The Definitive Smackdown of the Trig-Truther-in-Chief

Christopher Badeaux has written the definitive smackdown of Andrew Sullivan. The section titled “Dr. Sullivan on Sarah Palin’s Reproductive Abilities” is worth quoting here in part:

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the 2008 Presidential campaign was neither black sheep Republican John McCain’s nomination as the standard-bearer for a party he’d often accused of intolerance and hard-heartedness, nor Barack Obama’s unlikely cruise to the Presidency, but rather the groundswell of interest in the activities of Sarah Palin’s private parts.

Mrs. Palin, for those fortunate enough not to care about national politics, is the governor of Alaska, a married mother and not infrequent moose hunter. In early 2008, she informed her cabinet and the press for the first time that she was seven months pregnant — a somewhat surprising revelation given that she was in her mid-forties, and was not visibly showing much of a pregnancy belly. Nevertheless, two months later, she delivered a baby boy named Trig, who was subsequently diagnosed with Down Syndrome. Some months later, in a more than slightly surprising turn of events, Governor Palin was nominated for the vice-presidency of the United States.

As is typical of modern American politics, this turned Mrs. Palin into a hate object for roughly half of the country; the fact that she’d had the tackiness not to murder her defective son in utero made things worse. Lacking a toehold on which to criticize her record — a reformer who had challenged the old guard of her party and state government — and unable to fall back on remarks about her looks or any of the other, usual personal assaults, a select group of internet personalities decided that Mrs. Palin’s son Trig must, in fact, be her daughter’s, who was then a senior in high school. This being modern American political online writing, proof of this ridiculous assertion was neither offered nor demanded, and a thousand would-be obstetricians immediately began poking at pictures of a teenaged girl to demonstrate, for all the world to see, that those photos showed she was large enough to be pregnant. That these same people would be the first to cry in fury if the child being subjected to this humiliation were not the child of a Republican was, again as usual, lost on the lay doctors caught in their five-minute hate.

Andrew Sullivan immediately leaped into the fray. Unlike the rest of these non-experts, many of whom began to back off of the story when word emerged that Mrs. Palin’s daughter was pregnant and had been close to the time of Trig’s birth, Sullivan, who apparently received a secret medical degree while attending Harvard, began obsessively following this story, turning the Atlantic from a fairly uninteresting opinion website into a leading journal of gynecology and obstetrics. Rarely in human history has a gay man been that obsessed with a married woman’s vagina.

This became, perhaps even more than the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, Sullivan’s driving motivation during the 2008 campaign, if the quantity of his writings are any indication of his drive. While others were intimidated by photos of Mrs. Palin in late-stage pregnancy looking like a woman in late-stage pregnancy, the biological impossibility of a seventeen year-old girl giving birth to two non-fraternal children less than eleven months apart, and other indicia of what the rest of us take for ordinary reality, that laser-like mind knew no fear.

[...]

Behold Andrew Sullivan, a man who contains infinite contradictions: A believer in privacy, except a woman’s medical records, who never seemed upset that his preferred horse in the race released nothing besides a one-page “All clear!” note from his doctor; an opponent of the objectification of homosexuals, who objectified at least one, and arguably two, children; a professional journalist with a boundless understanding of not only applied medicine, but also hospital protocol and the art of diagnosis by news clipping and photograph.

Read the whole thing. It’s vintage.