Trig Palin 1, Andrew Sullivan 0

Andrew Sullivan’s modified limited hang-out on the Palin pass-the-baby story. Having let his adjutant rebut him last week on his own site, “The Daily Dish,” he has announced a suspension of the distasteful campaign he has been waging to get Gov. Palin to prove she is Trig’s mother.

It’s a relief he won’t be harrassing Trig anymore. It’s a shame he wasn’t accountable for having republished a lie on his Atlantic Monthly-owned web site without checking the facts. No other “Atlantic” journalist would have, and he shouldn’t have, either. Ever since, Sullivan says he’s just been trying to get the truth. It’s actually looked as though he’s been trying to get Palin or Sen. McCain to provide records or some other official response so that he would be able to say he had posed a legitimate question. In this effort, he has failed.

Whenever he insists, as he does yet again in his last (we hope) post, that by republishing a lie and then defending his behavior for months, he was just asking questions or expressing opinions, he underscores how desperately we need newspapers, or at least professionally-trained newspaper reporters. The Hackosphere — though not Sullivan; this was a bizarre aberration — is still too prone to sophomoric and poorly-formed content, and blatant lies carefully disguised as fact (what first fooled Sullivan). Bloggers also go to bed too early. Last week no “Atlantic” blogger had anything on the failure of the auto bailout until the next morning.

The Trig story was the most effective libel of the ‘08 campaign, and Sullivan will always be complicit in it. He gets some credit for letting a contrarian colleague say his piece and using it as a means of making a passably graceful exit from a disgraceful episode in the history of the so-called new media.