The difference between how Dana Milbank interpreted the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on greenhouse emissions and the way pretty much everyone else interpreted them is enough to give you whiplash. Maybe Dana’s right and Justice Kennedy is going to eviscerate the EPA, but the people who actually have experience watching the court thought Kennedy was siding with the EPA. They also didn’t think any likely ruling would have much impact either way.
I know who I trust to be correct about this, and it isn’t Mr. Milbank, who seemed to be guided by one question Justice Kennedy launched at the Solicitor General. That’s his style of analysis: look for the gotcha moment and present it as if it explains everything.
However he reads his tea leafs, Milbank would be best off crawling under one.
Milbank is all about the sports-narrative angle, and the idea of Obama competing in some kind of athletic contest, isn’t he? I mean he proposes as a big discovery that it’s an “inherent flaw” in Obama’s “strategy” that there are constitutional limits on executive power? (Wait till PBO finds out about that, huh?) He is literally unable to imagine that the president is trying to, like, accomplish stuff? His Kennedy reading isn’t to do with what Kennedy may or may not be thinking but what he, Milbank, can bring in to heighten our suspense as the horses turn some imaginary bend.
In so doing he reinforces the incomparably stupid Republican story about Obama’s monarchical tendencies, headline and all, and I bet his feelings would be hurt if you told him that’s what he was doing. In some ways these people are worse than conservatives, their bad faith is so extreme.
Still waiting for Milbank to find that elusive acorn. I’m really not in the mood to give him much more time. He is almost always the prototypical pundit buffoon.