If we could start off with a clean slate...

His blog on occasion would be tolerable, not usually, just on occasion.

But Sully has begun a new contest, the Malkin Award. I believe the prize is three and a half years in your own little internment camp. But in any case, the winner uses the most cliches in a utterance.

Now from Sullivan, that takes a lot of balls. Not that Li'l LuLu isn't a synapse killing train-wreck of both logic and style, of course. But for Sully to give out a cliche award, well, I agree with this commenter at Atrios that a good nominee would be this gem:

"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 a fifth column." -- Andrew Sullivan, September 16, 2001.

So many other potential nominees, especially in in the Winter/Spring of 2002/2003 when Sully got the vapors.

As ever, SullyWatch is the place to go for all your milky-loaded reference materials (for you neophytes that is only partly a pornographic reference):

If he wants to really have fun and twist the knife, he can and should call it The Maglalang Award.

Of course, as richly deserving as she is of it, two things need to be said here.

One is that Sullivan has to disclose the obvious payback, since Malkin accused him (with some justification in our opinion) of fraud over the summer. Ever since he’s had a very long knife out for her.

Two is, just who the hell is Andrew Sullivan to talk about schoolyard insults himself, he of the infamous “Fifth Column” column? (Readers are invited to sbumit examples for future publication) Maybe the real challenge would be for him to write about Chomsky, Alterman, Moore or someone else at an intellectual and emotional level above the age of eight (and not combined, either).