I don't think I've ever seen a reaction to a politician like I witnessed with Sarah Palin. My wife and her friends were instantly captivated, and the left went absolutely bonkers, desperately trying to mitigate Palin's charismatic effect.

Perhaps no one manifests this obsession more prominently than Andrew Sullivan, who insisted that Trig, the Palin's Down syndrome son, was actually the child of the Palin's oldest daughter Bristol. Sullivan's evidence are three photographs where Palin doesn't appear to be eight months pregnant, and the fact that she was in labor 26 hours with her fifth child.

On the other hand, Sullivan never deals with a couple of major exculpatory facts, like Bristol Palin was already pregnant when Trig was born (Trig was born April 18, his nephew was born December 29th of the same year), and young women Bristol's age have about a one in 1250 chance of having a Down syndrome baby, while women older in 44 have a one in 25 chance.

Whatever the actual facts surrounding Trig birth, the main question for sane folks is, "why do we care?" Frankly I can't even imagine a scenario where it would make sense to fake a pregnancy and then surreptitiously adopt a Down syndrome baby.

The issue has "loser" written all over it, but Sullivan has doggedly maintained his indignant demeanor in spite of criticism by both right and left, and two years later, he's still insistent that he's the only fair-minded 'journalist' in the country and takes his liberal-progressive brethren to task for not backing him up.

Remember all those liberals and lefties huffily denouncing this blog's attempts to make sense of Sarah Palin's bizarre stories about the pregnancy and birth of her alleged fifth child? I was nuts, crazy, vile, disgusting, etc etc to indulge in what Dave Weigel, with no working knowledge of the story, calls "nonsense." You may also recall that the liberal media didn't touch this with a barge-pole - and still hasn't (apart from a NYT puff-piece that I found utterly credulous at the time). Newsweek has even put its entire reputation behind the details of the story as outlined in Going Rogue, without doing any independent reporting on the subject.

Ironically, the cold-shoulder has useful if for no other reason than to have Sullivan write this about his ideological confreres.

This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever. And people wonder how this farce of a candidate now controls one major political party and could well be our next president. One reason is that we do not have a functioning adversarial media uncorrupted by partisan loyalty and tactics.

The "Whose baby is he really" story is boring and irrelevant, but everything else about its coverage is fascinating, particularly the revelation that Andrew Sullivan is deeply irrational--not simply because his obsession with Trig Palin is pathological, but because in the same column, he criticizes the liberal media's herd instinct while at the same time expressing anger and disappointment that he was unable to stampede them on the story.

...and they wonder why no one listens to Air American or reads liberal magazines and newspapers.