Andrew Sullivan reviews Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars in this week's New York Observer. Blumenthal is a Democratic loyalist who doesn't much like Republicans, and his book reflects that. Apparently, this is utterly remarkable to Sullivan:

It’s not a memoir, or a history. It’s a Gospel. Its facts are assembled, as the facts in the Gospels were assembled, for one purpose only: to affirm the faith, to rally the flock, to spread the further glory of the Church. It’s an allegory of eternal good and evil....

...This is Sid’s utopia. A world run by Democrats, in which everyone is a Democrat, everything is a Democrat, and being a Democrat is being a member of the elect, the saved, the holy.

Over and over, Sullivan shakes his head -- agog at the realization that someone in politics actually expressed his own partisan political beliefs in a book about a presidency.

Apparently, in his travels, Sullivan has never once happened across this book.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

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Ah, but poor Andrew: He goes on for nearly three thousand words about how awful Blumenthal's book is, and deals out one or two crumbs of praise to show that he, heaven forfend, isn't a partisan zealot -- and those crumbs will almost certainly make their way into ads for Blumenthal's book, and on the pages of reviewer praise that will go into the paperback edition:

"The account Mr. Blumenthal gives of the haplessness and priggishness of Kenneth Starr is riveting stuff. ...The insane attempt to actually bring down a President over perjury in a civil suit has not yet been more vividly evoked. ... Brutally revealing about the stupidity, bigotry, malevolence and extremism of the right-wing forces that became obsessed with President Clinton."

--Andrew Sullivan, New York Observer