A popular conservative smear tactic is to send false rumors out as email messages, knowing that the faithful will spread them across the nation; this harkens back to the days when Nixon-era dirty-tricks specialists rode elevators up and down all day chatting about fake rumors smearing the opposition candidates. During the last election, there were several rather nasty and racist emails spread to try to smear Barack Obama. One in particular showed an Obama extended-family portrait, with the warning “The Clintons and Rodhams were bad, but wait until this bunch starts running around the White House.” The caption then gave the people in the photo fake names and designations, including “dead,” “jail,” “crack addict,” “fugitive,” and “gay porn star.”

Well, irony has its compensations. Just recently, yet another Palin family member was caught in a rather embarrassing incident (burglarizing a house twice in one week), adding to the long list of rather tawdry soap-opera misadventures which seem endemic to the Palin clan. Let’s see what we have:

• Todd Palin: Sarah’s husband; member of secessionist party, illicitly pressured Public Safety Commissioner to fire Sarah’s sister’s ex-husband, has DUI charge on his criminal record.
• Diana Palin: Todd’s half-sister; arrested on felony charges of first-degree burglary and misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and theft.
• Track Palin: Sarah’s son; rumors of drug addiction and joining the military to avoid legal implications.
• Bristol Palin: Sarah’s daughter; raised on Sarah Palin’s abstinence-only education, she gets knocked up out of wedlock at the age of 17. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, she later told Greta Van Susteren that abstinence-only education is “not realistic.” Ya don’t say.) Planned marriage to Levi, father of her baby, fell through and Bristol is now an unwed teenage mother.
• Levi Johnston: the high school football player who knocked up Bristol; declared on his MySpace page that he’s a “f***in’ redneck,” that if “Ya f*** with me I’ll kick ass,” and “I don’t want kids.”
• Sherry Johnston: mother of Levi; arrested for drug possession, charged with six felony counts of misconduct involving a controlled substance.
• Mercede Johnston: Levi’s sister; claimed that the Palins considered the Johnstons “white trash” and won’t let them near the baby. (Levi says that he is “allowed” to see his son but can’t “take him anywhere.”)

By the way, Sarah Palin has now denounced the Johnstons for being on a “quest for fame, attention, and fortune.” And we know that that is simply not the Palin Way. I guess that this means that if Palin runs for and wins the presidency in 2012, the Johnstons, at least, wouldn’t be “running around the White House.” Alas, the Palins would be.

Suffice it to say that were even half this stuff true about Obama’s family, right-wingers would claim that he would be totally unfit for office. Just the fact that one of Obama’s aunts whom he has barely met over the years overstayed her visa in the U.S. and lives in public housing has Republicans on a tear. But as for who is “running around the White House,” what we have are two beautiful little girls and their school-kid friends. The closest we have to criminal scandals is that Obama may have violated copyright law when giving the Queen of England an iPod, and Michelle may have violated protocol by touching the Queen uninvited.

Irony bonus: despite all of the Palin family drama–and the fifty or so scandals around the former VP candidate herself–Sarah Palin is still a popular choice among Republicans as the party’s presidential candidate for 2012. Yay for consistency!