Dana Milbank does it again; guffaws at Democrats' 'food fight'

[quaoar]

What an ass.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/30/AR2006013001319_pf.html

Tasting Victory, Liberals Instead Have a Food Fight

By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, January 31, 2006; A02

< snip >

Elected Democrats and their liberal base are in one of their periodic splits between pragmatism and symbolism. Under pressure from blogs and liberal groups, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) yesterday attempted an obviously doomed filibuster against the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito -- and Kerry got only 25 votes.

Likewise, the chance of a Republican Congress moving to impeach Bush is close to zero. When one of the impeachment forum's sponsors posted an item on its Web site about news coverage of the event, a reader responded that, without conservative support, "this becomes a cartoon image of the old pinko commie left, and fair game for the wingnuts at Fox."

The lineup of speakers indeed could have been a Bill O'Reilly fantasy: Saddam Hussein's lawyer (Clark), Hugo Chavez's friend (Sheehan) and the man who denied Al Gore the presidency in Florida in 2000 (Ralph Nader).

Nader, as it happens, couldn't make it because of a death in the family. But Fox News was there -- and the other speakers did not disappoint.

[Demit]

1. Ha, you didn't even see the boner he made in that piece before he

corrected it. He made a government 101 factual mistake--the sentence that ends with "Kerry got only 25 votes" originally said "Kerry got only 25 votes out of 60."

This from a Yale graduate and longtime political journalist employed at what is supposedly a premier newspaper. That's okay by him, of course. His main purpose in the column was to disparage Democrats, and he was very careful to accomplish that.

[blm]

5. He's been attacking Democrats for years - it's apparently his only job.

Spin for the corporate masters and the paychecks, Dana - you fascist enabler.

[gratuitous]

2. Only 25 votes, Dana?

That's 16 short of the number needed to sustain the filibuster. And do you know how many votes were cast in favor of filibustering
Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia? No fair peeking, but the number was . . . zero, Dana. That's right; zero. And the Democrats were in control of the Senate for those two egregious appointments. Why don't you talk about the horrible records of those two men? Or isn't that an acceptable topic of conversation at the parties for the swells?

Yet, in a stony minority, with a popular war-time president striding the globe like a colossus (at least that's how he's portrayed in the pages of your newspaper), the Democrats brought 25 votes to bear in favor of the filibuster, and Mr. Alito was confirmed by the smallest margin since . . . the aforementioned Uncle Thomas.

Yet in your world, preoccupied with the appearance of power and influence, you have nothing else to report on except anonymous reader comments that coincide with your own estimation of what just happened.

Your toadying will save neither your soul nor you, Dana.

[iconoclastNYC]

3. We must get people to turn off the Traditional Media

Until the left gets as serious about battling the media as the right wing has been for the past 30 years we won't get anywhere. Most democrat non-activists I know hate their party because they believe all the shit they read about it in the MSM.

[magellan]

4. Millbank's no journalist

He's just another professional blowhard who has helped murder democracy by floating opinion as fact.

[grasswire]

6. Skull & Bones uber alles

Milbank obviously takes his oath to S&B more seriously than his journalistic "ethics"