He just can't help himself.

Dana Milbank fires both barrels at Newt Gingrich in this column. He doesn's speculate about erotic activities with pigs*, but I'm sure that's only because of the 700 word limit.

But even here, he just has to throw in a bit of Ballance

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones recently dug up a 1978 Gingrich quotation lamenting that “one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.”

Thanks to Gingrich, this is no longer a problem, in either party.

Milbank presents no evidence that Democrats are sufficiently nasty. In fact he doesn't quote a single Democrat. He doesn't argue that they have gotten nastier since 1994. There is no need to present evidence that Obama is nastier than Johnson, because the phrase "in either party" is automatically valid and need not be supported by any evidence.

I almost suspect that it is an unconscious tic. It could be that Milbank wrote and wrote, then realized that he had criticized only a Republican and added the totally unsupported swipe at the Democrats. But it is also possible that he claims that both sides share a fault as automatically and unconsciously as he breaths.

* pigs not goats as I am discussing the nastiness of Johnson and not Mickey Kaus's approach to journalism.