According to the Washington Post, the Obama White House invited 362 people to its state dinner for the United Kingdom. One familiar face will be gracing the red carpet: Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast.

For those who don’t remember, Andrew Sullivan is the once-conservative columnist who shifted dramatically to the left over the past few years – and reserved a special hatred in his heart for Sarah Palin and her special needs son Trig.

Early on in the campaign, Sullivan suggested that Trig was not actually Sarah Palin’s son – he was Bristol’s son, and Sarah had claimed him as her own to cover up Bristol’s pregnancy. Her oft-recounted labor drama, said Sullivan, was possibly nonsense; it was more likely that she had made it up. As Sullivan wrote in August 2008, “the noise around this story is now deafening, and the weirdness of the chronology sufficient to rise to the level of good faith questions.” Actually, the noise wasn’t deafening – it was just that Sullivan was tone-deaf.

But Sullivan didn’t drop his crusade against Palin and Trig.

In February 2010, Sullivan wrote that he believed that Palin had named her son Trig after the “medical term for Down Syndrome … Trisomy-21 or Trisomy-g. It is often shortened in medical slang to Tri-G.”

In June 2011, Sullivan continued the “Trig isn’t Sarah’s child” meme, writing:

It’s possible that Palin simply made up her drama of labor, or exaggerated it for effect, when in fact it was a routine, if rare, pregnancy, and she had mild warnings that the birth may be premature, and she gussied that up into a tall tale of her pioneer spirit, guided by her doctor, who refused to take the NYT’s calls as soon as Palin hit the big time. I think that’s the likeliest explanation, given the sheer world-historical weirdness of the alternative.

But it’s also possible that she never had that baby at all.

Sullivan has justified his Palin obsession by writing:

She has made speech after speech citing her infant son – just as her teenage daughter has been pushed into every public arena imaginable. There is nothing private about Palin’s story about her child with Down Syndrome. Nothing. To examine the details of a story already told in such detail in the public sphere as a core campaign platform is violating no one’s privacy. It is asking relevant questions of a narrative plainly and publicly provided by Palin herself. I have used no facts except those already in the public domain.

Sullivan is a hateful bully. There are no two ways about it. Doubting the parentage of someone’s son based on sheer, nasty speculation in the face of all available evidence sinks to the reprehensible. It’s a hell of a lot worse than the absurd leftist narrative about Slut-gate. It’s White House-backed lunacy. And it’s the latest in a series. If, as we reported yesterday, Louis C.K. did indeed visit the White House, this is just the most recent example of an Administration far too comfortable with nasty bullies – and deeply hypocritical when it comes to its pursuit of so-called incivility on the other side of the aisle.