As long as Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell is taking a look at Dana Milbank’s antics on MSNBC, she should turn a critical eye toward his columns as well. Take this one:

President Bush in 2000 ushered in the Era of Personal Responsibility. Yesterday ushered in the Era of Qualified Personal Responsibility.
In hours-long testimony before a Senate committee, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he took the blame for the department’s failures responding to Hurricane Katrina. “I am responsible for the Department of Homeland Security,” came the inevitable claim. “I’m accountable and accept responsibility for the performance of the entire department.”
At the same time, Vice President Cheney, breaking four days of silence since accidentally shooting a man on Saturday, was scheduling a confessional on Fox News. “You can’t blame anybody else,” Cheney told Brit Hume. “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend.”
But, try though they might, neither Chertoff nor Cheney could come up with much in the way of what he had done wrong.
“I have to say that the idea that this department and this administration and the president were somehow detached from Katrina is simply not correct,” Chertoff testified, contradicting a House committee report released yesterday that found the secretary exercised his responsibilities “late, ineffectively, or not at all.”
Cheney, similarly, said the way he handled disclosure of the shooting — leaving a private citizen to announce it to a local newspaper the next day — was spot-on. “I thought that was the right call,” he said. “I still do.”

In other words, while Cheney did take responsibility for shooting his friend, he did not apologize for not letting Milbank, David Gregory and Helen Thomas be the first to know. Milbank calls this “Qualified Personal Responsibility.” I call it being able to separate the shooting accident from its public-relations aftermath, accepting the blame for the former, and standing your ground on the latter. I also call it, “knowing you’re damned either way.”

Milbank is not so stupid that he actually thinks Cheney has contradicted himself. So why is he trying to convince readers that Cheney did? I have a theory.

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