The Hill regards itself as a respectable news organization, so it's not going to publish unfounded, poorly sourced smears like this:

An official adviser to the Trump campaign has escalated the attacks on Khizr Khan, the gold star father who was critical of Trump at the Democratic convention, baselessly accusing him of being a “Muslim Brotherhood agent.”

The adviser, Al Baldasaro, tweeted a link to an article from Shoebat.com, a fringe anti-Islam conspiracy website. The article also suggests (without any evidence) that Humayun Khan, who was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze, was a jihadist who joined the military to kill Americans.

No, The Hill has far more class than that. It won't publish that sort of attack on the Khan family. It will publish this sort of attack, by Charles Hurt:

Khizr Khan was tricked into smearing Donald Trump

Khizr Khan is a fine American and the father of a true American patriot. But now he is also everything that is wrong with American politics today.

It is not entirely his fault, though he has only himself to blame for allowing his dead son to be used for the most hideous of purposes and dragged through the gutter of nasty and dishonest partisan politics.

Khan and his wife took to the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week to deliver an impassioned rebuke of Donald J.Trump.... The Clinton campaign trotted out the Muslim couple because their son, Captain Humayun Khan, was killed by a car bomb in 2004 while guarding a base in Iraq.

... why would Khizr Khan choose to insert himself into politics and demean his son’s sacrifice by lying at a political convention on national television?

The answer is simple: He allowed himself to be tricked into it. And the Clinton campaign was all too eager to take advantage of him and his family and Capt. Khan and use them for their own political partisan purposes.

Stop for a moment and ask yourself how exactly the Clinton campaign arrived at the decision to trot out the Khan family in the middle of their highly-choreographed, exhaustively produced convention?

... Politicians like Hillary Clinton do not see people like Capt. Humayun Khan as a soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice on a foreign battlefield in defense of his country.

...First and foremost, to her, he is a Muslim of Pakistani heritage and therefore is a perfect political pawn for just the right situation.

For just about every American alive, Capt. Khan is an inspiring and unifying figure. To Hillary Clinton, he is a tool to be used to divide people.

In other words, according to Hurt, Khizr and Ghazala Khan appeared at the Democratic convention having no idea that their speech was meant to highlight the fact that they are Muslims whose Muslim son fought and died for his country. They fell into this trap unwittingly, in Hurt's view; Khizr Khan unwittingly spoke about these facts in plain and direct words, while his wife unwittingly stood by his side; later, Ghazala Khan unwittingly wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post defending their appearance, and Khizr Khan unwittingly reiterated what he'd said at the convention in follow-up media appearances.

But it shouldn't surprise us that Hurt responds to non-whites who oppose his agenda by treating them with patronizing contempt, when he's not smearing them outright. Here's a Breitbart column Hurt wrote in the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown:

You have a nasty thug boosting Swisher Sweets from the corner store and roughing up the merchant.

Then, like flies to a barnyard, you have swarms of race pimps breathlessly buzzing to the scene to further fuel the rage and delegitimize the very banner behind which they march.

Then come the “po-po,” dressed in military gear and riding in tanks of war -- all of it the final designs of a big government welfare state that came to power promising to solve all your problems.

This black-clad brute force stings all the more deeply coming from the hand that delivers food stamps, free cell phones and health care for everyone. It is the moment that slaves of the Dependency State learn that government bestows only a false dignity upon them. Indeed, they are despised now more than ever....

It's the standard line from the right: the majority of black people are not capable of independent judgment, and so they blindly remain on "the liberal plantation" taking their welfare and free Obamaphones because they don't know any better. Here it gets a nasty twist: You simple-minded people think you can trust the government, and now the government is beating you in the streets.

The Khans? Same deal -- they're brown, so they can't make their own decisions, and thus the Clinton campaign led them around by the nose. I expect Hurt or some ideological soul mate will follow up on this, blaming the Clinton campaign for the right-wing libels against the Khans' good name. That's what you get for trusting big-government, divide-and-conquer liberals.

Hurt is a nasty piece of work. He's a guy who once called the Voting Rights Act "an abomination of justice" (because no one would have dreamed of drawing a congressional district along racial lines if the VRA hadn't put the idea in everyone's head). He also once describedPresident Obama as an "economic terrorist" and a "spending jihadist," and suggested that Hillary Clinton's response to the Benghazi attacks showed signs of severe mental illness ("This inability to relate to the pain felt by those around her is a frequent sign of varying degrees of psychosis").

Why does The Hill, which regards itself as high-minded, even give space to a sewer-dwelling smear artist like this?

(Hurt links via Media Matters.)

Crossposted at No More Mister Nice Blog