grass,” “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” Obama absorbs Whitman, we absorb Obama, and “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

So are we absorbing him, or is he absorbing us? I'm not sure how this Oneness is supposed to proceed.

The "Stupid" Dialogue.

Q: Is it not "incredibly lame" -- as you yourself said -- to call your opponent stupid?

A: You forgot the part about how I said it was "an admission that you have no substance."

Q: Yeah, well, then, that too.

A: And you forgot the part where I called Glenn Greenwald "such an idiot" and a "moron." ("Disreputable slimeball" is another matter altogether.)

Q: Yeah, yeah, yeah, all that too. So you admit, don't you, as you must, that you are a hypocrite?

A: First of all, if this was a contradiction, I'd own up to it. It provides an occasion to look appealingly self-deprecating and to quote Walt Whitman. (I am large. It's the blogs that got small.) But it's not a contradiction, for two -- at least two -- huge reasons. First, you have to see the two statements in context. I said "calling your opponent stupid is incredibly lame... an admission that you have no substance" in response to someone who made no argument other than to call me stupid. It was the sum total of his argument. I called Glenn Greenwald an idiot and a moron in the context of a 152-word paragraph that stated a substantive argument. You can object to the epithets because they were epithets, but not because they revealed a lack of substance. The substance was also there, and the substance established the stupidity of what Greenwald had written. Second, Greenwald's post was titled "The meaninglessness of tenure" and intended to be personally insulting to me. My retaliation with cheap insults was meant as a taunt, as a way to say "same to you, &*%#!" It was ironic, a way of saying -- not that everyone got this -- I don't normally stoop to your level, but today I feel like making an exception, &*%#!

Q: I don't get it.

A: That's not a question.

Q: Yeah, but I don't get it.

A: You're an idiot.