Dana Milbank’s Very Thin Folder

It was a very thin folder Dana Milbank held in his hand–his shield against the DFH blogger who got to ask a question. "A full list of documentation of me holding the Bush White House to account," he explained it as, in addition to a copy of an email Nico Pitney wrote the night before Obama asked him a question at a press conference.

Milbank’s folder might be so thin because he apparently finds his three to four, 750 to 800 word columns a week a taxing burden. Funny … that sounds like Monday lunchtime to me.

But forget, for a moment, the embarrassing thinness of Milbank’s folder–the columns where, he says, he held Bush accountable. I’m more curious why he brought his thin folder to confront Nico Pitney, whose sin (after all) is that he got to ask the President a question on behalf of Iranians. Nico wasn’t the one criticizing Milbank for not holding Bush accountable (though he did remind viewers that Milbank was rather interested in how Obama looked in a swimsuit).

Dan Froomkin was.

Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long.

(To be fair, Milbank explained his thin folder as a response to others at HuffPo–not Nico–who had accused Milbank of not holding Bush accountable.)

Now, Froomkin did not name Milbank personally. But I can’t help but observe that a very testy Milbank whipped out his thin folder this week–the week when Dan Froomkin was fired because he refused to stop criticizing the crappy coverage of both Bush and Obama. I can’t help but notice that Milbank came prepared to defend himself aganist precisely the charges that Froomkin has leveled–that those covering Bush on a day to day basis "missed the real Bush story for way too long."

This entire exchange, it seems to me, has more to do with the WaPo’s thin skin about Froomkin’s charges than it has to do with Nico’s question.

Which sort of makes you wonder whether Milbank didn’t "collude" with fellow WaPo columnist Howie Kurtz, who apparently had no thin folder of his own even to show.