Dana Millbank on MSNBC spinning the same old tale -

[dogtag]

Republicans just looooooove Shrub and treat him like a rock star.

We Dems are lukewarm about Kerry. We can barely stand him and just want to beat Bush. Since we can't get behind the "man of the people" it must mean that we just aren't 'people' at all, just some robo folks out gunning for the rock star.

[highplainsdem]

1. Some background on Milbank, for those who don't remember

the article he wrote in October 2002, and the WH reaction. This is from a Ken Auletta article for the New Yorker early this year ("Fortress Bush: How the White House keeps the press under control" - http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040119fa_fact2 ):

---------

After September 11th, the briefings became less contentious, the press coverage of Bush and his leadership more adulatory. Another phase began around the fall of 2002, and was marked by somewhat more aggressive coverage of the Administration’s march to war with Iraq. The White House was enraged by an article by Dana Milbank, which appeared on October 22, 2002, under the headline “FOR BUSH, FACTS ARE MALLEABLE.” It began:

President Bush, speaking to the nation this month about the need to challenge Saddam Hussein, warned that Iraq has a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.”
Last month, asked if there were new and conclusive evidence of Hussein’s nuclear weapons capabilities, Bush cited a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency saying the Iraqis were “six months away from developing a weapon.” And last week, the president said objections by a labor union to having customs officials wear radiation detectors has the potential to delay the policy “for a long period of time.”
All three assertions were powerful arguments for the actions Bush sought. And all three statements were dubious, if not wrong.

Milbank, who is thirty-five and short, balding, and low-key, is not popular at the Bush White House. According to Maralee Schwartz, the Post’s national political editor, Fleischer, Hughes, and Rove each complained to her about him, and suggested that he might be the wrong person for the job. The White House now says that it does not “believe that anybody has ever asked for his removal.”

The White House, Milbank says, tried to freeze him out, and for a time stopped returning his calls. Some of Milbank’s colleagues thought he was “too snarky,” and Schwartz concedes that when he started on the White House beat “there was a lot of attitude in his copy” but that this “got detoxed in the editing process and Dana has come to understand his role better.” Even those White House reporters who sometimes think him snarky admire his independence. And Leonard Downie, the Post’s executive editor, says, “I think very highly of Dana’s coverage. He breaks news; he explains to readers how and why Bush and the White House do things the way they do; he provides the political context for policy decisions and actions.”

------------

I winced when I read about the Post's national political editor saying "Dana has come to understand his role better."