Now it's personal

All out war has broken out between Andrew Sullivan and the McCain campaign.

Sullivan had been airing questions about whether Trig--the Downs Syndrome baby--is really Sarah Palin's biological son, and even a few weeks ago melodramatically let his blog go dark for a couple of days so that he would be free to do research and "figure it out". Eventually he sent a private correspondence asking the McCain campaign to give a response to his request for proof that Palin really is the mother. The McCain campaign did not respond to Sullivan, but they did divulge the private emails to Howard Kurtz at the Post as part of an effort to marginalize Sullivan and dismiss him as "the biggest one-man ego on the planet".

I hope that the McCain campaign's strategy doesn't work, and that Sullivan keeps his cool and stays hewed to the facts. Already, though, I'm nervous that the personal betrayal--of divulging private communications to the world in order to make him look like an arrogant gossip--has affected his capacity to rationally criticize McCain. For example, he has a post called "The McCain Meltdown" where he points to McCain's request to postpone the Friday debate as evidence that the campaign is in some way melting down. But it seems pretty clear to me either that McCain is telling the truth and needs to focus on the financial crisis instead of cramming for the debates, or that he wants to push the debate to a night that will have a larger TV audience (since the debate will be on foreign policy, one of McCain's alleged strengths). It's a pretty weak attack from Sullivan--an attack for attack's sake that will only cost him credibility on the right (although perhaps the ship has sailed).

In any case, this Washington soap opera stuff is extremely entertaining.