Andrew Sullivan’s jihad: This is interesting. On the one hand, Salon’s founder and editor in chief, David Talbot, harbors Andrew Sullivan’s bile at Salon but wants to show he doesn’t have to like it. On the other hand, castigating Sullivan seems an excuse so he can go on at length blowing his own horn about how tolerant Salon is. On the third hand, in touting Salon’s defense of Sullivan against the recent scandal over the exposure of his sexual orientation and charges of sexual hypocrisy, Talbot repeats the claims, surely mudslinging no matter how delicious this particular mud will feel to many in his audience. Crafty devil.

In recent weeks, Sullivan has taken it upon himself to evaluate whether his fellow writers and commentators are sufficiently patriotic. He broods darkly — in the pages of his native British press, on his Web site and on the Op-Ed pages of the Wall Street Journal — that America harbors nests of traitors, or in his words “decadent left enclaves on the coasts [that] may well mount a fifth column.” And like all Manichaean guardians of national security, from the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts to those of Joseph McCarthy, Sullivan has turned his pumped-up and disproportionate rhetoric toward rooting out these disloyal Americans in his midst.

Since Sullivan has unleashed the hounds of patriotic fury, I’ll respond with some nationalistic zeal of my own. It’s repellent to be lectured about my commitment to America, which is deep and true, by an arrogant and self-important Brit. And it’s equally galling to be scolded about my supposed intolerance of conservative dissent in Salon when I have made a consistent effort to include Sullivan’s own voice and that of many of his fellow conservatives in our pages. Sullivan has often fallen to his own knees before President Bush in Salon. In fact there is no political journal in the country — on the left or right — that publishes as eclectic a mix of opinions as we do. The same week we published the interview with Sontag, Salon ran a cover essay by her son, David Rieff, blasting the Berkeley City Council’s anti-bombing resolution and the “depraved rationalizations of the American left.” When Sullivan seeks ideological variety, does he eagerly reach for the latest National Review or Weekly Standard? His own site is rigorously monochromatic — one-note blasts from the increasingly narrow confines of his own head.