September 12th, 2008
So other people are noticing it, too: Something happened earlier this week with Sullivan. He stopped writing without notice. Then mysteriously reversed his position on the parentage of Trig Palin, without explanation or retraction of his earlier insistence that there was no reason to believe for certain that Trig was Sarah Palin’s son.
And throughout all of this, Sullivan has been posting “Quotes of the Day” which seemed designed to function as a sort of Greek Chorus. During his period of radio silence, he posted the German “About which one cannot speak, one must be silent.”
Today he publishes a quote reading, “It may be false. It may be true. But nothing has been proved.”
For whatever reason, Sullivan seems to have backed away from smearing Sarah Palin, but his heart just doesn’t seem to be in it. He’s like Col. Nathan Jessep, just dying to tell us exactly who ordered the code red.
Update: Galley Friend Dean Barnett makes a fairly important point:
[The left] smeared Sarah Palin with a host of – um – imaginative charges like she wore a fat suit to fake a pregnancy that had actually visited itself upon her daughter. Even the chief disseminator of that rumor from his perch at the Atlantic has since bethought himself of that smear, publicly crediting Palin for bringing her fifth child to term on Wednesday (although of course neither admitting error nor apologizing for his role in spreading the rumor).
If Sullivan and The Atlantic are now walking back from their charge–and don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing–don’t they need to issue either an explanation or a retraction of the earlier stuff? Otherwise, how are we to know which is the real position?
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