Dana Milbank decided that he was the only person whose opinion counted eleven months ago when he deliberately reported Obama's Berlin speech out-of-context so he could label the then-candidate "presumptuous."

Between his booting from Countdown then and this now, Dana really ought to think about what being a journalist means to him.  Nico has been doing a yeoman's service to both Iran and the world with his blogging and deserves the credit.  Dana thinks he's a media personality.  "Personality" is a little strong word to use, though.

I'm so old I remember Bush press conferences. One in particular stood out - you know, the one where Bush assigned seats to the press corp & there was a designated order in which members of the press would get to ask their questions. It was great fun seeing the press treated like little children & nary a peep of protest out of them.

Dana is old school, he's not happy about these new web hotshots.

Obama is simply understanding how the tail (the blogs etc) are wagging the dog (old media) at this point.

I must say, although Milbank came off as an idiot, Nico didn't come off looking as good as he could have. Two observations:

1. Nico throwing his head back and laughing several times looked childish;
   
2. he never effectively rebutted the claim that the topic of the question was agreed ahead of time. Milbank made that ridiculous claim several times, but Nico let himself get sidetracked by bringing up blasts from the past against Milbank that viewers wouldn't know about.
   

Thus, although I totally side with Nico and against Milbank on this issue, Nico didn't do as good a job as he should have been able to.

This is much different from Bush planting a question because he had knowledge ahead of time.  Obama clearly did not and also was a hard hitting question.  This was placed on a tee unlike Milbank's swimsuit question.

The WaPo chicky really summarized it.

It's not fair!!

/Whine