Despite his on-air persona as a real-life version of the old SNL John Belushi bit on “Weekend Update” in which his rant on some issue always ended with him convulsing and hurling himself to the floor, Mark Levin is an attorney of some note, a scholar, and theoretically a couple of evolutionary steps above the typical right-wing radio screamer. Yet tonight he began yelling about how hypocritical it was for the Obamas to be preaching healthy life-styles “when his own doctor told him to stop drinking so much!” Now, that is simply untrue, as Ethics Alarms and others have thoroughly documented. Obama’s medical report did not recommend that he “moderate his drinking” as the Drudge Report erroneously reported, but rather recommended “moderation in alcohol intake,” which is boilerplate language for “a drink now and then is OK.” Even though the Drudge smear, accidental of not, made the rounds of the virulent Right media, there had been plenty of time to get the facts right, especially for someone like Levin, who is always mercilessly slamming Democrats for sloppy research and dishonest facts.

Yet Mark Levin is still flogging the phony “Obama is a souse” story. This is unconscionable—either inexcusably sloppy, or blatantly dishonest. Yes, if I were not in the ethics field and could indulge my baser instincts, it might provide me some sly satisfaction that a Democratic president is now enduring the kind of same cruel, mean-spirited, unsupported slanderous attacks that the Angry Left heaped on President Bush for eight years. But I am in the ethics field, and this sort of thing is poisonous and wrong.

Mark Levin knows better, and yet he is doing it anyway. This may help him sell more copies of his book (his show has become essentially a nightly infomercial for it), but like all egregious breaches of integrity, it makes him irrelevant and unpersuasive, because it proves that he is willing to employ lies for his own purposes—exactly what he accuses the Democrats of doing.

He might just as well hurl himself to the floor, because that’s where he belongs.