Dana Milbank, who skewers politicians of all stripes in his “Washington Sketch” column during the week, will soon get the chance to be more prescriptive on the weekend.
Starting Sunday, Milbank will write a weekly column on the Washington Post’s op-ed page.
Milbank, reached by phone Wednesday, said that in his regular column—which runs three to four days during the week—he mostly writes on “what folks are doing wrong.”
The only person who is probably happy about this is Maureen Dowd, whose columns will seem less catty by comparison.
FUMU.
Bhall35
There really is no punishment for failure over there, is there?
asiangrrlMN
Goddamnit. I need to become part of the Village so I can pontificate endlessly as I do now but get fucking paid for it!
And, Cole, are you feeling any better?
And, of course, the obligatory, TUUUUNCH!
4tehlulz
Did he sleep with Sally Quinn to get the gig?
scav
Dana, watched any good mirrors lately?
John Cole
@asiangrrlMN: I am feeling much, much better. I feel like ten bucks!
Max
FUMU? I think I know the first word, what are the rest?
When did we become a world of acronyms? Why doesn’t anyone use complete sentences any longer? This is why today’s youth can’t even write a business letter.
Morning all!
cleek
@Max:
Fuck Up, Move Up
ie. The Peter Principle
Mr Furious
FUMU = Fuck Up, Move Up
asiangrrlMN
@Max: I had to look it up. Urban Dictionary helped me out. Fuck Up, Move Up.
@John Cole: Shit. If ten bucks is much much better, I hate to imagine what you felt like before. I am glad you’re better, though.
Max
@cleek: Thank you.
Mr Furious
Is my memory failing me, or was Milbank NOT a complete tool as recently as the first GWB term? Or am I confusing him with Dana Priest?
Zifnab
@Mr Furious: I think Dana Priest was the reporter that broke the CIA black sites and Walter Reed scandal stories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Priest#.22Black_sites.22
But yeah, I get them confused all the time too. Just think “Milbank” = “Milquetoast”.
General Winfield Stuck
Our media is a cesspool
and well stocked
with zombie sewer trout.
If you want me,
I’ll be in the salad bar
eating my brane
haiku of the damned
Mike Kay
You know why — he called Hillary Clinton a “bitch” and wapo hates the Clintons.
Thus, he was rewarded.
SGEW
Obligatory Milbank “Mouthpiece Theater” trenchant hilarity video here. “Washington Post – Inadvertentently revealing the dark heart of our industry, two minutes at a time.”
Zifnab
@cleek:
I always think this has something to do with the size of your pen is.
JenJen
Prepare for trenchant hilariousness!
Davis X. Machina
(Possibly apocryphal) NY tabloid headline during 1919 negotiation of Treaty of Versailles:
Wilson’s
Pen Is
Ready.
On the other hand, I saw the following with my own eyes on the Boston Globe‘s Sports page after the Bruins’ goalie was injured:
Bruins to play next six games with Peeters out.
dmsilev
Maybe he and Richard Cohen can do a “I think I’m funny, therefore I am funny” tag-team road show.
-dms
ellaesther
@Davis X. Machina: Ok, now I have to tell you this:
In Tel Aviv, there is an orthodox religious school called the Pines School for Girls — where “Pines” is a last name, pronounced (I shit you not) “pee-nus.”
Mike Kay
In which year will WaPo fold?
I’m picking 2018.
4jkb4ia
Now he has a bigger platform to annoy people. The WaPo’s columnist judgment remains exquisite.
(What I meant about Moses was that in some sense the ability to feel righteously angry made him qualified to be the leader, even if striking down every overseer in Egypt was not really the solution)
Mr Furious
@Zifnab: That’s probably what I was thinking of. Thanks.
GregB
Leave Dana Millwank alone!
-G
The Grand Panjandrum
Milbank is trying to be funny. The only thing missing from this video is his little buddy Chris.
Morgan
WaPo’s op-ed page does, indeed, suck big fat donkey balls, but I’m not sure I want the whole paper to fold because of it. It still manages to occasionally turn some pretty top notch investigative journalism (Barton Gellman’s series on Cheney comes immediately to mind) and I think on balance we’d be worse off without it around.
Stooleo
The same as my 401k..
Zifnab
@Morgan: The question is whether the good reporters would die with the bad editorialists. It’s not like the WaPo will take out the entire concept of print journalism in it’s fall.
Newspapers existed before WaPo. Newspapers will exist afterwards. We’re not contemplating the end of gravity.
And given that online mags like HuffPo and TPM have been on the rise, I have little worry that some good reporters will be absorbed into the blossoming New Media.
On the flip side, there’s no guarantee that the WaPo’s fall would kill Dana Milbank. He could just as easily pick up a spot on CNN or MSNBC or find a seat at the Politico.
GReynoldsCT00
OT: Blumenthal is running for Dodd’s seat — FINALLY a senator we can be proud of in CT
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@General Winfield Stuck:
Nice
Violet
@Zifnab:
That sounds like Tucker Carlson’s career. I’ll expect Milbank to show up on Dancing With The Stars in a few seasons.
DanF
Awesome. One more reason to skip the WaPo editorial page.
Maybe it’s just because I was young whipper-snapper, but I remember a time (in the increasingly distant past) when OpEds would actually challenge the reader with weird things like “ideas”.
BubbaDave
@GReynoldsCT00:
That’s right, because Dodd’s fine work on civil liberties, on FMLA, on health care reform– all of that should be set aside because he got the same deal from Countrywide as other high-income good-credit mortgage applicants.
WTF is wrong with Nutmeggers anyway? I expect this kind of high-quality stoopid from Alabama….
GReynoldsCT00
@BubbaDave:
I’m not commenting on Dodd’s performance. I am commenting on Blumenthal’s and in contrast to Lieberman especially. I am NOT stupid, thank you very much.
The Republic of Stupidity
It’s Pronounced “Fronkensteen“!
The Republic of Stupidity
Perhaps… we are all Alabamans now…
Ash Can
@Morgan: I agree. I hate to think of all the money being wasted on the big-name/empty-head gasbags on the op-ed pages that could be used instead to develop and expand actual news reporting and investigation, not just at the WaPo but at every paper.
Mike in NC
When I moved to the DC area in late 1989, I quickly realized there were only two choices of daily newspaper: the Washington Post and the Washington Times. The former styled itself as a peer of the New York Times, while the latter was patently batshit insane rightwing propaganda bankrolled by the Moonies. We liked to read the Post for years and I’m not quite sure when it’s steady decline began. Probably some time during the Clinton impeachment. The Post seemed mostly out to lunch while Cheney and Bush drove the country into a ravine, even as the winguts predictably denounced it as ‘Pravda on the Potomac’. Certainly in the last 4-5 years the Post has been drifting to the right, adding staffers from the Wall Street Journal, etc. To cut costs last year they did away with the Sunday Book World magazine, one of their best features. Even the online edition now sucks, and it goes way beyond the Op-Eds and pundits. We left DC two years ago and don’t miss it one bit.
thomas Levenson
If I’m a stockholder in Kaplan, I’m thinking that these folks have kind of missed what Sun Tzu (and many others) were trying to tell them. You reinforce success, dudes, not abject failure.
Sell low, avoid lower. (I know it’s not at its bottom, folks — but look at the chart over human rather than machine trading time scales).
(And of course, this is not actual financial advice. I know nothing. the comment above is worth exactly what you paid for it. Are we clear?)
Morgan
@Zifnab:
But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? There are – and will always be – plenty of outlets for the kind of bullshit Milibank peddles. He could surely find a place at one of those outlets, but I’m not sure he’s any worse than some of the people already there.
The difference is, while it does host asshats like Milibank, WaPo also funds those investigative efforts like Gellman’s that take a long time to produce and probably will never get the kind of buzz or Drudge-linkage that inflammatory, off-the-cuff gasbaggery does.
Big investigative pieces just aren’t as cost effective as what Milibank or Beck or Halperin or any of those guys turn out, and the big national papers (NYT, WaPo, LA Times, maybe a couple others?) seem to be the only ones currently willing and able to do them. When a place like TPM proves itself capable of turning out reporting on par with the Angler series maybe I’ll feel a little better about seeing WaPo go under, but not before.
burnspbesq
@Davis X. Machina:
I don’t know whether it still exists or not, but there used to be an online retailer called Pen Island. You can imagine what its URL looked like.
Brick Oven Bill
Beyond the Washington Post, and Balloon Juice, for more excellence in prose, consider the on-topic winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award-2009.
geg6
@Zifnab:
Probably not on MSNBC. There was a not too friendly falling out between lil’ Dana and MSNBC. But he’s perfect for CNN. Stupid, smug, and interested in nothing of any importance to policy.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/4/174920/2691/934/562486
Randy P
@Mike in NC:
Oh that’s easy. That would be when they dropped the Sunday Style Invitational. (Kidding. Sort of.)
I still think of the WaPo as my hometown paper even though that’s not where I grew up. I had a home subscription for 17 years in Montgomery County.
I might still be paying money to get it here in the Philly suburbs, but their out of town circulation department is incredibly screwed up. I was trying to buy it in stores when I first moved here in 2001, at least the Sunday edition. But nobody ever carried more than 3 or 4 copies, you never knew if it would arrive at all, or if it did whether it would have the magazine and inserts.
Then I tried mail subscription. They told me it would be up to 5 days late and was that OK with me. It would have been. However, the actual delay varied from 3 weeks to never. You could have driven it up here by bicycle in those 3 weeks.
The Style Invitational was only one thing, but it was one of the last attractions for me in a paper that had steadily been losing things I looked forward to. Humor columns by Dave Barry and Tony Kornheiser, op-eds by Ellen Goodman. I suppose Molly Ivins dying was not their fault. Comics I wanted to read. Etc. Once I realized I was paying a lot of money to get a paper I no longer was much interested in, a month late if at all, it was easy to make the break permanently.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Dana Priest is one of the few good ones at the Post. She covers national security issues, not political wankery the way Millbank does.
There really is no justice in this world. And the Post wonders why they’ll never see a dime of money from me?
Sentient Puddle
@cleek:
Actually, to nitpick, the Peter Principle is where someone moves up through the ranks of positions where you’re competent at until they get stuck in the lowest level position where they’re incompetent.
That’s not exactly what’s at work here. What’s happening in journalism is basically the inverse. Incompetent journalists moving up through the ranks to roles where they’re even more incompetent, and if by some fluke they turn out to be competent, they get fired.
Zandar
@Sentient Puddle:
Shitty journos get Krauthammered. Good, responsible journos get Froomkined.
Kryptik
The WaPo news side of things isn’t getting much better. For every Dana Priest you have, you have 2 Shalaigh Murrays
danimal
The courtiers of the Beltway need to be included when we break out the rusty pitchforks.
ThresherK
@BubbaDave:
BubbaDave,
I’m a lifelong Nutmegger (and your handle suggests you aren’t), and I’m with you 1000%.
All one needs to know is the opener Chris Dodd got from the AP in today’s Hartford Courant: “his political stock has been falling since an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2008”.
Okay…Joe Lieberman finishes in 5th place in New Hampshire in 2004, adds the famous soundbite “three way tie for third place”, and plummets. His punishment? Apparently, being fawned over by every TV political talker in existence as often as he wishes, without fear of being challenged or fact checked to his face.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to rehab John Ensign’s image. The buzz is that Cokehead thinks he looks Presidential!
Arguingwithsignposts - ipod touchs
Fred hiatt is just doing this to piss offthe bj front pagers after dough carpetbombed their chat yesterday.
fraught
Dana Priest=good.
Dana Millbank=bad.
That’s why we all have to have good xian gender specific names like Maureen and John.
eemom
@Mike in NC:
“We left DC two years ago and don’t miss it one bit.”
Do ya hafta rub it in? Some of us are still stuck here and unable to shake their morbid addiction to the thing landing in the driveway every morning.
Milbank epitomizes what I find most disgusting about all the emmessemm bobblebots (and yes, MoDo is another fine example): the ability to exhibit their “wit” on issues that are of life-or-death importance to a lot of people, from the perspective of a smug, safe spectator who is going to be just fucking fine no matter what happens.
SiubhanDuinne
@Zifnab:
I have a vague memory that Dana Milbank used to be a pretty frequent guest on “Countdown” but then all of a suddent, he wasn’t any more (nor, I think, anywhere to be seen on MSNBC) — and I further seem to recall that Keith really took him down for something or other that he (DM) said or did or didn’t do, or something. But as you can tell, I have completely forgotten the circumstances. Does anybody remember what that was all about?
/the rapidly-aging SiubhanDuinne
SiubhanDuinne
@geg6:
Well, I know someone who would be well-served by reading ALL the comments before posting her own. Please ignore mine to Zifnab above; geg6 provided exactly what I was wondering about.
SiubhanDuinne
@ellaesther:
As a Respighi fan, I can’t wait to listen to “The Pee-nus of Rome.”
Sentient Puddle
@SiubhanDuinne: Your recollection is correct. I had to look up exactly what that spat was about though. Per Wikipedia:
Sounds a little petty to me, but given how Milbank turned out, still the right call.
Mr Furious
@Sentient Puddle: Olbermann not wanting his show to be used as a bullshit platform? Doesn’t sound petty to me.
geg6
@Sentient Puddle:
Actually, I remember it well and I have the diary KO posted on GOS when it happened linked in my comment #43 above.
It wasn’t just that he called Obama presumptuous. It was that he basically lied about what Obama had said by leaving out the most pertinent part of the quotation. And then Milbank refused to correct or clarify the matter.
KO and MSNBC did the right thing in this case.
Mr Furious
@BubbaDave: I agree as well.
Dodd isn’t pure—none of ’em are—but he was a pretty good Senator for a pretty long time. I’ve lost touch with the details of politics in CT since I left for college a long-ass time ago, but Dodd, to me, gave CT plenty of reasons to be proud.
As for his downfall, as I said, I don’t follow CT too closely, but I had assumed another, much heavier shoe had dropped to kill him as a viable politician, especially for a 5-term incumbent.
If it’s just that horseshit Countrywide scandal, that’s a shame, because far worse senators have survived far worse scandals.
Sentient Puddle
@Mr Furious and @geg6: It struck me as a little petty because of the scope of what Milbank did. Misquoting Obama to make him out as presumptuous is silly and deserving of ridicule, but it also doesn’t strike me as a big deal. Not something that Keith needed to make such a big kiss-off over like he did.
On the other hand, if this were over, say, the Nico Pitney feud, then I wouldn’t have second-guessed Keith, so your mileage may vary on this one. But I don’t think that particular instance was worth it.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@eemom:
Well thank goodness we don’t have any of that disease in this neighborhood. Heaven forbid.
Now, Sadly, No! on the other hand… My god, those people have no shame, no shame at all, I tell you!
eemom
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
not sure what this snark is about. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a smug, safe spectator. I’m a working mom in a family where a job loss would be catastrophic.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@eemom:
It wasn’t directed at you in particular. I’m not a “safe spectator” either, for that matter. It just struck me that the commentary in this place can be more than a little bit snarky even when talking about matters of grave import, so using this particular blog to criticize folks in the MSM for not taking serious matters seriously, was, well, kinda funny.
But only a serious way, mind you. Ahem.
eemom
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
regular folks can be snarky about serious shit on blogs. Gallows humor and all.
Millionaire emmessemm assholes whose words reach large audiences, but for whom personally it’s all just a game, not so much.
jmo.
BubbaDave
@GReynoldsCT00:
Is that what you meant by FINALLY? ‘Cause from where I sit you’ve had a Senator to be proud of since 1980. (And as a resident of Texas, I know about Senators to be ashamed of.)
I’ll make you a deal– you don’t talk stupid and I won’t call your talk stupid.
oh really
I guess Fred didn’t think the opinion pages were as bad as they could possibly be. This is certainly a shortcut on the way to that end.