Nearly a week after an ABC/Washington Post poll found that an overwhelming 71 percent of Americans think Sarah Palin is not qualified to be president, Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm has finally come up with a way to spin that finding as a positive. Malcolm, formerly a Bush press secretary, has an odd obsession with Palin that frequently leads him to twist and distort her poll numbers in what we can only assume is an attempt to assemble a clip file for his inevitable interview for a position on Palin's staff. But this time, Malcolm has outdone himself.

Check out Malcolm's lede:

A recent Washington Post/ABC News Poll found that 30 months out from the 2012 party presidential nominations, only 71% of Americans believe that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be president.

This compares with someone named Barack Obama. At the same point in his then unannounced campaign, 0% thought he was qualified for the Oval Office. That's because he wasn't even on the polling lists' radar then.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that “only 71%” was meant to be taken as sarcasm. But arguing that it's a good thing that after near-constant exposure to Sarah Palin for a year and a half, nearly three-quarters of Americans have concluded that she is not qualified to be president? That's Baghdad Bob-level spin -- just as audacious, and just as absurd.

Malcolm then moved on to writing about “how quickly the modern American presidential selection process and landscape is changing, making traditional patterns of political prediction as reliable as Prius brakes.” But his “evidence” ... well, it doesn't make any sense:

For starters, the last three presidents all won the nation's top political office on their first try for the Oval Office, a break from usual U.S. political tradition when voters seemed to want candidates to serve years in another office or executive position to come to know their political personalities before entrusting them with their highest office.

Winning the presidency “on their first try for the Oval Office” is in no way a break from voters wanting “candidates to serve years in another office.” Those two things simply aren't inconsistent. But the second part of Malcolm's sentence isn't merely inconsistent with the first, it is also wrong. Andrew Malcolm surely knows that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did, in fact, “serve years” in an “executive position” -- after all, he was press secretary for Bush's wife. So, basically, that paragraph is complete nonsense.

Next, Malcolm moves on to Sarah Palin's qualifications:

Palin also has other apparent qualifiers for the GOP 2012 race: she is not of Washington and doesn't currently hold an elective office, having resigned the Alaska governor's job last summer.

So now abruptly quitting the governorship halfway through her first term is a qualification? I guess Malcolm must be thinking of the lengthy track record of major parties nominating candidates for president who didn't hold elective office at the time of their selection. That's a list with exactly three names on it since 1960: Nixon, Reagan, Mondale -- two former vice presidents and former two-term governor of California who had already run for the presidential nomination once.

But here's where Malcolm's desperate spin veers into outright dishonesty:

While vocal Palin-haters reveled in her awful recent national poll numbers about presidential qualifications, they missed a fact: if she decides to run for anything, the first goal is to become the GOP nominee. And the voters Palin needs to convince about that are state-by-state Republicans, 69% of whom still see her favorably.

Malcolm didn't provide a link for that poll number, or even tell us what poll it came from. But the ABC/Washington Post poll Malcolm cited at the beginning of his post, and which he attempts to rebut by pointing to unspecified polls, has something interesting to say about Palin's standing among Republicans: “Even among Republicans, a majority now say Palin lacks the qualifications necessary for the White House.”

Wow. Malcolm dismisses the ABC/Washington Post poll's findings that the overwhelming majority of Americans think Palin is not qualified to be president by arguing that she only needs to convince Republican voters, who he says view her favorably -- and all the while he ignores the ABC/WaPo poll finding that a majority of Republicans don't think Palin is qualified to be president.

This is simply not honest behavior.