I’m someone who considers himself Libertarian leaning. I subscribe to Reason.com’s RSS feeds, along with a few other Libertarian blogs. Of course, I also subscribe to many Republican blogs, and Democrat blogs, and tech blogs, and entertainment blogs, etc. I don’t read Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish regularly anymore (it’s updated way too fast for me to keep up), but I followed it very closely coming up on the 2008 presidential election. I will admit Sullivan seemed to have it out for Sarah Palin, probably because, as a lot of people saw it, she was nominated from out of nowhere and stayed out of the press’ reach for most of her candidacy.

In addition to maintaining a running list of all the verifiable lies she told (which I can’t fault him for), Sullivan also frequently revisited one suspected lie that couldn’t be verified without Palin’s consent (by releasing her medical records)–Sullivan suspected that Palin’s son Trig was not her child, but in fact he child of her (at the time) 17-year-old daughter Bristol Palin.

Today I saw (via my feed reader) that Reason editor Nick Gillespie reviewed two books about Sarah Palin in the Washington Post. I was reading Reason’s excerpt of the review and was a little surprised to read this:

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, a self-identified conservative who calls his Daily Dish “the most popular one-man political blog site in the world,” persistently claimed that Trig Palin, the governor’s then-4-month-old baby with Down syndrome, was not Sarah’s biological child and requested the full release of her obstetrical records, stopping just short of demanding he be sent the placenta for genetic testing. (If President Obama is hounded by a small group of reality-challenged “birthers,” who doubt he was born in Hawaii, Palin is certainly the only politician to have given rise to what might be called “after-birthers,” who doubt that she delivered her own children.)

Am I reading too much into that, or is he especially harsh toward Andrew Sullivan? As someone who likes Sullivan, and as someone who read his blog regularly as he was making the aforementioned claims, I’m a little disappointed by how that paragraph treated him. I have to wonder if Gillespie even read what Sullivan wrote about the matter, or if he’s just been influenced by the way it was covered by others. First, let’s address the actual argument, which I think Sullivan best laid out here.