If today's Dana Milbank column mocking “jock in chief” Barack Obama's fondness for sports sounds familiar, it's probably because he wrote almost exactly the same column almost exactly a year ago.

Both columns obsessively detail Obama's events with various championship sports teams (a routine part of every presidency.) Both highlight Obama joking with non-Chicago teams about his preference for Chicago teams. Both dwell on Obama's own fondness for playing sports. Both even include the same ridiculous comparison to George W. Bush. Here's Milbank today:

Obama's foes have mocked him for playing golf more often than his sports-mad predecessor, who played only 24 rounds during his entire eight-year presidency. “Obama skips Polish funeral, heads to golf course,” was one Washington Times headline. Liberals who once mocked George W. Bush's “watch this drive” moment on the golf course now speak of the need for Obama to clear his head.

And here's Milbank on July 28, 2009:

To observers of the presidency, the sports imagery may look familiar. Former president George W. “Watch This Drive” Bush was often ridiculed for playing the role of athletic supporter in chief. But Obama, while switching the focus from Texas to Chicago, has been no less fanatical. CBS News's Mark Knoller, the unofficial statistician of the White House press corps, counts 18 sports-related events for Obama in the first six months of his presidency -- not to mention a dozen golf outings and a few off-campus basketball games.

The invocation of Bush's “Watch This Drive” moment is, as I explained a year ago, completely absurd. People didn't criticize Bush's “watch this drive” comment because he was playing golf. They criticized it because he made a statement about terrorism to the assembled media, which he concluded by saying “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive,” turned, and hit a golf ball. It wasn't that he was playing golf; it was the apparent flippancy with which he intermingled his comments about terrorism and golf.

And Dana Milbank knows that. Here's how Milbank described the incident on August 29, 2004:

In his first three years in office, Bush played golf 16 times. But, according to the White House's unofficial statistician, CBS News's Mark Knoller, Bush has not teed off since Oct. 13, 2003. Some muse that Bush was cowed by filmmaker Michael Moore's mocking of Bush's golf habit in “Fahrenheit 9/11” which featured footage of Bush mixing remarks on Middle East violence with a command to “watch this drive.”

But now Milbank pretends the “Watch this drive” criticism was simply about Bush playing golf, in order to equate Obama and Bush. Twice.