Andrew Sullivan is pissed that Howie Kurtz wrote about his conspiracy theorizing with regard to Sarah Palin’s youngest child. Sullivan sent McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb a pair of emails asking him to confirm whether or not Trig is Gov. Palin’s daughter; Goldfarb (full disclosure: a friend and former coworker) sent them to Kurtz; Sullivan is calling foul, saying they were “private” emails.

I’m actually really surprised that Andrew has the balls to raise the issue of violating someone’s privacy, since he wrote a series of posts on Sarah Palin’s hacked personal email account–a series of posts that not once, as far as I have seen, condemned this clear-cut invasion of privacy.

I don’t even understand how Sullivan can claim that these were private, personal emails: he was writing in his official capacity as a magazine reporter. If Goldfarb had replied “Nope, not her baby” would Andrew have treated the response as a private email? These were on the record discussions, and when you’re on the record the journalist is just as responsible for what he writes/says as the subject is. A journalist’s questions aren’t guaranteed anonymity, even though they usually don’t receive much scrutiny.

Andrew has good reason to be embarrassed: he’s digging in the fever swamps for anything he can find to make Sarah Palin look bad, sharing company with the same category of people who demanded to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate to prove he wasn’t born outside of the country. What Andrew is doing–and what he did in the days after Palin’s announcement–isn’t responsible journalism. Good on Kurtz for calling him out.