Poor Bris­tol and Levi.  The stars are aligned against them.  First, the baby.  Or, wait, before that, the genealogy. 

The latest is that Levi’s mother has been arrested for the abuse of Rush Limbaugh’s favorite treat, also known as hill-​billy heroin: Oxy­Con­tin.  This might put a damper on the birth of Gov­er­nor Palin’s first grand­child, due this weekend.

News out­lets are report­ing on a new Spanish-​language Obama ad that com­pares McCain’s atti­tude toward immi­gra­tion to Rush Limbaugh’s. As a few people have noticed, that’s pretty bla­tantly mis­lead­ing, since McCain has gen­er­ally (though not com­pletely) been in favor of reform­ing immi­gra­tion, while Lim­baugh has come out stri­dently against it. The ad does the truth the fur­ther dis­ser­vice of pulling Limbaugh’s words out of con­text. Here’s ABC’s Jake Tapper on the sum of Obama’s sins:

The greater impli­ca­tion the ad makes, how­ever, is that McCain is no friend to Lati­nos at all, beyond issues of fund­ing the DREAM act or how NCLB money is dis­trib­uted. By link­ing McCain to Limbaugh’s quotes, twist­ing Limbaugh’s quotes, and tying McCain to more extrem­ist anti-​immigration voices, the Obama cam­paign has crossed a line into mis­lead­ing the view­ers of its new TV ad. In Span­ish, the word is erróneo.

It seems odd (read: polit­i­cally dumb) for Obama to release a mis­lead­ing ad at the very moment that he’s reap­ing the sym­pa­thy of a media envi­ron­ment that turned against John McCain for his mis­lead­ing ads.

So what’s going on here?

Today, in a post­ing on his “Rough Sketch” blog at the Wash­ing­ton Post Dana Mil­bank per­pe­trated one of the most grotesque exam­ples of hatchet jour­nal­ism I’ve seen in a while. I’ll get to the par­tic­u­lars soon enough, but first it’s worth set­ting a little context.

Mil­bank was report­ing on the Rev­erend Jere­miah Wright’s speech at the National Press Club this morn­ing, a speech that marked the third public appear­ance of Barack Obama’s former pastor in the last couple of days. The first appear­ance came on Friday, when Wright appeared in a PBS inter­view with Bill Moyers. The second came yes­ter­day, when he spoke at the Detroit NAACP’s Free­dom Fund dinner.

The Moyers inter­view was so uncon­tro­ver­sial that one com­men­ta­tor had to wonder why we hadn’t heard more about it. But the question-and-answer period after today’s Press Club speech gave the media just the kind of thing it was wait­ing for. Joe Klein of Time said that “Wright’s pur­pose now seems quite clear: to aggran­dize him­self–the guy is going to be a go-​to main­stream media source for racial extrem­ist spew, the next iter­a­tion of Al Sharp­ton–and destroy Barack Obama.” Amy Sul­li­van, also at Time, said bluntly that Wright’s per­for­mance at the National Press Club “can only be described as a polit­i­cal disaster.”

Only small-t time will tell if Sul­li­van is right–one sign she’s cor­rect is that Obama is already inch­ing his way onto the denounce-and-reject road. [UPDATE 4/29: The inches have become miles.] But it only takes one look at the tran­script of Wright’s appear­ance at the Press Club to see that Klein’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of it as “racial extrem­ist spew” is ridiculous.

Milbank’s post is worst of all.