Dana Milbank is Finally Proud of the President -- for....?

[Hannah Bell]

Dana Milbank is really excited as he tells readers in the first sentence of his column:

"For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of President Obama."

Wow, and why is Mr. Milbank so excited? Has President Obama stood up to the Wall Street banks, the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies, or the oil industry? Well, not exactly, Milbank tells us that:

"I'm proud that he has finally stood firm against the likes of Peter DeFazio."

For those who don't know of him, Peter DeFazio is a 12 term Congressman from Oregon. He has never held a leadership position in the party and has not played an important role in designing any major piece of legislation. (In other words, he does not have much power.) He has also backed President Obama on all the key items in his legislative agenda.

But, Mr. DeFazio has criticized President Obama's tax deal with the Republicans. This got President Obama angry and he told DeFazio and his types to get lost. That passes for being tough at the Washington Post.

Milbank is also impressed that:

"That display was coupled with some hardball politics (Larry Summers's warning that rejecting the package would return the economy to recession)."

That's really cool. Larry Summers told the liberals that if this deal does not got through that the economy would go into a recession. How tough can you get?

Does Larry Summers have a model that shows the economy will fall back into recession without this deal? This certainly is not the forecast that the administration is using in its budget modeling.

This modeling projects 4.3 percent as the growth rate for 2011...

This means that when Larry Summers was playing hardball and telling Congressional Democrats that failure to the pass the compromise would lead to a recession he was saying something that is not true. Outside of polite Washington circles this is known as a "lie."..

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/dana-milbank-celebrates-misleading-obama-administration-statements-to-push-its-tax-deal

[gratuitous]

1. If Obama wants to pick a fight with DeFazio, that's his lookout

Nice to know that Milbank will be there to tend to Obama's wounds. Don't mess with Peter DeFazio.

[Supersedeas]

2. Milbank knows who our real enemies are and has a National Platform for announcing it