The Way It Works

An old college friend of Andrew Sullivan is now Lord Mayor of London, which makes Sullivan very happy. One of Sullivan's readers, not so much:

Johnson’s a thug who used his position as a journalist to help old friends violently settle scores; he’s an anti-Muslim bigot who claims the problem in Britain isn’t Muslim extremists, but Islam itself; he’s a racist who writes of Africans’ “watermelon smiles” and throws around the word “piccaninnies”; he’s a homophobe who says same-sex marriage is indistinguishable from bestiality.

As someone who supports Barack Obama, a candidate whose own biography and positions combat the notion of a clash of civilizations and who attempts to transcend the ugliness of America’s racist past, how can you also support Johnson? Were BoJo an American politician he’d be the very type of right wing blowhard you’d be criticizing for his corrosive bigotry. I get that you knew him in college, but does that really make everything okay?

But it does, you see. That's the baseline for the villagers: they may be serial killers and child molesters, but they went to the right schools, they know the right people (i.e., each other -- that's most important), and they go to the right cocktail parties.

So they must be people you can support, right?