WaPo Watch: Dana Milbank hits a trifecta of arrogance, stupidity, and cheese

The occasionally-good Wapo writer Dana Milbank cemented his legacy as a clueless hack today, with a predictable,  awful piece on the federal "debt."  The man somehow managed to stitch together his recent European vacation (wow, glad your job writing useless columns pays you enough for that Dana!), turmoil in the Middle East, the Ice Bucket Challenge, Justin Bieber, and the recent CBO report on debt/deficits.

This guy is clearly a modern day Shakespeare, with all the talent it takes to copy-and-paste tired talking points from any of the half-dozen Pete Peterson websites. If I had tried to submit something so blatantly plagiarized back in my high school days, I'm sure I would have gotten it back with lots of red ink and a 'D-', for lack of creativity and original thought.  The fact that this guy gets paid to be so lazy is an incredible insult to people who actually have to work for a living-- many of whom, tragically, will probably believe much of what he 'wrote' in todays ragsheet column.

If the column does have one redeeming quality is that it should make obvious the outsized influence that the Congressional Budget Bullshit Office has on policymakers in Washington. Despite CBO's appalling record at predicting.....well, anything, it is taken extremely seriously by most people here. CBO also has the added advantage of being perceived as 'nonpartisan', when it is really nothing of the sort. Since its very founding, it has been run by right wing neo-liberals, regardless of what party was in control of the Congress. Both parties are constantly competing to see how low they can bow down to this unelected and unaccountable institution, and in most cases getting a "favorable" score is the overriding imperative of legislative drafting. Case in point is the ACA, which instead of being written to clearly meet a public purpose, was written with all sorts of contortions and machinations to get a "deficit-neutral" score from the Budget Gods.

And of course, I don't mean to suggest that this sort of garbage out of the Washington Compost is anything new. Just that maybe Dana's next European vacation should be permanent. Take our journalists, please!