BooMan on Milbank:

There was a brief period of time, probably in 2004, when I thought Dana Milbank was doing a decent job of showing a sane level of skepticism about the Bush administration's pronouncements and behavior. He wasn't striking for his wit or his moral outrage. He just stood out as someone who was occasionally willing to call bullshit in a town where that seemed never to happen. His schtick appeared to be irreverence of a kind slightly more substantive than that provided by Lady Dowd. But something changed. If I had to guess, what changed is that Milbank started getting invites to be on the cable news. And that made him somebody. He joined the Big Boys like Howard Fineman and Ron Brownstein. His opinion was supposed to move the national discourse. ...

He lost his outsiderish up-and-coming edge. His condescension stopped reaching up and started hammering down. Instead of telling us that our betters are full of crap, he told us that his lessers were unworthy. And, at some point he reached a stage of inness where he felt comfortable enough to wallow in his sense of accomplishment and to develop a sense of entitlement.

I have long thought that the worst thing that can happen to a journalist (from a quality-of-journalism standpoint, not from a paycheck standpoint) is becoming a regular guest on cable news. The way to get on, say, Hardball, is for Chris Matthews to think you have smart things to say. The way to get Chris Matthews to think you have smart things to say is to say things Chris Matthews agrees with. This has obvious flaws. It also, I think, contributes to a homogenization of viewpoints available in the media.

Theories about television aside, BooMan's contention that Milbank seems to have shifted from afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted to the opposite seems right. Milbank's defenders often point out, as Howard Kurtz did today, that he was critical of the Bush administration. True -- though the Bush administration made it pretty hard not to do so. But those defenders never seem to remember Milbank's mockery of people who were trying to hold the Bush administration accountable, which drew rare criticism from the Washington Post's assistant managing editor and ombudsman.