Another rat deserts the sinking ship

Funniest quote I've seen today, courtesy of Dana Milbank:

While Rove testified, three women dressed as condoms, and a fourth with a stocking over her head, distributed "Karl Rove Brand" prophylactics in front of the courthouse. The nine demonstrators, coordinated by the antiwar group Code Pink, chanted "Some things should never leak! Fire Karl Rove!" The hot-pink condoms, with a smiling photo of Rove on the wrapper and the same "Some Things Should Never Leak" message, promised to be effective against pregnancy, AIDS and STDs. "Any of the condoms want to say something to the microphones?" one of the camera operators asked. But the latex-clad demonstrators had nothing to add. The president's chief political strategist was no more forthcoming, at least in public.

Now if memory serves, wasn't Milbank the author of the "it's old news" comment after the release of the Downing Street Minutes? The answer can be found in this interesting article:

Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank (6/8/05), who referred to progressive activists trying to bring media attention to the memo as “wing nuts,” wrote that Bush being asked a question about the memo “ended a slightly strange episode in the American media in which the potentially explosive report out of London had become a seldom acknowledged elephant in the room.” Milbank offered a variety of explanations for that odd phenomenon: In part, the memo never gained traction here because, unlike in Britain, it wasn’t election season, and the war is not as unpopular here. In part, it’s also because the notion that Bush was intent on military action in Iraq had been widely reported here before, in accounts from Paul O’Neill and Bob Woodward, among others. The memo was also more newsworthy across the Atlantic because it reinforced the notion there that Blair has been acting as Bush’s “poodle.” This catalog of rationalizations deserves some scrutiny. Milbank had reported the same day (6/8/05) that his paper’s latest poll showed that only 41 percent of Americans approved of the Iraq war—leading one to wonder when exactly the war would cross the threshold and become unpopular enough to report on honestly. Milbank’s second defense—that the memo isn’t news because similar stories had been “widely reported”—would seem to contradict his third explanation, that the memo was news in the U.K. because it confirmed existing suspicions.

Looks like Milbank's jumping ship to me.