New York Times reporter Dan Barry has an "outsider visiting the Capitol" piece (8/3/11) about the strange things one encounters in the legislative sausage factory. In some rooms you are required to wear a necktie; others have no such rules. The place is confusing in other ways, too: "To reach the third level from the first, walk down, not up."

Barry watches the behavior of reporters, scrambling around to get a quote from this or that lawmaker. Not that they're interested in all lawmakers equally. After John Boehner spoke at one lectern, for instance:

A few minutes later, representatives of the Congressional Progressive Caucus appeared at the Boehner-warm lectern to deplore the plan as an assault on working families and the result of a hostage situation created by Tea Party Republicans. But fewer reporters remained to listen.

Whatever the strange rituals of the Beltway, this is one that isn't surprising at all.

I  suspect one of the reporters who stuck around was Dana Milbank--because he had to write a column making fun of the complaining leftists, who apparently should be grateful that budget cuts aren't as deep as they might have been:

Republicans received only a third of the $6 trillion in cuts over 10 years that they proposed in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. But liberal lawmakers are convinced that Obama gave away everything--big spending cuts, probably including Medicare, without any tax increases--all because of a few dozen tea party House members who, defying even House GOP leaders, were perfectly willing to see the government default. In essence, the progressives had been out-crazied by ideologues on the other side--and that drove them mad.

"Oooh!" Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) screamed when asked about the compromise. "Oooh!" she cried again, as if witnessing a ghastly accident scene.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) reported a crime by the Republicans. "A minority within the Congress of the United States has held up the president," he told reporters.

"You have this small element," added Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), "which is basically willing to hold Congress and the nation hostage." Cummings read a complaint he received from a constituent calling the deal "a total capitulation."

Democratic leaders made no attempt to calm their pitchfork-wielding backbenchers, such as Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), who described the deal on TV as a" Satan sandwich."

"It probably is--with some Satan fries on the side," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told ABC News.

That left nobody to counter the likes of Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who called the deal "bizarre" and said it would lead to old folks in his state losing medical care. "It’s all about cutting, cutting, cutting!" he shouted at reporters.

Mocking left-wing members of Congress is a staple of Milbank's columns; one of the few pieces about the People's Budget of the Progressive Caucus was Milbank's red-baiting mockery of their press conference. Perhaps that's the choice in the corporate media: Ignore progressives--or laugh at them.

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza's curious take on the Mark Halperin affair:

The truth of the Halperin matter is that all reporters (or others) who go on television frequently are forever in a “there but for the grace of God go I” situation.... We know of what we speak, having found ourselves tongue-tied or worse on any number of occasions while staring into a camera. And in an ill-fated 2009 video venture known as “Mouthpiece Theater,” The Fix had to live down an inappropriate reference to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

For those who might be unaware, he's referring to the skit where he and Post colleague Dana Milbank likened Hillary Clinton to a "mad bitch." This was a scripted satirical video; the "bitch" reference came in the form of an image, which would suggest they'd thought about it well in advance. There's something utterly predictable-- and pathetic-- about reporters who react to these scandals by suggesting that if you talk into a microphone often enough you're bound to say something stupid.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank deserves some credit for writing this about all of the awful things about the White House Correspondents' Dinner:

The fun begins, appropriately enough, at the offices of the American Gas Association, where White House reporters are feted by the lobbyists of the Quinn Gillespie firm. More lobbyist-sponsored entertainment comes from the Motion Picture Association. Along the way, journalists wind up serving as pimps: We recruit Hollywood stars to entertain the politicians, and we recruit powerful political figures to entertain the stars. Corporate bosses bring in advertisers to gawk at the display, and journalists lucky enough to score invitations fancy themselves celebrities.

Milbank points out that his own paper invited Donald Trump as one of its guests (which is reason enough to write such a column, and skip the event altogether, as Milbank did).

He adds that the parties, after-parties and celebrity-studded receptions add up, and that:

the cumulative effect is icky. With the proliferation of A-list parties and the infusion of corporate and lobbyist cash, Washington journalists give Americans the impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like the celebrities and power players we cover.

I think Americans long ago rendered a verdict on the "professional detachment" of Beltway media elite. He closed with this:

My late colleague David Broder once recalled how, when he began newspapering in mid-century, journalists embraced the credo that "the only way a reporter should ever look at a politician is down." He said they "prided themselves on their independence, their skepticism, and they relished their role in exposing the follies and the larceny of public officials."

That's an odd sentiment to associate with Broder, who rarely expressed that kind of critical attitude towards politicians. The most notable exception might have been Broder's hostility towards Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank seems to like to mock progressives almost as much as he likes to go after Glenn Beck. So it's no surprise that he turned out to "cover" the unveiling of a budget plan by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (4/13/11).

Milbank seems to think that little explanation is needed--these crazy ideas are just obviously crazy:

Among the highlights: a $4 trillion tax increase over 10 years. An increase in the top tax rate to 49 percent. A $2.3 trillion defense spending cut--and an increase in domestic spending. Oh, and they would revive the "public option" to offer government-run healthcare.

Putting "increase" in italics is Milbank's way of saying, "Can you believe these people?!" And it's worth pointing out that the "public option" isn't "government-run healthcare," but these are details.

He goes to present the nightmare vision of the future:

Still, it gives a sense of how things would be if liberals ran the world: no cuts in Social Security benefits, government-negotiated Medicare drug prices, and increased income and Social Security taxes for the wealthy. Corporations and investors would be hit with a variety of new fees and taxes. And the military would face a shock-and-awe accounting: a 22 percent cut in Army soldiers, 30 percent for the Marines, 20 percent for the Navy and 15 percent for the Air Force. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would end, and weapons programs would go begging.

Keeping Social Security as is, reducing Medicare drug prices, raising taxes on corporations, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.... I'm sorry, are these ideas supposed to sound absurd on their face? Someone should tell the people, since much of this would be broadly popular. At least, that seems to be the case when the people are asked what they think.

Better watch our language, though--Milbank points out that this talk about "the people" is a little creepy:

Their oft-repeated slogan, "The People’s Budget," conveyed an unhelpful association with "the people's republic" and other socialist undertakings.

An "unhelpful association" made by the writer. Glenn Beck might be leaving Fox, which might open up some room for others in the media to ferret out the socialists among us.

Washington Post Dana Milbank (3/19/11) skewers the Republicans for their "emergency meeting" to defund NPR:

This particular emergency involved the lower end of the FM radio dial. Republicans, in an urgent budget-cutting maneuver, were voting to cut off funding for National Public Radio. All $5 million of it--or one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the federal budget.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers and calculated the impact this emergency measure would have on government spending: "No effect."

One of the rules of corporate media balance is that if you criticize Republicans, you have to find an example of similar buffoonery on the other side. Milbank finds that in an effort to end the nine-year-old Afghan War, which nearly two-thirds of Americans now say is not worth fighting:

Democrats would have been in a good position to point out the Republicans' lack of seriousness, except they were engaged in their own trivial pursuit. On Thursday, the same day the Republicans were doing battle with Diane Rehm, the House was also debating a bill by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) ordering full withdrawal from Afghanistan by year’s end.

Milbank explains: "Neither a vindictive slap at public broadcasting nor a pell-mell pullout from Afghanistan would be good policy," though in the end he gives the Democrats more credit for opposing majority opinion on the war:

In the end, the Democrats proved somewhat more adult in restraining impulses. Party leaders opposed Kucinich's Afghanistan pullout plan as irresponsible, and most Democrats voted against it.

Well, thank goodness someone in Washington is being a grown up.

The desire to not debate the Afghan War seems to be a popular one at the Post. Today Fred Hiatt (3/21/11) cheers the fact that David Petraeus' Congressional appearances on the Afghan War were free of rancor--unlike his 2007 testimony on the Iraq War:

At a time when our political system is said to be incapable of rising above poisonous partisanship to promote the national interest, Gen. David Petraeus’s visit to Capitol Hill last week was instructive.

Hiatt adds:

Obama's escalation, when 73 percent of Americans want substantial numbers of troops brought home, would seem to open fertile ground to Republicans. But from their leaders on down, they haven't sought to plow there. In this instance at least, politics really has stopped at the water's edge.

For the Post, it seems, democracy is supposed to stop at the water's edge.

New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie is the object of intense devotion among some on the right (Glenn Beck in particular). No surprise, then, that he'd get a lot of attention for going to Washington and delivering a stern lecture about how to fix the deficit. And no surprise that he'd talk about Social Security. It has nothing to do with the deficit, but that's another matter.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was on hand to cheer on Christie's message (2/16/11). Christie pokes fun at his weight, which apparently makes his truth-telling even more appealing:

But his physique also works to his advantage by reinforcing Christie's appeal as something other than the blow-dried politician who says whatever the voters want to hear. Christie isn't pretty, and he tells ugly truths.

And what was this ugly truth? The need to cut Social Security benefits. As Milbank put it, Christie is brave enough to "to scold both parties in Washington for their failure to talk about what must be done to solve the debt crisis. " He writes:

Christie, however, is talking about it. "You're going to have to raise the retirement age for Social Security," he said. "Whoa-ho! I just said it, and I'm still standing here. I did not vaporize into the carpeting, and I said it."

Now for this to be any kind of truth--ugly or not--it has to be, well, true. As Matthew Yglesias pointed out:

Closing the projected actuarial gap in Social Security requires some combination of more immigration, higher taxes and lower benefits. Relative to higher taxes, lower benefits tend to be preferred by richer people. And of all the different ways to reduce benefits, raising the retirement age is the one that does the most to punish the poor and demands the least sacrifice from the rich.

Robert Reich, who was once a Social Security trustee, wrote a column laying out a much easier fix--raising the cap on income subject to the Social Security tax, which in 1983 was designed to hit 90 percent of income. It no longer does that, because rich people have gotten substantially richer. Reich writes:

If we want to go back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax would need to be raised to $180,000.

Presto. Social Security's long-term (beyond 26 years from now) problem would be solved.

So there's no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical response to the increasing concentration of income at the top is simply to raise the ceiling.

If Christie's "ugly truth" isn't true, why does Milbank think it is? It might be because he has a record of Social Security scaremongering, writing a column in 2007 warning that Social Security was going to be "insolvent" due to the retirement of the Baby Boomers.  His response to FAIR's criticism was that he was writing about the combined effects of Social Security and Medicare--which is problematic on an entirely different level.

Chris Christie wasn't speaking the truth. But he was sending the same kind of message that people like Milbank want to hear: that workers should get benefit cuts in order to preserve tax cuts for the wealthy. It's ugly, but it's not the truth.

It is bizarre to see Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly denying that pundits from her network compare people to Nazis--contrasting this reticence to Rep. Steve Cohen (D.-Tenn.), who said calling healthcare reform a "government takeover of healthcare" was "a big lie. Just like Goebbels."

In fact, such comparisons are common currency on Fox News and in much of right-wing media, as FAIR has documented (Action Alert, 1/16/04; FAIR Blog, 4/2/09,  8/9/09, 4/28/10; Extra!, 3/10). Fox's Glenn Beck, a leader in this trend, compared the auto bailout to "the early days of Adolf Hitler" (4/1/09), said that Barack Obama's plans to expand the programs like the Peace Corps were "what Hitler did with the SS"  (8/27/09) and, when Obama said he was looking for "empathy" in a Supreme Court nominee, claimed that Hitler's empathy "led to genocide everywhere" (5/26/09).

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (10/3/10), who wrote a surprisingly good book on Beck, did a count of how many times the Fox host had made various Nazi allusions:

In his first 18 months on Fox News, from early 2009 through the middle of this year, he and his guests invoked Hitler 147 times. Nazis, an additional 202 times. Fascism or fascists, 193 times. The Holocaust got 76 mentions, and Joseph Goebbels got 24.

Yep, the particular comparison that was so outrageous it merited in-depth examination on Fox News has been made on Fox's top-rated show at least two dozen times--along with hundreds of other Third Reich references.

For an added dose of hypocrisy: Bill O'Reilly (1/20/11) had right-wing talker Laura Ingraham on last night to weigh in on, among other things, the outrageous Nazi analogies coming from the left. Ingraham has a record of--you guessed it--playing the Nazi card while criticizing the Obama administration.

How does Fox get away with such shamelessness? It's hard to explain--if I'm not allowed to mention the Big Lie theory.

As Sam Husseini noted, one of the things we'll miss about print newspapers is ironic juxtaposition of stories. The front page of Yesterday's New York Times (1/20/11) provided a classic example: There was a story about Chinese President Hu Jintao visiting the White House, headlined (in the late print edition) "Obama Raises Human Rights, Pressing China." And right next to it was an article about how the Obama administration was acknowledging that Guantanamo would stay open indefinitely, with some prisoners to be held forever without trial, while others would be tried by military tribunal instead of a civilian court because they had been tortured while in custody. The story about Obama championing human rights didn't mention Obama institutionalizing human rights abuses, or vice versa.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (1/20/11) didn't see the irony; instead, he saw Obama and the White House press corps sharing one of their finest hours. Describing AP's Ben Feller asking Obama at a joint press conference "how the United States can be so allied with a country that is known for treating its people so poorly" and asked Hu to "justify China's record"--and Bloomberg's Hans Nichols repeating the question when it was ignored by Hu--Milbank wrote:

It was a good moment for the American press. Feller and Nichols put the Chinese leader on the spot in a way that Obama, constrained by protocol, could not have done. The White House press corps has at times been too gentle on Obama (recall the adulatory pre-Christmas news conference), but on Wednesday afternoon, Obama and the press corps were justifiably on the same side, displaying the rights of free people.

One of those rights is the right to be much more concerned about human rights abuses when they occur in countries other than your own. I suspect that Hu was less impressed with the press's demonstration of this freedom than Milbank was.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (12/19/10) derides WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for being "insufferable"--apparently because he emerged from prison talking about prison conditions. Milbank sarcastically noted, "As if nine days in an English jail fighting extradition to Sweden on sex charges made him a regular Nelson Mandela."

You can decide for yourself whether that's insufferable. (Assange said, "I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand, in conditions that are more difficult than those faced by me. Those people also need your attention and support." Milbank ended this quote after the word "confinement.")

But one thing is indisputable--Milbank's column is inaccurate.   Specifically when he writes: "Assange's indiscriminate dump of American government secrets over the last several months--with hardly a care for who might be hurt or what public good was served."

One more time: The release of the WikiLeaks cables has been extremely discriminate, actually. The documents are mostly released on schedule with various news outlets, with certain information redacted.

One of the more annoying corporate media storylines since the midterms dwells on whether or not Barack Obama will move to the "center" in order to have better luck in the 2012 elections. The conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton did this after terrible losses in the 1994 midterms, and his "triangulation" proved once and for all that successful Democrats move to the right.

There are several reasons this is nonsense--Clinton was more or less the original DLC "New Democrat," so he was consciously and conspicuously to the right of the party base all along. The press wanted to nudge him even further to the right. The idea that Obama should finally break with the left is equally nonsensical, since he's been happy to cross the base for two years.

It's telling that some of the strongest support for Obama's tax compromise has come from right-wing columnists and Guardians of the Political Center like David Broder. Broder's Post colleague Dana Milbank joined that crowd over the weekend, writing (12/12/10):

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of President Obama.

I'm not particularly proud of the tax-cut deal he and the Republicans negotiated. But I'm proud that he has finally stood firm against the likes of Peter DeFazio.

It's not the policy, then--it's the fact that Obama stood up to a "hard-core liberal." Apparently Obama has been letting such Democrats control his policy decisions so far, "to his peril over the past two years." This was what doomed the healthcare debate, according to Milbank--Obama let liberals waste time supporting the public option. Paul Krugman responds:

The debate over the public option wasn't what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican "moderates" weren't negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.

So look at how the Village constructs its mythology. The real story, of pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day.

That media mythology is deep. This weekend, NBC Meet the Press anchor David Gregory wondered:

You know, Harold, the question was, was this a Sister Souljah moment, to go back to the Clinton era, for President Obama, standing up to the base?

Clinton's "Sister Souljah moment" came before he was even president--a poor example of a chastened president moving to the "middle."  But that timeline is mostly forgotten--as are Clinton's other moves to the right, many of which came before the 1994 midterms.

Even stories that try to knock down the Clinton/Obama comparison-- like Peter Baker's Week in Review article in the New York Times (12/12/10)--wind up having to play along with the storyline. As Baker noted about Clinton's surprise appearance at a White House press conference:

Equally riveting and astonishing, Mr. Clinton's blast-from-the-past performance in the White House briefing room on Friday afternoon reinforced the impression of political déjà vu, the sense that once again a Democratic president humbled by midterm elections was pivoting to the center at the expense of his own supporters.

Baker goes on to explain why the comparison misses the mark, but it's telling that this history lesson is the exception in the media and not the rule. Apparently there is something irresistible about moving Democrats even further to the right.

Bill O'Reilly's recent "joke" about decapitating Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was only the latest example of a demented Fox News culture that permits on-air personalities to fantasize about assassination and other forms of violence against those deemed enemies of the station, its personalities or their worldview.

During the cable channel's 2008 election coverage, in what she later called an attempt at humor, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta linked Osama bin Laden to Barack Obama as people who both should be assassinated:

And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh Obama. Well, both, if we could.

A week before Trotta's "joke," Republican primary candidate Mike Huckabee was apologizing for his own Obama assassination quip. Addressing a gathering of the National Rifle Association, Huckabee joked that a loud thud heard backstage during his address was Barack Obama diving to the floor to avoid gun shots. Months later, Huckabee was given his own Fox News show.

With its biggest new star, Glenn Beck, Fox News hired a host well-known for on-air death fantasies--for instance, chattering about killing filmmaker Michael Moore with his bare hands and hoping out loud that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio) would burn to death. In a Fox News skit in September 2009, Beck portrayed himself poisoning Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It's a culture that apparently filters down to Fox News viewers and supporters. Over the years Fox Nation, the Fox News "owned and operated" fan website, has regularly featured comments expressing the desire to see Barack Obama's assassinated.

Yesterday  News Hounds (11/8/10) published a collection of such quotes, some of which can still be read at on the Fox site. Fox Nation purports to be self-policing, to depend on readers to report inappropriate and irresponsible remarks for removal. Apparently presidential assassination fantasies fall short of Fox Nation's standards for inappropriate or irresponsible commentary.

Recent examples of these assassination fantasies on Fox Nation include comments calling for President Obama to "get what Kennedy got," for the CIA to "take this pres down" and a warning to the president that the Koran "ain't thick enough to stop a .308 round."

There is some evidence that Fox's murder fantasy culture has already helped to spark violent action.  Reporting for Media Matters, journalist John Hamilton tells the story of Byron Williams, a Beck devotee who engaged in a shootout that injured two California Highway Patrol officers in July. After his apprehension, Williams told police he'd intended to travel Oakland California to kill people at the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.

In a jailhouse interview in which he described the right-wing media sources that informed his views, Williams returned again and again to Glenn Beck:

I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.

Among the things Beck did, according to Hamilton, was attack the Tides Foundation in 29 separate Fox News shows in the 18 months leading up to Williams' foiled mission to Oakland.

Moreover, as the ADL reports, Pittsburgh's Richard Poplawski was so inspired by Beck's anti-government conspiracy theories, he reposted to a neo-Nazi website tape of Beck suggesting the government was building concentration camps for dissidents--before he was arrested after a shootout with police that left three officers dead.

If this all wasn't so deadly serious it would be seriously funny, because O'Reilly has spent years accusing liberal and progressive websites of fomenting hate speech. O'Reilly's crusade largely targets the comment and open forum sections of such websites, highlighting comments that generally  pale in comparison to those broadcast on Fox and posted on Fox Nation. To add to the irony, when O'Reilly is called out for failing to make distinctions between the editorial content and comment sections of these websites, he argues that the groups are responsible for everything on their websites:

Open forum is bull.... You can regulate what’s on your website.

When it comes to hypocrisy and Fox News, you really can't make this stuff up.

The hostility behind O'Reilly's creepy Milbank beheading joke was on display when the host appeared to make a veiled threat toward Milbank's boss in an appearance on another Fox show. Apparently angered that Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt permitted Milbank to publish columns critical of Fox News, O'Reilly had Fox host Megyn Kelly put a picture of Hiatt up on the screen, and told her audience:

This is the editor, Milbank's editor, Fred Hiatt. And Fred won't do anything about Milbank lying in his column. I just want everybody in America to know what the Washington Post has come to. All right, you can take Fred's picture off. Fred, have a nice weekend, buddy.

(Later in the same appearance, O'Reilly suggested that the host join him in physically assaulting Milbank: "I think you and I should go and beat him up.")

O'Reilly's veiled threat toward Hiatt  recalls one made in a recent interview with an Australian paper by Fox boss Rupert Murdoch (Australian Financial Review, 11/5/10):

People love Fox News.... We said to the cable operators when we put the price up, we said, do you want a monument to yourself....  Cancel us, you might get your house burnt down.

Perhaps the fish does rot from the head.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs generated a huge controversy by slamming the "professional left" for being too critical of the Obama administration.  People who compare Obama to Bush "ought to be drug tested," according to Gibbs.  Responses to the Gibbs remarks can be found almost anywhere you look--Glenn Greenwald's post provides perhaps the most thorough reaction.

In the corporate media, moving to the right and bashing the Democratic base is constantly offered up as a smart move for Democratic politicians. So it was not a surprise when Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank offered a defense of Gibbs' comments (8/12/10):

Gibbs and his colleagues have reason to be frustrated by the constant carping from the professional and semi-pro left. The Gulf oil spill has been plugged, and three-quarters of the oil is gone. Combat in Iraq is ending in a matter of days. Healthcare reform has been enacted. The auto industry is recovering, the bank bailout funds have been repaid, and a depression was averted. Yet the president, instead of getting credit, has received the sort of criticism from his unruly base that the right never bestowed on George W. Bush.

That's a pretty unconvincing case. The fact that the oil spill "has been plugged" is irrelevant; progressives disagreed with Obama's pro-drilling stance, his choice of interior secretary, the administration's failure to address existing problems at the Minerals Management Service (which oversees offshore drilling) and the degree to which the White House seemed either disengaged on this issue or acting more on BP's behalf than the public's.

"Combat in Iraq is ending in a matter of days"? That would be a surprise. If Milbank means the U.S. troop withdrawal, then yes that is happening. That policy was a continuation of George W. Bush's drawdown plan. The massive troop increase in Afghanistan, meanwhile, was opposed by the left--and is unmentioned in the column.

On healthcare, the left's critique (familiar to everyone who followed the debate) was that the White House stripped out the most progressive aspects of the reform bill, such as the public option (never mind the failure to even raise single-payer as a serious option).

The fact that bailout funds "have been repaid" does not address the criticism that the subsequent Wall Street/financial sector reforms were weak, or that the bailout itself  was structured to benefit certain Wall Street giants (Goldman Sachs, for instance).

Averting a depression is, of course, a good thing; the criticism from the left is that the federal government hasn't done enough to combat unemployment, and that the economic stimulus was smaller than it needed to be (a decision launched in a futile attempt to attract GOP support).

Looking back to this post on the FAIR Blog, I was reminded that Milbank was defending the Obama White House against left-wing agitators back in December. His main point then was that Obama's escalation of the Afghan war "is above all a pragmatic, nonideological strategy." Opposing it, then, is crazy;  Obama supporters should instead "applaud this sort of thoughtful, methodical leadership." Milbank singled out Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington and Code Pink for not having the good sense to support a president who does something they fundamentally disagree with. It was a strange argument then, and it's a strange argument now. But it's not surprising that Beltway pundits would approve of Gibbs' base-bashing.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (3/18/10) returns from his excursion into mocking right-wingers to return to his natural role of ridiculing single-payer advocates. His target today is Rep. Dennis Kucinich.  You know what's funny about him? He's short! Or, in Milbank's words, he's a "little man," a "little guy," a "diminutive figure" and--because he announced his support for the healthcare bill on St. Patrick's Day--a "leprechaun."

Actually, Kucinich is the exact same height--5 foot 7--as John McCain, whom Milbank can somehow write about without any elf jokes.

Milbank also includes a sneering reference to how Kucinich "led the city into default" when he was mayor of Cleveland. Yes, that's true--he stopped the plan to privatize the city's power system, which caused some banks to play hardball with the city's credit. He didn't blink, Cleveland still has municipal power and it saved the city and its residents tens of millions of dollars. It's hard to find many people in Cleveland who think Kucinich did the wrong thing.

But also... he's short! Like a leprechaun!

What most struck me as most strange, though, about Milbank's column was this line:

Our Kenyan Hawaiian commander in chief evidently has the luck of the Irish.

First of all, it's weird to refer to a president's state of birth as though it were an ethnicity. Who would anyone describe Bill Clinton as an Anglo Arkansan?  Ronald Reagan as an Irish Illinoisan? It's as if, like Cokie Roberts, Milbank doesn't really consider Hawaii to be part of the United States.

Secondly, Obama is part Irish on his mother's side--he's got Kearneys and McCurrys in his family tree.  But Milbank was apparently too struck by the hilarity of being "Kenyan Hawaiian" to look that up.

Washington Post columnists Dana Milbank and David Broder are both committed guardians of the establishment center, but they don't always interpret their role in the same way.

Milbank led the cheers for White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as chief dragger to the right (FAIR Blog, 3/2/10), whereas Broder saw his blame-the-boss disloyalty as unseemly (3/4/10); on the other hand, it was Broder who thrilled recently to the "pitch-perfect populism" of Sarah Palin (2/11/10), while Milbank's column today (3/16/10) finds a similar spiel by Dick Armey to be as worthy of ridicule as, say, single-payer advocates (FAIR Blog, 6/12/09).

While Milbank's take-down of Armey's speech was amusing ("He asked if people 'agree with, with uh, with uh, help me out, uh, the great prime minister, English prime minister--Churchill'"), it was about as lo-cal as his more typical mockery of the left.  He quotes Armey's assertion:

Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow.

To which Milbank retorts: "Who knew they had socialists in 1607?" But Milbank doesn't recall that Jamestown was in actuality a for-profit enterprise--a project of the Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company. Perhaps that would have been too pointed a punchline for Milbank's ideological tastes.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has always been a controversial figure--famously profane and short-tempered, and politically speaking a center-right Clinton Democrat. As of late, though, there's been a strange effort--particularly in the Washington Post--to present Emanuel as the confidant whose political advice Barack Obama has too often ignored and who offers a clear path to political rehabilitation. This only makes sense in a Beltway media that views Obama as too far to the left, and in need of Emanuel's pragmatic centrism to pull him back to the middle.

This campaign was kicked off by a February 21 Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post, headlined "Why Obama Needs Rahm at the Top." Milbank wrote: "Obama's first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter." What advice would that be? Milbank says:

For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig's effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn't politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn't met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder's plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

As Matthew Yglesias has noted, the odd thing about this argument is the fact that Obama's foreign policies--whatever you might think of them--are generally more popular than Obama's domestic efforts. So why should we think that not taking Emanuel's advice on security issues is the cause of Obama's political woes?

Milbank also writes that Emanuel was against the public option in the healthcare bill, but Obama listened to "Capitol Hill liberals," with disastrous results. Again, the public option remains relatively popular with the public--despite consistent demonization from the right--so it's not clear why one would think Obama would have fared better without it.

Milbank noted that Emanuel "has set up his own small press operation and outreach function"--leading to some speculation that Emanuel is either directly or indirectly the originator of this if-only-he'd-listened-to-Rahm storyline (Huffington Post, 2/21/10).

And the story lives on in today's front-page Post article (3/2/10), "Hotheaded Emanuel May Be White House Voice of Reason." According to the piece, despite Emanuel's reputation for being loud and obnoxious, "a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: healthcare reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts."

Yes, that "narrative" is "emerging"--in the Washington Post. And it's being seconded by the likes of right-wing columnist Jonah Golberg. Debates are raging about who fed the story to Milbank, but that misses the real point: The press always counsel Democrats to move to the right.