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.

I think Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin are on to some­thing about the sub­text of all this Ayers stuff bil­low­ing up out of the McCain cam­paign these days. Martin writes:

At best, this is to say that Obama doesn’t believe in Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. At worst, and this is where the new ad goes, it means Obama doesn’t suf­fi­ciently love Amer­ica and is actu­ally apart from it.

And Smith concurs:

It’s not about an obscure ’60s rad­i­cal; it’s about chal­leng­ing Obama’s Amer­i­can­ness, which is why the lan­guage of the ads, delib­er­ately or inad­ver­tently, echoes the lan­guage of viral emails that do that more directly.

But in another sense, I think Martin and Smith stop a step too short in their analy­sis.

Having once some­what cheek­ily included a sen­tence dia­gram in a book review, I was charmed this morn­ing to see gram­mar­ian Kitty Burns Florey take on the sen­tences of Sarah Palin over at Slate. Check it out here.

I can’t wait to hear how the McCain cam­paign walks this one back:

Couric: Why, in your view, is Roe v. Wade a bad decision?

Sarah Palin: I think it should be a states’ issue not a fed­eral government-​mandated, man­dat­ing yes or no on such an impor­tant issue. I’m, in that sense, a fed­er­al­ist, where I believe that states should have more say in the laws of their lands and indi­vid­ual areas. Now, foun­da­tion­ally, also, though, it’s no secret that I’m pro-​life that I believe in a cul­ture of life is very impor­tant for this coun­try. Per­son­ally that’s what I would like to see, um, fur­ther embraced by America.

Couric: Do you think there’s an inher­ent right to pri­vacy in the Constitution?

Palin: I do. Yeah, I do.

Couric: The cor­ner­stone of Roe v. Wade.

Palin: I do.