I used to preface posts like this with statements such as, "it doesn't get slimier than this." But that was overly optimistic.

I think we all know that it does. And that there's no bottom drain.

The perpetrator this time is MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, whose ratings dropped when the bottom fell out of her crazy Russian conspiracy theory rants. And flailing about, like a drunk in an empty bar, she fastened on to Steven Menashi, a Trump judicial nominee.

Steven Menashi, a former Alito clerk, is the son of Jewish Iranian refugee father. And, as he notes, "My grandparents were Iraqi Jews who had lived in Baghdad before moving to Tehran and then finding a home in Israel. My grandmother survived the Farhud, a violent pogrom against the Jewish community of Baghdad in 1941, by fleeing the city for the countryside."

So, Maddow and her people decided to attack him as a racist.

In Maddow's rant, she falsely accused Menashi of making "a highbrow argument for racial purity" and of a "blood-curdling article".

As Ed Whelan points out, Maddow grotesquely misrepresented the article, but what's even more disturbing is the frequency of such drive-by attacks on judicial nominees, which casually accuse them of racism based on their past writings and the social media echo chamber without even understanding what it is they're saying.