The Revolting Atlantic Two Step

Nothing proves what a threat the Sarah Palin VP pick is to Barack Obama better than the new depths Obama supporters have sunk to strangle the birth of Palin’s national profile in the crib. At the forefront of the left’s campaign to kill Palin’s reputation at any cost are two of The Atlantic’s most high profile contributing editors, Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder. Sullivan has devoted the last year of his life to getting Obama elected President. When he is not testifying on his Atlantic blog about Obama’s Truth, he is writing fawning Atlantic cover stories about how Obama will ‘transcend’ our ‘distorted politics.’

So imagine Sullivan’s fear when he noted that Palin managed to do in 24 hours what John McCain had failed to do in 24 months: excite the conservative base. Desperate Sullivan threw everything he could conjure up against Palin. But when attacking her foreign policy credentials and attacking her decision to fire an uncooperative political appointee did not work,  Sullivan decided to take the low road.

Sullivan is a very intelligent man who cares deeply about his reputation. So it is important to document just how thoroughly dishonest Sullivan’s next move was. In a post titled “Things That Make You Go Hmmm” Sullivan deftly writes: “Questions for the McCain-Palin campaign:” and then block quotes from a Daily Kos post: 

Where has Bristol Palin (far right, holding Trig, with a ring on her wedding finger) been for the past year? Has she been attending high school? Or was she absent because of infectious mononucleosis for between five and eight months, as is now being reported on the Internet? Why would a 43 year old woman, on her fifth pregnancy, with a Down Syndrome child, after her amniotic fluid has started to leak, not go to the nearest hospital immediately, even if she was in Texas for a speech?

Sullivan then writes:

It strikes me as likely that there are reasonable answers to these questions … and the rumors buzzing across the Internets and the press corps are unfounded and unseemly. There must be plenty of medical records and obstetricians and medical eye-witnesses prepared to testify to Sarah Palin's giving birth to Trig. There must be a record of Bristol's high school attendance for the past year. And surely, surely, the McCain camp did due diligence on this. But the noise around this story is now deafening, and the weirdness of the chronology sufficient to rise to the level of good faith questions. So please give us these answers - and provide medical records for Sarah Palin's pregnancy - and put this to rest.

See Andrew’s sick game here? He quotes baseless and disgusting attacks verbatim, and then seemingly diminishes them by calling them rumors. Then he whips around and demands the victim of the slander prove their innocence. What were just “rumors buzzing” in one sentence magically become “a chronology sufficient to rise to the level of good faith questions” in the next sentence. ‘Good faith questions’!?!?! Andrew has absolutely no idea what ‘good faith’ means. Remember the targets of Sullivan’s bile here: a mother, her daughter, and her Down Syndrome son. Good faith indeed.

Even Andrew’s normally supplicant readers smelled a rat, so Andrew tried to explain, perhaps even to himself, why his attacks on a 17-year-old girl and her four month old brother were fair game: 

Is raising questions about the Palin pregnancy a smear campaign? Here's why it's not. The circumstantial evidence for weirdness around this pregnancy is so great that legitimate questions arise - questions anyone with common sense would ask. The answers to those questions can easily be provided.

The job of a press is to ask questions which have a basis in fact. Read for yourself the full chronology here. See whether you are certain there are no legitimate questions worth asking. I have claimed nothing. I am asking the McCain campaign to resolve a factual question which they must already have covered in the vetting process. After all, this baby was a centerpiece of the public case for Palin made by the Republicans. They made it an issue - and therefore it is legitimate to ask questions about it. That's all.

Got that? Andrew enters into evidence the same Dialy Kos post he called “buzzing rumors” just hours before but now he characterized them as ‘facts’ … then he has the audacity to say he has “claimed nothing.” Have you stopped molesting your beagle Andrew? I heard rumors on the internet that you haven’t, but I’m not claiming anything, I’m just asking.

Even Sullivan must have seen how vile this line of attack was. It had to change. It had to become about John McCain and fast. Enter Sullivan’s Atlantic partner Marc Ambinder who asked early on 8/31: Was she really vetted?  By that evening, Sullivan was running with the new line, explaining his pregnancy fetish under the header “It’s About the Vetting”:

If McCain had vetted her, the Internet wouldn't have to. And this would be a private matter if the McCain-Palin campaign hadn't made the baby a key campaign point. Once they made it a reason to vote for someone, it's reasonable for bloggers to ask questions about it, especially when there are so many strange twists to the story. But, look: I hope this isn't true, and it can easily be disproved quickly. I'll immediately post any evidence that answers the questions.

Does anyone believe Andrew here? Does anyone really think for a second that a man so deeply invested in an Obama presidency “hopes this isn’t true.” Of course not. Andrew is either completely self unaware or he is lying through his teeth. And he proved it quickly when news came that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter was pregnant. Responding to the news Andrew simply wrote: “Now all we need is confirmation from the obstetrician who delivered Sarah's baby, Trig.”

That’s it. No apology for being 100% wrong about Palin faking her own pregnancy to cover up the true parentage of Trig. No pause to reflect on the Palin’s pain of having their very private business exposed for no legitimate reason. Not even a single pause to reflect on the biological facts of the female anatomy. Just a relentless, reptilian, soulless repetition of his demands for Palin’s medical records. Unbelievable But Ambinder was no better.

Now that the original baseless charge had been proved 100% untrue, a new rationale was needed to keep the story alive. Ambinder stepped into the gap writing under the header Bristol's Revelation: "John McCain knew. A few members of his senior staff knew. Most members of his senior staff did not know. Palin's spokesman in Alaska did not know. Palin's campaign-appointed spokesman did not know. McCain staffers -- at different levels of the campaign -- are a bit stunned.”

So now the story of how prurient internet rumors destroyed a family’s privacy is now a story about John McCain’s judgment. Andrew quickly seconded Marc’s developing meme: 

Marc files a dispatch on McCain's minimal vetting of Palin. All you can say from this - regardless of what happens with this Desperate Housewives subplot beginning to play out - is that McCain is more incompetent as an executive than Bush.

Later Andrew returned to the issue of whether or not this ever was a legitimate issue: 

From the very start of this process, Sarah Palin's motherhood and her children, especially the most recent baby in the Palin family, Trig, were put out there by the McCain campaign as reasons to vote for her. Her pro-life record, which centers as it must on her admirable decision to bring up a disabled child, was made the focus of the campaign - not by the press but by the McCain peeps. They put a baby out there, making Palin's private life a subject bound to be covered by the media. Did they know what they were doing?

Got that? If you are a pro-life woman with children, and you enter politics, all of your kids are “out there” in Andrew Sullivan’s opinion. He will scour the earth looking for anything to defame you and your children, because their very existence, when combined with pro-life views, makes them targets.

Last Monday night, Obama’s beautiful two young girls took to the stage to speak with their daddy via satellite in front of a live national audience. The Obama campaign was clearly using them to portray Obama as the loving father he is. According to Andrew’s perverse logic, this makes those girls fair game for the most baseless and insulting political attack. But unlike Andrew (who, barring a major medical miracle, will never have biological children of his own), Obama is a father and a human being. His common decency led him to tell reporters that Palin’s family was “off limits.” Unfortunately The Atlantic seems to have lost all common decency these days.