By way of the inestimable and altogether too necessary SullyWatch, I see that Andrew Sullivan had the audacity, or better yet, the temerity, to post this sentence at his vanity site: “I guess I’m lucky I didn’t work for Raines.”

I grant you, Sullivan never worked for former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines in the sense that he, Sullivan, never reported for work at the Times Building on a daily basis -- that’s a privilege reserved for real journalists, of which Sullivan is surely not one.

But wait just a minute. If Sullivan never worked for Raines, then who, exactly, fired his lazy, self-important, non-journalist ass? As SullyWatch asks, are we now to believe it was Sullivan’s friend Adam Moss, the editor of the New York Times Magazine and a man known to have defended the bitter Brit in contretemps with upper management at the paper? (Strange, I think, to watch a soi-disant disciple of George Orwell engaged in such a blatantly Stalinist rewriting of his own resume.)

And if Sullivan never worked for Raines, why are we supposed to treat his obsessive and incessant -- and, incredibly, ongoing -- fulminations against the former executive editor as having any credibility whatsoever?