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.

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.

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.

BUT.... don't think for a second that Milbank's going to let "greens" off the hook that easy. No way. As he put it on Sunday (2/14/10): "There's some rough justice in the conservatives' cheap shots. In Washington's blizzards, the greens were hoist by their own petard."

How so?  Climate activists "have argued by anecdote to make their case," especially Al Gore, who has warned of  a whole menu of negative consequences from climate change. Milbank writes: "It's not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heatwave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle."

Milbank has more:

Scientific arguments, too, are problematic. In a conference call arranged Thursday by the liberal Center for American Progress to refute the snow antics of Inhofe et al., the center's Joe Romm made the well-worn statements that "the overwhelming weight of the scientific literature" points to human-caused warming and that doubters "don't understand the science."

The science is overwhelming--but not definitive. Romm's claim was inadvertently shot down by his partner on the call, the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, who confessed that "there's a huge amount of natural variability in the climate system" and not enough years of measurements to know exactly what's going on. "Unfortunately we don't have that data so we are forced to make decisions based on inadequate data."

Aside from lamenting Romm's comments for being so "well-worn," did Jeff Masters really "shoot down" climate analyst Romm? That's not what Masters says happened; he has a response on his site, where he writes, "I agree with Dr. Romm's statement." Milbank's storyline--both sides are exaggerating--is a familiar one, but it's also entirely misleading. As is his drive-by summary of the whole "Climategate" scandal:

The scientific case has been further undermined by high-profile screw-ups. First there were the hacked e-mails of a British research center that suggested the scientists were stacking the deck to overstate the threat. Now comes word of numerous errors in a 2007 report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including the bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear in 25 years.

There is no credible evidence that climate scientists were "stacking the deck." It is hard to figure out what he means by "numerous" errors in the 2007 report; there are two prominent allegations, including the aforementioned glaciers error. The New York Times determined that the complaints have amounted to "half-truths." Milbank's assertion, then, that the "scientific case has been further undermined" is specious. But the point of climate change denial is to manufacture a political scandal--which is what journalism like this does well.