Scrupulous readers of this blog, if such exist, may have come to the conclusion that I enjoy using Dana Milbank as a punching bag almost as much as I enjoy doing the same with Ross Douthat, but that isn’t true. Most of the time, Dana tells you what he thinks, which is, basically, “Washington vanilla,” a judicious, homogenized blend of whatever it was that everyone said at the last cocktail party Dana went to. If it’s unoriginality you want, Dana’s your boy, which is why he’s rarely worth writing about. Compared to Ross’s patented pose of pious hypocrisy, the fraudulent even-handedness that sets up the stab in the back, Dana scarcely even presents a target.
But, clearly, there’s a line that you can’t cross with Dana, and Ross crossed it, after the publication of the Planned Parenthood videos that did not show Planned Parenthood staff offering to sell embryonic organs. When Dana, and others, continued to defend Planned Parenthood, Ross exploded in a foam-flecked, blood-soaked 1,973-word primal screed, blasting liberals who dared to suggest that Planned Parenthood’s activities help reduce the number of abortions. But, sometimes, explosions beget explosions, and Dana returned fire, refusing to back down from his assertion that there are “hopeful signs that the use of long-acting, reversible contraceptives such as new-generation IUDs can reduce abortions,” responding to Ross’s banshee howls of “Blood! Blood! Murder! Murder!” with reasoned argument and even, you know, data. Anyone reading both columns might come to the conclusion that Dana genuinely wants to reduce the number of abortions, while Ross genuinely wants to scream his fucking head off.1 Sometimes the middle of the road is a nice place to be.
- If you don’t make it through Ross’s piece, I don’t fucking blame you. ↩︎
