There was a brief period of time, probably in 2004, when I thought Dana Milbank was doing a decent job of showing a sane level of skepticism about the Bush administration’s pronouncements and behavior. He wasn’t striking for his wit or his moral outrage. He just stood out as someone who was occasionally willing to call bullshit in a town where that seemed never to happen. His schtick appeared to be irreverence of a kind slightly more substantive than that provided by Lady Dowd. But something changed. If I had to guess, what changed is that Milbank started getting invites to be on the cable news. And that made him somebody. He joined the Big Boys like Howard Fineman and Ron Brownstein. His opinion was supposed to move the national discourse. He became a connoisseur of the cocktail frankfurter. And then…he began to suck.
He lost his outsiderish up-and-coming edge. His condescension stopped reaching up and started hammering down. Instead of telling us that our betters are full of crap, he told us that his lessers were unworthy. And, at some point he reached a stage of inness where he felt comfortable enough to wallow in his sense of accomplishment and to develop a sense of entitlement. He worked hard to get where he is and, dammit, who is some blogger from the Huffington Post to get an invitation to ask the president a question?
That blogger is Nico Pitney who has been covering the Iranian elections with indefatigable energy. Milbank’s sense of vanity was on full display today when he appeared on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources with Nico, and whined about a mere aggregator of news getting called on in a presidential press conference. When the segment was over, Milbank turned to Pitney and told him, “You are such a dick.”
It’s hard to say exactly why Milbank decided to insult Pitney to his face, but it’s a good bet that his feelings were hurt when Nico pointed out that Milbank once asked candidate Obama numerous questions about how he looked in a swimsuit. I think it should go without saying that a journalist’s opportunities to ask a presidential contender questions are limited, and Milbank blew one of the few chances he will ever get. The truth is, only someone whose bowels are bloated with cocktail weenies would ever waste such a golden chance to probe the mind of a presidential candidate by asking about his pectoral muscles.
