Today, in a post­ing on his “Rough Sketch” blog at the Wash­ing­ton Post Dana Mil­bank per­pe­trated one of the most grotesque exam­ples of hatchet jour­nal­ism I’ve seen in a while. I’ll get to the par­tic­u­lars soon enough, but first it’s worth set­ting a little context.

Mil­bank was report­ing on the Rev­erend Jere­miah Wright’s speech at the National Press Club this morn­ing, a speech that marked the third public appear­ance of Barack Obama’s former pastor in the last couple of days. The first appear­ance came on Friday, when Wright appeared in a PBS inter­view with Bill Moyers. The second came yes­ter­day, when he spoke at the Detroit NAACP’s Free­dom Fund dinner.

The Moyers inter­view was so uncon­tro­ver­sial that one com­men­ta­tor had to wonder why we hadn’t heard more about it. But the question-and-answer period after today’s Press Club speech gave the media just the kind of thing it was wait­ing for. Joe Klein of Time said that “Wright’s pur­pose now seems quite clear: to aggran­dize him­self–the guy is going to be a go-​to main­stream media source for racial extrem­ist spew, the next iter­a­tion of Al Sharp­ton–and destroy Barack Obama.” Amy Sul­li­van, also at Time, said bluntly that Wright’s per­for­mance at the National Press Club “can only be described as a polit­i­cal disaster.”

Only small-t time will tell if Sul­li­van is right–one sign she’s cor­rect is that Obama is already inch­ing his way onto the denounce-and-reject road. [UPDATE 4/29: The inches have become miles.] But it only takes one look at the tran­script of Wright’s appear­ance at the Press Club to see that Klein’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of it as “racial extrem­ist spew” is ridiculous.

Milbank’s post is worst of all.

Tonight we raise a glass to the 22nd amendment…

(Hol­ly­wood, California)

In today’s Guardian Ronan Ben­nett goes after Martin Amis for “The Age of Horrorism,” a nasty 12,000-word essay on Islam pub­lished in The Observer (The Guardian’s sister pub) last year. My take on Amis’s essay, writ­ten last year after the orig­i­nal arti­cle came out, is here. (A shorter ver­sion, pub­lished in the U. of Chicago Sight­ings series, is here.)