Milbank: Dick Cheney Leading a 'Firing Squad' on the Press

Someone at the Washington Post must be leaning their head out of an office door, shouting "We need more Milbank!" Sort of like the old "Saturday Night Live" skit about Blue Oyster Cult needing "more cowbell." So the Post's Sunday "Outlook" section had a new feature called the "Zeitgeist Checklist," which is pretty much a complete ripoff of Jon Alter's dopey "Conventional Wisdom Watch" feature in Newsweek. Most noticeable was the usual drama-queen readings about press criticism:

Homeland Security: It's open season (again) on the press, with Dick Cheney leading the firing squad and Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.)accusing the New York Times of treason for publishing information about how the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication(SWIFT) is helping to track terrorist finances. Never mind that much of the information had already been public; it's good politics to blame the media.

All this talk about Cheney leading the "firing squad" is perhaps typical for Milbank, who perhaps wore his traditional hunting-orange as he typed these snarky items up.

Speaking of the "CW," we just had to giggle at Alter fluffing up Dan Rather with praise in the last edition: "Unlike his network, onetime anchor king is class act. CW can't wait for Gunga Dan in high def."

The funniest part of that is the ludicrous verbiage underneath on the web version: The CW is not NEWSWEEK's opinion, but an informal distillation of the ever-changing thinking of Beltway pundits and the chattering classes.