Los Angeles Times reporter -- and former Laura Bush flak -- Andrew Malcolm struggles with many aspects of his current career, but reporting on polls may give him the most trouble.

Lately, the erstwhile Bush aide has appeared to be auditioning for a gig with Sarah Palin by -- among other things -- repeatedly offering absurd apples-and-oranges comparisons of Palin's favorability rating with President Obama's job approval rating.

But Malcolm outdid himself today, shoe-horning in a sentence about Palin's favorability rating into a blog post about public skepticism that Obama has done enough to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize:

Almost nearly not quite one-in-five Americans believes that President Obama has accomplished enough to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize that he had to go to Norway in December to collect.

...

Doing the math from those numbers, that means that during the past eight weeks or so the proportion of fellow countrypersons who think the Chicago Democrat is undeserving of the global-peace-prize distinction has gone from an overwhelming 67% majority up to a gargantuan, ground-shaking tsunami landslide majority of 80%.

Perhaps having something to do with the same award-winning U.S. president having just ordered another 30,000 combat soldiers into the increasingly unpopular and peaceless battle for Afghanistan. A subject Obama might address in his address. (Text here later.)

Meanwhile, the favorability rating of Republican Sarah Palin, an unemployed itinerant author, have climbed back up to 46% from a summertime low of 39%.

So now Malcolm is comparing Palin's favorable ratings to the number of people who think Obama deserves the Nobel? That isn't apples and oranges, that's apples and ... I don't know, rattlesnakes, maybe. Or frisbees. Something very much unlike an apple, anyway.

Meanwhile, that Palin favorability rating Malcolm thinks is so darn impressive? It's 46 percent -- with a 46 percent unfavorability rating. Palin's unfavorable rating is just one point lower than John Edwards'. Her net fav/unfav is significantly worse than that of Vice President Joe Biden, who Malcolm mocks daily. Palin's numbers, in other words, are not good. Malcolm has to invent bogus comparisons in order to make them look good. (Well, that's not quite true: He could simply note that she has lower unfavorable ratings than Dick Cheney.)