This is one of the dumbest, most arrogant articles I’ve ever read. The stupid starts in the title.

Romney can retire later

Mitt Romney isn’t actually retiring. As Milbank even notes in the article, Romney is taking on another job when he doesn’t have to. He just wants to work. Milbank just wants him to save Barack Obama and help destroy the Republican Party.

The nation is heading toward the “fiscal cliff,” but have no fear: Mitt Romney is coming to the rescue — of Marriott International Inc.

In his first public comments since election night, the defeated Republican presidential nominee issued a statement Monday announcing his next step. An appeal to national unity? A charitable initiative?

No, he announced that he was rejoining the hotel chain’s board of directors. “It is an honor to once again be able to serve in the company of leaders like Bill Marriott,” said Romney’s statement, distributed by Marriott.

It was emblematic of the tone-deaf, I-have-some-great-friends-that-are-NASCAR-team-owners moments that contributed to his loss. The country is in a crisis, political leaders in a standoff, and Romney is joining his buddy’s corporate board.

Look, Milbank, the headline of your article does not match the factual content. Romney did not retire. But having lost the election, he is under no obligation to do anything about the political standoff. In fact, he has no power to intervene in it. He did not get us into the crisis, as he was not in government at any point during the process that got us here. He is a private citizen. He offered to help fix it, but a slim majority of the American people decided to keep the president who did get us here in the job.

Milbank, as a journalist, does have a position from which he could point out that Barack Obama is not negotiating at all, much less in good faith. Milbank could also spend a few pixels noting that the Democrat-controlled Senate won’t even bring Obama’s fiscal cliff offer up for a vote. Instead, Milbank attacks Mitt Romney.

Romney is a private citizen now and free to do as he chooses. But it’s not as if he needs the money; the $170,000 in cash and stock that Marriott directors received in the most recent year reported is but a sliver of the $20 million or so Romney takes in annually from his investments.

So, obviously, Romney is not joining Marriott just for the money.

More to the point, Romney’s first post-election move served to confirm the exhaustive report my Post colleague Philip Rucker did on Romney’s “rapid retreat into seclusion.” Rucker, who covered the Romney campaign for this paper, wrote that in the former candidate’s disappearance he is “exhibiting the same detachment that made it so difficult for him to connect with the body politic through six years of running for president.”

More to the point, reporters like Milbank and his Post colleagues are biased hacks. Romney went into “seclusion” by showing up at Disney World, having lunch with the president, and then by joining the board of Marriott. He didn’t hole up in a cabin in the woods, you idiots.

He didn’t win the election. What is he supposed to do, sleep on the streets in Washington just in case someone needs his financial acumen? Clearly, a slim majority of the American people thought that his financial skills were less useful in our time of crisis than whatever skills Barack Obama brings to the presidency. Unfortunately we all get to live with the consequences of that choice.

Romney’s post-election behavior has been, in a word, small. Never again, likely, will his voice and influence be as powerful as they are now. Yet rather than stepping forward to help find a way out of the fiscal standoff, or to help his party rebuild itself, he delivered a perfunctory concession speech, told wealthy donors that Obama won by giving “gifts” to minorities, then avoided the press at a private lunch with President Obama.

Though keeping nominal residence in Massachusetts, the state he led as governor, he moved out to his California home and has been spotted at Disneyland, at the new “Twilight” movie, at a pizza place, pumping gas and going to the gym. In warm weather, he plans to live at his lakefront manse in New Hampshire. The man who spoke passionately about his love for the American auto industry has been driving around in a new Audi Q7.

Avoiding the press is a sign of sanity. Who wants to deal with people who just spent a year trashing you, and are still trashing you? More to the point, who in the right mind wants to spend any time at all with Dana Milbank?

I wonder, what kind of car does Dana Milbank drive? Someone needs to do hit pieces on arrogant reporters like him, just to give him a taste of what he does to other people.

A former adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, told Rucker that Romney will “be involved in some fashion” in public service. And nobody can begrudge Romney some downtime.

Then, what’s the point of your article, Milbank?

It’s understandable that Romney would now feel like shrinking from the scene: He offered the people a choice, and they chose otherwise. But this is a crucial time for the country and particularly for Romney’s Republican Party, which must unshackle itself from the far right or become irrelevant.

I’m sorry, what? Milbank wants Romney to come out and give Barack Obama an assist in the fiscal cliff talks? By trashing his fellow Republicans?

Are you an idiot, Dana Milbank? Barack Obama just spent a year calling Mitt Romney a bully, a felon, and a murderer. Why on earth would Romney lift a finger to help Obama after that?

Milbank’s piece is mindblowingly dumb, biased hackery unworthy of the bowels of Talking Points Memo. Just unbelievable in its obnoxious, arrogant, twittery.