Dana Milbank: My dog wrote my homework

Trust him, he's just like a virgin on this
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Caught red-handed breaking his own moratorium and then being ridiculed for it, now Dana Milbank is claiming that he is not the author of the Post Partisan item about Sarah Palin which appeared under his byline February 1 in the Washington Post. According to Politico's Andy Barr:

Dana Milbank just shot over an e-mail letting us know it wasn’t him who posted – under his name – an item on the Post Partisan blog pointing out that he had "survived" the first day of his month-long Palin "moratorium."

[...]

We asked Milbank for comment, and he wrote back: "Say it ain't so, Joe! I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. I didn’t know about the text on the Post-Partisan item with the ABC video, and I had our website fix that. So as far as the moratorium goes, fear not: I am still a virgin."

The old text has been crossed out on the site, and under the video is an update that reads: "The sentence as written above was posted by an editor, not Dana. So Dana's moratorium remains intact."

Now wait a minute. Dana Milbank, from the same Journolist community which claims that Sarah Palin doesn't write her own op-eds, now expects us to believe that he doesn't write all of his own material published by the Washington Post?

Our first inclination is to wonder just how sweet a writer's job can be when the writer doesn't even have to write his own stuff? Nice to know that the editors will write copy for their contributor and publish it under the writer's byline. Wish we could find editors like that to work for.

Our second thought is that this is a creative new twist on the old "My dog ate my homework" excuse. Except in this case, it's "My dog did my homework for me." That's an even more imaginative excuse than Rachel Maddow blaming Glenn Beck for her "lust" to push bad Palin news, even if it isn't really about Palin and it isn't really news. Dana, if you can sell this one, you're in the wrong business. That's the kind of salesmanship that could lift the housing market right out of the tank.

- JP