Andrew Sullivan, the premier logger, who’s a Brit transplant, is currently suffering a disillusionment more like poor unBritish Candide as the philosophy he was weaned on—Dr. Pangloss’ “It is the best of all possible worlds”—is mugged by reality.

First, he had to abandon he’s pro-Israel politics when he discovered, much to his chagrin, that Israeli soldiers—to defend their nation—had to use real bullets.

Then he had a torrid “bromance” (as he late friend Christopher Hitchens called it) with Barack Obama which now, all of a sudden, has cooled because Sullivan, after an August vacation, had to wake up to the revelation that even Obama is a weak reed in the wind in the face of the American public’s rediscovery that (Islamic) terrorism is indeed a mortal threat to which even the Democratic party is unwilling any longer to ignore:

“My own dismay (even bewilderment) at the current mood in America may well be because I was largely off-grid in August. But it’s still a truly remarkable shift. In a month, the entire political landscape has reverted to Bush-Cheneyism again. I honestly thought that would never happen, that the grisly experience of two failed, endless wars had shifted Americans’ understanding of what is possible in the world, that the panic and terror that flooded our frontal cortexes from 9/12 onward would not be able to come back with such a vengeance. I was clearly wrong. Terrorism does not seem to have lost any of its capacity to promote total panic among Americans. The trauma bin Laden inflicted is still overwhelming rationality. It would be harder to imagine a more stunning success for such a foul mass murder.The party that was primarily responsible for the years of grinding, bankrupting war, a descent into torture, and an evisceration of many core liberties is now regarded as superior to the man originally tasked with trying to recover from that experience. The political winds unleashed by a few disgusting videos and a blitzkrieg in the desert have swept all before them. And we now hear rhetoric from Democratic party leaders that sounds close to indistinguishable from Bush or Cheney.”

Poor Andrew whose difference with Candid is that Voltaire’s antihero belatedly wised up to reality, whereas Sullivan still believes in and is parroting Dr. Pangloss’ mush.