Earlier today, we took a look at Alan Colmes’ comments about Sarah Palin’s most recent pregnancy. Colmes wrote:
While Colmes’s sudden concern for fetuses so long as they reside inside the body of conservative politicians is touching, some people inferred from this idiotic post that Colmes was suggesting that Palin’s putative poor judgment caused her baby to be born with Down syndrome. After sending the initial post down the memory hole, Colmes addressed this concern:
Why anyone would infer bad faith when someone is belittling a politician’s handling of her own pregnancy is beyond me. Nevertheless, good of Alan to sort of man up. At the other end of the crackpot conspiracy theory spectrum, we have Andrew Sullivan who seemingly blogs for the sole purpose of posing the existential question, “How many times can one man kill his own reputation?” Sullivan promulgates a theory that categorically rejects the notion that Palin irresponsibly handled her pregnancy. Why? Because Palin was never pregnant in the first place! Instead, she pretended to be pregnant and give birth (while a sitting governor!) in order to cover for her daughter who was in fact having the baby out of wedlock. In his original post on the matter, Andrew stated that the rumor is “buzzing across the Internets” before calling them “unfounded and unseemly.” A full 41 minutes later, however, he characteristically disagreed with himself, inveighing, “This baby was a centerpiece of the public case for Palin made by the Republicans. They made it an issue – and therefore it is legitimate to ask questions about it.” Speaking of the unseemly, contra Andrew, the story has not been buzzing across the Internets. Prior to Andrew propagating the rumors, they remained confined to the fever swamps where even on the Huffington Post the commentary was generally of the “Good god this is stupid” variety. At the Daily Kos, many of the commenters to the rumor-mongering diary lamented its idiocy and ugliness. Since I know you’re dying to know the kind of persuasive logic that the Kos diarist displayed that piqued Andrew Sullivan’s interest, I offer the following excerpt:
Someone better tell Alan Colmes – the Kos Kid has him dead to rights. Both Andrew Sullivan and Alan Colmes did the exact same thing – they disseminated attacks so vile and idiotic they would never dare put their own names behind them. They used their platforms, platforms that lunatics who come up with such crackpottery typically lack, to get the attacks much more attention than they originally would have received. Colmes and Sullivan did the exact same thing in another regard. Both men, in eagerly publicizing crackpot theories, showed the boundless desperation and ugliness that Sarah Palin will face. If ever there were examples of “kitchen sink” political tactics, the blogging efforts today of Sullivan and Colmes provide them. And both men have provided early returns on our question, “How low will the left go?”
