The Palin-bashing is starting to get a little absurd as the spotlight turns to young Bristol Palin’s fiancee.

Besides his hard play on the ice, Levi Johnston was also a bit of hell-raiser off it - another reason Bristol may have been smitten.

State troopers popped Johnston last year for snagging some King salmon out of season in Moose Lake, records from Alaska wildlife enforcement show. He had to pay $370 bail.

As a native Alaskan I can tell you that snag-fishing king salmon, while illegal, is considered more of a rite of passage than a crime.

Anyway, on a related note, anyone else getting the feeling that this “day of bad news about the Palins” was orchestrated by the McCain campaign specifically to get all this stuff out of the way so that the campaign and the news coverage of it wouldn’t be dragged down by a drip-drip-drip of sensationalized “scandal?”

Seems plausible to me.