I wrote about Andrew Sullivan’s descent into madness here. But Sullivan shows no signs of stopping even as his colleagues at The Atlantic recoil in horror. In fact, he keeps digging a deeper hole, now claiming that what happened to John Edwards was a different issue entirely because he wasn’t running for president any more, but Sullivan’s own baseless and profoundly insulting attacks on Sarah Palin and her family are justified, because he alone must stand up for investigatory journalism into this political unknown. And he will stand on his couch, hold his laptop aloft, and scream that we don’t have the full story about Trig Palin’s birth until someone in the condo upstairs complains to the super.

You would shame the man, but he has none left to invoke.

Yesterday Moe and I with his colleagues in respected corners of the news media who had disparaged Sarah Palin, relying on the rantings from the foulest corners of the blogosphere as the basis for their articles. Douthat’s disappointment - along with that of his colleagues McArdle and Goldberg - turned slowly into outrage over the course of the day, as it became clear that much of his frustration was directed at the worst offender of them all: Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is on the extreme edge of the assault on Palin - even as Campbell Brown and others have drastically scaled back their attacks on Palin as they realized their allegations were either unfounded, irrelevant, or significant stretches of fact, Sullivan continues to beat the drum. He repeats rumor and innuendo as established truth, but even worse, insists that every tabloidesque rumor be met with immediacy by Palin herself. It’s more than a little pathetic: Andrew Sullivan, once one of the most brilliant wits of the neocon blogosphere, now occupies that darkened zone of the tabloid preacher - the streetcorner pamphleteer who cries to all who will hear, “The Government will not respond to my writings the existence of extraterrestrials among us, and THIS LACK OF DENIAL PROVES DEFINITIVELY THAT THEY ARE HERE!”

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Andrew Sullivan, fresh off of bending the truth to mean whatever he’d like it to mean about his pre-Iraq position on the war, writes today to accuse John and Cindy McCain of embellishing a very personal story in a crass attempt to achieve political gain with evangelicals.

Part of the McCain Celebrity, as packaged for the evangelical base, is the rescue of two Bangladeshi girls at the behest of Mother Theresa, one of whom, Bridget, they subsequently adopted…The story of how Mother Teresa talked them into it makes it all the more poignant.

The only trouble is: it’s not true.

Sullivan goes on to cite a few instances where it’s said Mother Teresa urged Cindy McCain to adopt. This list consists entirely of: 1) a mention on the McCain website (since corrected), 2) a mention in the intro to an ABC story by an anchor, 3) and a WSJ story, all from this year.

Now, in all my readings of it, I have NEVER seen or heard this aspect of the story, in any way shape or form. And you know, I kinda paid attention to it. I have my own personal reasons for caring about adoption.

I’m missing where John McCain has ever said anything but that the two children his wife brought back were from Mother Teresa’s ORPHANAGE, not that they were personally urged by her to adopt them? It seems clear that the first time this idea ever proceeded from an official McCain source was on his website, and was corrected when someone pointed out the discrepancy.

But Sullivan perceives a far more insidious goal:

This is the pattern:

A story that shows the McCains’ genuine compassion and faith is embellished over the years to make the story a little more perfect, a little more salient, a little better as a narrative. It’s especially important to add these embellishments when your goal is to appeal to a fundamentalist base, when your own prickly, personal and private faith isn’t very marketable. And when your adopted daughter is Bangladeshi, and when that fact has been disgracefully used against you by the Bush machine in 2000, and when some fringes of your base get queasy about multi-racial families, what better way to describe the adoption than as something Mother Teresa herself “implored” you to do? More interesting: the first actual reports of this event do not mention this fact. They are added later.

This is a website error compounded by journalists not doing research. Hardly anything planned, or anything close to a “pattern.” JustOneMinute builds a phenomenal case against Sullivan’s flippant argument, pointing out that John McCain has never been quoted saying anything of the kind. And what’s more:

Well, I’ll tell you what the pattern is - Andrew Sullivan sees an outlandish accusation against John McCain and re-echoes it without doing even a minimum of research. At this point, unless John McCain is to be held accountable for every word of his website there is no story.

Go over to Tom Maguire for a full debunking.