Andrew Sullivan’s Harassment of Trig Palin

October 8, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Hackosphere, News media, Republican Party 

High priest of transparency and honesty when it comes to the GOP candidates, Andrew Sullivan makes this misleading statement about the latest in his unending demands for Trig Palin’s birth records:

As far as the propriety of demanding such basic public records, I am merely following Sarah Palin’s own standards. In her first race for mayor of Wasilla, she demanded the marriage license of her opponent be made public.

But Sullivan isn’t demanding the hospital records of the births of any of the candidates’ other children nor of the candidates themselves. Everyone knows who their parents are. As a matter of fact, everyone knows who Trig’s parents are, too. Sullivan is demanding the baby’s birth records because, among legitimate journalists, he and he alone is out on a limb for having repeated and amplified and then continued to keep alive to this day an obviously false story charging Gov. Palin and her minor child Bristol with a massive coverup of Trig’s true parentage.

If the McCain campaign releases Trig’s records, Sullivan will be able to say that it responded to his legitimate question. Absent the campaign’s acceding to his self-serving demand, he’ll always be remembered for his complicity in an obvious lie that altered the course of the Presidential campaign and helped turn the Palin family into tabloid fodder. His decision to publish the possibly libelous story is important evidence of the ethical immaturity of the so-called new media.

While he claimed that he’d decided, after a two-day blogging hiatus in early September, to let the story go, he kept sending e-mails to the McCain campaign demanding satisfaction, complaining about others’ ethics when the e-mails leaked. In late September, he claimed that he’d been vindicated by a McCain campaign denial of the original fictional story (failing to inform his readers at that time that the campaign had denied the story on the record weeks before). Now he says he just wants the same sort of information Palin had demanded from an opponent (though the record makes clear his sole motive is to vindicate himself).

On this story, Andrew Sullivan can’t be trusted.

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