SULLY ROCKS IN ABSENTIA: I've been on record many times saying that Andrew Sullivan and his blog have been major, major influences in my political...well, it's not a conversion, really, but in my...political...opening up...? The fact that I no longer reflexively self-identify as a Dem is at least partly due to the stuff I read and thought about as a result of AndrewSullivan.com, plain and simple.

Although I don't always agree with Andrew, I generally admire his writing and his thinking. Turns out now I have something else to admire: his ability to judge talent.

Guest-blogging for Andrew in the past few weeks have been some smarmy editor from TNR (yawn), and then two incredibly captivating raconteurs.

The first was Dan Savage, who I knew dimly from the profane sex-advice columns (or something like that) he contributes to the Chicago alt-weekly THE READER. Dunno if he still does that or not, but what I do know is his week helming Andrew's blog was a romp, full of funny and smart and "I'd like to be his friend" stuff. Loved the guy by the end of the week.

The second star is Walter Kirn, a novelist and TIME contributor whose plain-spoken essays over the last couple days have been just fantastic. Here's an excerpt of Kirn, from earlier today:

What big-time Washington journalists largely do these days, in my experience, is to get as close as possible to power, socially and in every other way, while maintaining the legal fiction that they aren't implicated in its workings. They send their kids to school with power's kids, they marry it, they go to parties with it, they jabber with it on the phone, they watch the game with it from adjoining seats, and, as a natural result, they keep its confidences - until, that is, some secret leaks out anyway and they have to pretend that they didn't already know it but will get to the bottom of it immediately or that they knew it all along and just weren't telling their audiences because they were bound by some lofty code of ethics that allows them to do the jobs they rarely do. They're profound double-dealers, is what I'm saying, who pay for their access, influence, and by going along and getting along until it's simply too embarrassing not to. They reserve their best stories for one another, publishing them only when they have to and feeling very nervous when they do, because it might screw up the Great Arrangement. And afterwards, once the secrets are on the street, it often comes out that they were common knowledge among the people whose jobs it was to tell them.

Quick story. In the mid 1980s I went to a fancy Fifth Avenue party for Senator Ted Kennedy. There were journalists there and lots of other bigwigs. The only time I'd seen Kennedy before was at a campaign stop in 1979 when he'd been seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He might have won, but I realized at the party that it would have been a terrible thing because he was the drunkest human being I had ever encountered in my life, and chances were that it hadn't just started that night. Sure, he already had this reputation, but it was a vague reputation, all myth and gossip, while the intoxicated wreck in front of me was as vivid and specific as a car wreck. How many thousands of times, I wondered, had such behavior as I was witnessing been quietly countenanced by journalists, and how much other wild, scary stuff pertaining to other movers and shakers who had a shot at ruling the free world, say, had they deftly slipped into their back pockets in return for the right to attend such parties as this one?

I was a kid then, in my early twenties, and I couldn't answer that question. Now I'm older, I've seen more, and I can. A certain kind of job in journalism can only be kept if its holder, for the most part, refrains from doing it.

Bottom line: Cruise by the Sullivan blog and read the past couple weeks' stuff, if you haven't already. No newspaper, website, or magazine has better writing and thinking these days, in my humble opinion.