Hehe...great post!

I think I'm going to re-read this a dozen times over the next couple of days. If I can read through the tears, that is. A beautiful yet energetic takedown.

Brent Bozell has a pretty good smackdown of Milbank Here

Guy's been a serial liar and jaggoff for quite a while.

One must applaud Dana Milbank. Rarely has any man shown such ingenuity at reaching such lofty heights on the basis of such meager talent.--Ace

I have loads of 'meager talent'. Can I get the Big Bucks at the WP too?

Great post, but these f****** idiots in the media are really beginning to irritate me. When will the new technology finally make them unemployable?

Faster please.

What I don't understand is why the stupid chimp-Hitler, liar, warmongering idiot retard draft-dodging wife-beater didn't live up to his promise to "change the tone" in Washington.

You think it's quite reasonable to claim that Bush knowingly lied about the presence of WMD's in Iraq, despite the fact that he knew he'd win the war within months at most and his lie would be exposed to the world.

Hmm... late 2005, war turning into quagmire, and only NOW are these darn intel questions being raised by the MSM, when the Preznit's poll numbers are tanking...

Is this hard to understand? The Cheney administration was counting on these questions being largely forgotten -- once victory was declared.

And if it had all turned out well, they would have been right. No MSM reconsideration of the lies to sell the war would have taken place!

They would have gotten away with it.

The weird thing about the Post is that they are considered by a lot of crazy ass liberals, and cosplay democrats, to be a little too conservative.

Good smack down, Ace. I couldn't read most of it, as I am in a bourbon in some oregon resort, tre lewis ne clark. The Post's columnists, though, are insane. I think that think that posting a George Will column absolves them of objectivity.

Every letter to the editor I write now asks them what exactly it is a you have to learn to get a journalism degree, and that they should hire Steyn and Hitchens.

I understand your differences with Milbank over some of the points he raises, but I think you're missing something. When the media complains about bloggers, it's largely because bloggers don't have to do any heavy lifting when it comes to reporting, and certainly don't have to worry about even an appearance of fairness or objectivity. But I'm not sure why you think Milbank would be jealous of your ability to state your opinion. He's a columnist. He's stating his opinion in this article. There's no pretense of objectivity. You seem to be complaining because a columnist is letting his personal opinions color his writing. That's what columnists do.

Dana Dana
He's so vain-a
F*cks his dog
and snorts cocain-a
You might say
he's gone insan-a
Dana Dana
He's so vain-a

Damn war turning into a quagmire. Shit, its been a quagmire since 2003. Hell, Oct 2002. Fuck, Afghanistans been a quagmire since 9-11-2001,

As Coulter would say, if its as bad as tubino says, why hasn't the Republican National Guard invaded NYC yet?

The bad guys in Iraq have not won an engagement since when? They are reduced to road side VBIEDs. The only type of Americans to cut and run when the odds are that pro-American are the type who want us to lost just to get an lefty pres in 2008. Oh, and someone whose committment to the CIA is such that any administrator's ID is byond the touch of policy debate, even if she has injected herself into such debate. Oh, unless, that CIA's involvement touches upon secret terrorist prisoners, or other real parts of the GWOT.

Milbank Milbank
leftist ho-crank
There's no redemption
he's a shawshank
His loins are moldy
and they smell dank
Milbank Milbank
Such a ho-crank

Ace's disagreement with Dana, Chris, is merely a technical one. One that someone like Ace couldn't possibly understand. I too feel pity for those amateurs who do not understand the nuance required of a Wash Post columnist, who has to do so much, ah how you say, reporting.

Indeed, Ace only showed his ignorance when he dared disagree with Dana. I would almost say that reached the tipping point, as it were.

Ah, yes, the tipping point Dana though Sheehan was. Or to point out that Murfa was not the hawk he was reported to be. Its all taught in journalism 100, up is down, the sky is blue and we are all red.

joe, he repeats himself sometime

"You think it's quite reasonable to claim that Bush knowingly lied about the presence of WMD's in Iraq, despite the fact that he knew he'd win the war within months at most and his lie would be exposed to the world. This strikes you and your unhinged partisan leftist buddies as quite reasonable; conservatives, after all, are not only evil, they're also mind-bogglingly stupid, and do things like claim that a dictator has WMD's as a pretext for war knowing that within 90 days at most their lies will be shown as such.

What, we're that evil, Dana, and we didn't think of smuggling a few gallons of VX into Iraq?"

Okay, so if we can't decide that the Administration lied, we can at least decide that, given that they were at best WRONG, the war was a giant fuckup, right?

Or ... is this about, you know, freedom on the march. And what not. Because our foreign policy has so consistently been about freedom...

Oh, Ace, if Dana's comments count as the most biased pieces you have read, then you may be pure enough to count towards being one of Mr Shamari's 72 virgins.

Milbank's and the MSM's treatment of the VP shows one thing: conservative, christian white men have fewer free speech rights in this country.

tubino, you're "begging the question"

If an administration would lie to get us into that war, why would they not create a Potemkin village of WMD? "The lies would be forgotten," is not really an argument so much as a surprisingly weak rationalization on your part. Even a child knows that when he lies and says he has a doctor's note to get out of class, he ought to probably go ahead and forge the note...

Ace,

One of your best here. You are absolutely on target. Well done.

Subsunk

WO-Oz writes, "Or ... is this about, you know, freedom on the march. And what not. Because our foreign policy has so consistently been about freedom...'

If by "our", you mean the United States, then your skepticism is justified. For far too long, US foreign policy has been dominated by Kissingeresque "realists", for whom promoting stability over change or - God forbid - freedom. As the old saying has it, "He may be a a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch."

There's one person who agrees with you most emphatically: George W. Bush. On November 19, 2003, he declared the following before the British government in Whitehall:

"Your nation [Britain] and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

"As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found."

Here's the link. See for yourself.

Dubya's words couldn't be plainer: he's declared the last 50 years of British and American foreign policy in the Middle East to have been a failure, because it was willing to promote tyranny in return for stability. The fact is, Dubya has embraced the Left's position. The "root causes" argument has won. Dubya has done precisely what the Left has demanded for so many years: the overturning of US policy toward the Middle East, that disastrous policy of maintaining dictators and autocrats, and is instead promoting the values on which our own society is based - democracy, openness, freedom.

And yet, when Dubya not only embraces their creed, but does something about it, the Left howls for his blood. Go figure.

You went at Milbank's piece as if it were a WaPo article or "news analysis." It was a political column, clearly marked as such. Under that heading, he had the right to take the liberties he did.

I don't like Milbank, but give the devil his due.

The fact is that for years Dana Milbank was the White House political correspondent for the Post. He was as much an advocate then as he is now.

After accusing the Bush admin of basically lying (notice a constant theme here) he stopped getting any access and was moved. What this demonstrates is that reporters often morph into commentators when their bias becomes too obvious. This trend has been going on for a long time in papers like the Post and the Times, journalism becomming interchangable with reporting and I would submit to you, Bill, that the average public does not make the fine distinction you do.

Outstanding post. Thanks

PS - WMDs is a plural, not a possessive. America has lost control of the apostrophe and I'm here to help get it back. :)

joeindc

I know Ace disagrees with what Milbank says and believes. That wasn't my point. He seems to take offense to the fact that the article takes sides. It's a column. Of course it takes sides. He said "But I'm confounded if I can tell the difference between our neutral and objective press corps and "internet political partisans" anymore." That's my point. Columns aren't supposed to be neutral and objective. There's no reason a column should read much differently than a blog posting.

And my comment about "reporting" wasn't about columnists, it was about reporters. I think you're the one who has trouble with nuance.

And I thought this point by JackStraw was telling. "After accusing the Bush admin of basically lying (notice a constant theme here) he stopped getting any access and was moved. " That's exactly how the Bush White House turned the press corps into lapdogs. The administration knew what has become apparent to a lot of people. Reporters crave access over the truth. So they don't criticize, because they get frozen out and lose their White House beat and don't get invited onto the talk shows and don't get to write books.

It used to be that the press wouldn't put up with it, and wouldn't go along when one of their own was being frozen out, because they knew where that would lead. But that's all changed as they've become corrupted by power and money.

This may be an opinion piece by Milbank but it reveals his BDS and leftist credentials that he denies has an influence when he does "real" reporting.

In regard to our sucess in Afghanistan and Iraq , I am still amused by an analogy I read on some blog sometime ago comparing the whiny quagmire adherists to basketball fans who are angry at the coach because the team is only up by 70 points at half time and that if something is not done quickly we will lose the game.

Bill Milan: he had the right to take the liberties he did.

Once again, the right to be stupid and destructive does not excuse destructive stupidity. The smackdown was in order.

Brown Line: when Dubya not only embraces their creed, but does something about it, the Left howls for his blood.

That's because they were never about ending the "stability" of propping up "our sonofabitch" so much as replacing him with one of their sonsofbitches. (E.g., Castro, Ortega, et al.)

Once again, good for America = bad for the left. They are consistent.

Again, Chris, there is a big difference between reporters and columnists. At least there is supposed to be. When an article appears on page 1 it is assumed to be straight reporting and free of bias. This is the way the press has supposedly been operating since day 1. What has happened in the last few years is that reporters have morphed into columnists.

Look at Helen Thomas, the "dean of the Washington Press Corp". She was ostensibly a reporter for the AP but her bias was overwhelming and it got to be tedious to watch her suck up to demos and slam repubs and call it news. She is now doing officially what she has been doing surreptitiously for years, acting as a columnist. If you want to say that Helen Thomas was bought and paid for since before the Kennedy administration, well ok. I prefer to just think of her as a partisan hack.

I have no problem with columnist but they should be properly identified and their columns placed where they belong, in the editorial section.

How would Tubby like to look into one of these little faces and tell them that we can't help them anymore because they're just not worth it?

Actually, Dana Milbank's title at the Washington Post is national political reporter. He's may write a column, but that's secondary to what he does.

If he's still actively reporting on national politics, he has no business writing pieces like the one linked above.

Ace, think he has himself completely self-bullshitted?

How would Tubby like to look into one of these little faces and tell them that we can't help them anymore because they're just not worth it?--Sue

Actually quite easily since their plight would be the fault of the Evil US Empire and much as he would like to help, we can't solve ALL the problems in the world.

Even more importantly the media don't EVER show those pictures. EVER

Wouldn't want to be a propaganda outlet would they ?So much more professional to just concentrate on yet another car bomb. Now that's the way to tell an objective news story, and if human interest needs to seep in , why let's interview some annoyed Sunni who blames the Americans for the fact that he is not longer a General in the Air Force, and can barely make ends meet now that he does not go automatically to the head of the lines.

His inner-beltway nickname is "Chickenfucker." We'll always have "Chickenfucker." At least.

Millbank is a columnists. They post opinions.

Millbank is a liberal. He will always post liberal opinions.

That's like getting upset with the WP's Charles Krauthammer posts CONSERVATIVE opinions.

Now, granted, almost ever opinoin writer at the post is a liberal, but that's a different story.

Bang them for having too many liberal op/ed writers. Not because one of their liberal op/ed writers is, well... liberal.

Sean, Milbank's main title at the Washington Post is "National Political Reporter." His column is in addition to his reporting duties.

Having reporters double as columnists is always a bad idea, because it does tend to call their objectivity into question. The column displays how Milbank actually feels about the people he spends time reporting about, and the picture's not pretty.

The analogy to Krauthammer is facile, since he is a syndicated columnist, not a reporter. Milbank probably couldn't get his column syndicated in more than The Nation and a few web 'zines.

What do you expect from a guy named DANA??

Best. Post. Ever.

He is an editorial writer, but he is more than that to the Post. He sort of gets bandied about in DC as some sort of political guru. He sets interviewed on local stations as sort of an umpire on daily politcal struggles, which gives him an air of legitimacy, middle of the road sort of thing.

Eitherway, its legit for a blogger to take on a editorial he feels is off the edge.

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