Digby, Dana, and Rick, my favorite columnists

My two favorite columnists are Dana Milbank and Heather "Digby" Parton, and runner up Rick Wilson. The later is known by her fans simply as Digby. After his most recent column I could nickname Milbank as Dana the Divinely inspired.

Above: Dana Milbank (left) and Heather "Digby" Parton

 

Heather "Digby" Parton who writes columns several times a week for Salon and publishes on her blog, Hullaballoo, and Dana Milbank who writes a regular column for The Washington Post, are my two favorite  columnists.

Unfortunately you need a subscription to the Post to read Dana's columns. This is his most recent column:

Dana, speaking for God, country, and I suppose you might as well throw in an apple pie a la mode... 

... begins this column this way:

And, lo, it shall come to pass, on the eighth day of the eleventh month of the Year of our Lord 2022, that Our Heavenly Father shall gather the inhabitants of His Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, from the Sacred City of Filial Love to His Earthly Paradise on the Monongahela, and from all other dwelling places therein; and He shall say, “Riseth up ye and goeth to the polling places; and therein casteth ye thy ballots in such manner that the Heavenly Host doth thunder, ‘Yea, Doug Mastriano, assuredly and verily thou art a cuckoo bird.’ ”— the Gospel according to nobody in particular

He concludes:

Will the good people of Pennsylvania succumb to conspiracy lunacy masquerading as scripture? Or will they, and voters everywhere, decide that this is just one more sign that the false prophets of MAGA have gone entirely too far?

God willing, voters will know them by their fruits. 

His Washington Post column tops their Opinions section above the conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt who is also a Fox News regular. I never gift Hewitt with a click. You can see his Wikipedia profile here and compare it to Milbank's profile here where you can see that Milbank is no stranger to experiencing the consequences of pushing the limits of snarky satire. For example from Wikipedia: Milbank and Chris Cillizza appeared in a series of humor videos called "Mouthpiece Theater" which appeared on The Washington Post's website. An outcry followed a video in which, during a discussion of the White House "Beer Summit", they chose new brands for a number of people, including "Mad Bitch Beer" for Hillary Clinton. Both men apologized for the video and the series was canceled.

The brief Post profile describes Dana as sketching the foolish, the fallacious, and the felonious in politics. Here's his Twitter page.

Then there's Digby. Her Salon columns, fortunately, you can read here without a subscription. These, as of this posting, are her three most recent ones:

This is Digby's Twitter page.

To say Digby is as prolific as she is clever is an understatement. On her blog Digby's Hullaballoo she and colleague Tom Sullivan (he is a North Carolina-based writer who posts at Hullabaloo and Scrutiny Hooligans and a former columnist for the Asheville Citizen-Times. His posts have appeared at Crooks and Liars, Campaign for America's Future, Truthout.org, AlterNet, and TomPaine.org.) Between them they post several stories every day. 

I like Digby's shameless self promoting reference to herself as "what rugby sez.." It reminds me of the photo of myself I used on my Twitter page.

Here are a few choice examples of the snarky wordsmithing which has made her one of my two favorite columnists. It is from her recent column about Trump's MAGA judge not being able to save hIm:

• It will be interesting to see if Trump's lawyers make the case that he magically declassified all those documents with a Vulcan mind-meld when he was still president as his minions have been saying all over television ever since the search.
• Trump himself has not intelligibly addressed this latest state of affairs but he has been emitting periodic primal screams as events unfold.
• They would be safer in Central Park because Donald Trump doesn't live there, an easy target of all of America's adversaries who know he has all the common sense of a bath mat.

My runner up  for favorite columnist is Rick Wilson. 

Wilson is a Lincoln Project co-founder who is sometimes on MSNBC.  I wrote about him in a Daily Kos essay here. He's not as funny as Dana and Digby but he does have a scalpel sharp wit but  sometimes it is a bit too cruel for my sensibility.

Here's his Twitter page:

Here's my most recent tweet which reeks of a probably futile attempt at self-promotion. Perhaps Dana, Digby, or Rick will retweet it...

Do you have a favorite columnist? Do you read Dana and Digby? Scroll down the page to make a comment.