Today, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (The GOP’s Gasoline Alley) defends President Obama’s energy “policies” and diminishes his GOP  antagonists. Milbank is characteristically unbound by the truth, claiming that under Mr. Obama “domestic oil output has sharply increased . . . to the highest level in nearly a decade and is expected to continue expanding.”

Milbank fails to inform his few readers that the increase is nearly all attributable to production on private lands, not federal leases; that this trend began under President Bush; and that development of oil reserves takes years from exploration to spigot.

Milbank also omits the illegal moratorium Mr. Obama imposed in the Gulf that has cost thousands of jobs and directed drilling rigs to more productive waters in Brazil, the Middle East and elsewhere. Further, he ignores the Keystone XL pipeline two-step, in which Mr. Obama denied thousands of Americans the right to good jobs, assured that the Canadians, who can’t store their oil, will seek other outlets, and put the environment at greater risk, not less as the oil is sent by tanker to China.

Sadly, WaPo is saturated with the likes of Milbank, afraid to include the truth and the facts in a policy debate and smug in his confidence that his few readers are too dopey to know better.