I dunno, maybe it was the orange hunting vest. Or his comparison of the ex-parrot and the ex-candidate.
But I think Dana Milbank, particularly in his columns for Washington Sketch, is the funniest, most insightful chronicler of the tribes of the Potomac. I don’t think Washington has had a columnist like Milbank since Frank Carpenter left the Cleveland Leader in 1888, save perhaps for Dr. Thompson’s brilliant but unsustainable run in ’72.
Anyway, I was wondering what to write about Steve Hadley’s speech on weapons o’ mass destruction and the Proliferation Security Initiative. But Milbank did a much better job than I can, particularly his summary of the prose:
But Hadley parried this reality with his characteristically deft blend of the bland. He treated the diplomats to platitudes (“during the Cold War, nuclear weapons dominated our national security perspective”). He entertained them with jargon (“non-state actors are active on both ends of the supply chain”). And he numbed them with his desiccated prose. He began by listing six nonproliferation priorities, then begged the audience’s indulgence to “let me go through these one at a time.” But after plodding through these (“second, dismantle the facilitation networks”), he arrived at point No. 6 only to reveal that this point had a three-point subset. He then moved on to a four-point summary of actions to be taken.
The whole thing is worth a read.