"How do you respond to a sociopath like this?"

Asks Andrew Sullivan about... Hillary Clinton. She's a sociopath now? Why?

She agreed that Michigan and Florida should be punished for moving up their primaries. Obama took his name off the ballot in deference to their agreement and the rules of the party. That he should now be punished for playing by the rules and she should be rewarded for skirting them is unconscionable.

She's insane because she's fighting for the nomination using whatever arguments are available? If it's such a bad argument, it will lose and that will be the end of it. Obama is making the arguments that work for him. To exaggerate the hatefulness of her arguments and the virtuousness of his is to be too caught up in your personal preference for one candidate over the other. Obama's taking his name off the Michigan ballot wasn't all about some sort of supreme respect for rules and agreements. If he'd thought he was going to do very well, wouldn't he have left his name on?

Here's part of the quote from Hillary that drove Sullivan up the wall:

Now, I’ve heard some say that counting Florida and Michigan would be changing the rules.

I say that not counting Florida and Michigan is changing a central governing rule of this country - that whenever we can understand the clear intent of the voters, their votes should be counted.

Ha ha. That's rich. She is using the buzz words from the 2000 Florida recount (in which each of the 2 candidates made the arguments that helped his cause and acted outraged that the other was making arguments which he'd have made himself if they would have served his end). Clinton drives the point home:

I remember very well back in 2000, there were those who argued that people's votes should be discounted over technicalities. For the people of Florida who voted in this primary, the notion of discounting their votes sounds way too much of the same.

This isn't insanity. It's litigation. Quite normal. If the rules help you, you insist on the importance of rules. If the rules hurt you, they are mere guidelines that must bend flexibly for the sake of justice.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan responds ... but in the form of printing an email from an unnamed reader that makes some incoherent assertions about law.

To use the ligitation [sic] analogy, if you walk in to court espousing the exact opposite position of an earlier stated position, you lose, plain and simple. Your opponent calls it an admission, throws it in your face, and probably moves for sanctions.

What is this person talking about? "Admissions" as an exception to the hearsay rule? If a party says one thing about the facts of the case and then another, it's evidence, to be analyzed as the factfinder sees fit. You don't "lose, plain and simple." You just have a credibility problem. But I'm not talking about assertions of fact. I'm talking about legal arguments — arguments about what the law is or how it is applies in this case. You're allowed to make one legal argument and then another. You can make 2 contradictory arguments in the alternative at exactly the same time.

AND: I should add that what the emailer and Sullivan (and some of my commenters) are doing is also the litigation style — acting as if the argument on the other side is utterly ridiculous. I'm soooo jaded about that sort of thing. I can see what you are all doing. One side or the other will win, and it probably won't be Hillary, but her argument is not insane.

ADDED: An emailer copies me on email sent to Sullivan:

I do not agree with Althouse's comment discussed at this link on your blog (as it unfairly ascribes to Obama the same type of win-at-all-costs mentality exhibited by Clinton). However, the reader response that you highlight for the purpose of knocking down Althouse's view is simply not correct as a legal matter.

The reader believes that "if you walk into court espousing the exact opposite position of an earlier stated position, you lose, plain and simple" on the ground that the litigant has committed an "admission" that would be determinative in the litigation and even subject to sanctions. That is not so. Flip-flops in position -- even within the scope of the litigation itself — are generally not themselves determinative of the outcome, let alone sanctionable. Generally, speaking, a change in position has to meet the criteria of the doctrine known as "judicial estoppel" for a litigant to be bound to the first position and thus prevented from relying on an inconsistent position in the litigation. And that doctrine requires that the litigant take the first position in the litigation itself AND that it be accepted by the court before the litigant is prevented from later raising the inconsistent position. And even then there are exceptions. There are, of course, doctrines that prevent parties from re-litigating cases that have been concluded, but that problem does not arise here because NO litigation has yet taken place let alone concluded.

So, I think it is clear that Clinton could litigate a challenge to what has occurred in Michigan or Florida without being formally prevented from raising positions adverse to positions she posited previously. That, of course, is a different question from whether she would prevail in the litigation. I think the chance of her prevailing in such litigation is remote, let alone in a way that would would alter the Democratic primary season outcome.