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A beautiful woman, at once a scheming, ambitious right-wing ideologue, and the powerful, evil forces behind her, plot to seize the presidency from the man—foolish enough to have made her his running-mate—who may be concealing just how seriously sick he is, both physically and mentally! As the stuff of straight-to-video filmmaking, not bad, perhaps. But as the theory of an ostensibly serious column in America's newspaper of record? And yet, that is the paranoid picture that Frank Rich paints today in Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain. Annotated excerpts: "[T]he 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race . . . and the...

Somebody PLEASE Help Frank Rich !! Ladies and Gentleman, I understand that NY Times Columnist Frank Rich has never been a favorite of those of us who sit on the right side of the political spectrum, but it is time for us to show some compassion. The man has totally lost it. And we should help the man. Maybe it was sitting through one to many revivals of "No, No, Nannette" or that 1970's revival of "Good News" that featured Stubby Kaye, Alice Fay and a live elephant, but it is very obvious that the brain of the former Theater...

My NewsBusters colleague Noel Sheppard, in the course of detailing how the New York Times devoted four items and over 6,000 words today to attacking Sarah Palin, cited Frank Rich's column and its malicious message. Rich's column is such a treasure trove for chroniclers of Palin Derangement Syndrome that I'd like to devote a bit more time to deconstructing it. For sheer paranoid fantasy, it will be hard to outdo the scenario Rich sketches. In having mentioned Harry Truman in her convention speech, Rich sees nothing less than a "creepy" clue to what Palin has in mind. Truman, you see...

WITH all due deference to lipstick, let’s advance the story. A week ago the question was: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The question today: What kind of president would Sarah Palin be? It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election. No longer able to remember his principles any better than he...

The liberal campaign to seek to diminish Sarah Palin by sexualizing her continues. Yesterday, I described how Frank Rich used a number of sexualized terms in reference to Palin's relationship with McCain: "shotgun marriage," "speed-dating" and "embrace." Chris Matthews employed a similar tactic this evening, claiming that Palin is running "somewhere between a VP and a First Lady."

Frank Rich expends his 1,500-words today ripping into Sarah Palin. Into John McCain for picking Sarah Palin. Into any members of the press who might not rip into Sarah Palin. What's got Rich so riled up? Cut to Frank's final line: "they just might pull it off." With props to the late Robert Palmer, Rich has a bad case of not-loving Sarah Palin—but he's badly worried America will find her simply irresistible. We've had fun with this kind of thing before, so let's ring up the curtain on Rich, Fisked: Act II. Rich's headline is "Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage."...

This is a puff piece for a movie called Wall-E; this movie is for children and does its best to portray progress as terrible and people as unnecessary. I found the below interesting: For me, Mr. Obama showed signs of jumping the shark two weeks back, when he appeared at a podium affixed with his own pompous faux-presidential seal. It could have been a Pixar sight gag. In fact, it is a gag in “Wall-E,” where, in a flashback, we see that the original do-nothing chief executive of Buy N Large (prone to pronouncements like “stay the course”) boasted his...

OK With Losing In Iraq? Vote Dem! Not sure that would be a winning campaign slogan for Barack Obama, but on today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski expressed skepticism as to whether Americans really care about winning in Iraq. Mika made her comments in the course of touting Frank Rich's NYT column of yesterday [on which I commented here]. Brzezinski was clearly eager to make her point: after reading an extended excerpt from Rich's column and inviting comment from the panel, she didn't let a bemused John Harwood of CNBC/NYT get more than a few words out before cutting him off...

If you're going to accuse a president of lying and committing crimes, it might be nice to provide some particulars. But Frank Rich sees no need for any such niceties in his New York Times column of today. The column's putative topic is the McClellan book, but the real subject is Rich's abject Bush hatred. After referring to Pres. Bush as "the loathed lame duck," Rich writes: Americans don’t like being lied to by their leaders, especially if there are casualties involved and especially if there’s no accountability. We view it as a crime story, and we won’t be satisfied...

BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive. What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,”...

IT’S a nightmare. It’s the Bataan Death March. It’s mutually assured Armageddon. “Both of them are already losing the general to John McCain,” declared a Newsweek columnist last month, predicting that the election “may already be over” by the time the Democrats anoint a nominee. Not so fast. If we’ve learned any new rule in the 2008 campaign, it’s this: Once our news culture sets a story in stone, chances are it will crumble. But first it must be recycled louder and louder 24/7, as if sheer repetition will transmute conventional wisdom into reality. When the Pennsylvania returns rained down...

This is a scattered editorial. Rich begins by puffing an Abu Ghraib film supposed to excite the masses. It doesn't sound interesting and, to Rich's credit, he gives up on this score. He then confesses his confusion and unhappiness and blames the American people for disinterest in his and the NYT's preoccupation with Iraq an alleged atrocities. "...This is not merely a showbiz phenomenon but a leading indicator of where our entire culture is right now. It’s not just torture we want to avoid. Most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the...

Frank Rich's understanding of Barack Obama's speech: "...Race has been America’s transcendent issue far longer than that. I share the general view that Mr. Obama’s speech is the most remarkable utterance on the subject by a public figure in modern memory. But what impressed me most was not Mr. Obama’s rhetorical elegance or his nuanced view of both America’s undeniable racial divide and equally undeniable racial progress. The real novelty was to find a politician who didn’t talk down to his audience but instead trusted it to listen to complete, paragraph-long thoughts that couldn’t be reduced to sound bites. Frank...

Let's have some fun deconstructing Frank Rich's NY Times column of today. The gist of The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama is that it will be near-impossible for McCain to defeat Obama because the Arizona senator reflects the politics of an almost all-white GOP in the age of a changing America. Rich begins by mocking the the "collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols" who flanked McCain during his victory speech on the night of the Potomac Primaries. Adding insult to injury, Rich replays Letterman's line about the GOP presidential hopefuls looking like “guys waiting to tee off at a...

the Hallmark Channel. ...offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come. The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner. This decision was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user, “the black candidate” . The result? Black America...

If Frank Rich is the voice of elite liberal opinion, Hillary Clinton is in deep, deep trouble. How many folks on the Upper West Side and reasonable facsimiles thereof from Boston to Madison to LA will be opening their hearts -- or credit cards -- to Hillary after reading Rich's stunning indictment of Clinton and her campaign this morning? The jumping-off point for Rich's column is the live prime-time special the night before Super Tuesday that the Clinton campaign conducted. Flashing his theater-critic roots, Rich panned it as a "boring" "pseudo-event," noting that "some in attendance appeared to trance out."...

January 27, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist The Billary Road to Republican Victory By FRANK RICH IN the wake of George W. Bush, even a miracle might not be enough for the Republicans to hold on to the White House in 2008. But what about two miracles? The new year’s twin resurrections of Bill Clinton and John McCain, should they not evaporate, at last give the G.O.P. a highly plausible route to victory. Amazingly, neither party seems to fully recognize the contours of the road map. In the Democrats’ case, the full-throttle emergence of Billary, the joint Clinton candidacy, is measured mainly...

CONTEMPLATING the Clinton-Obama racial war, some Republicans were so excited you’d have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to slap around a welfare deadbeat. Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond the incessant repetition of Reagan’s name. A battle over race-and-gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As long as the G.O.P.’s own identity politics, over religion, don’t flare up.) Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in...

The devil made Larry do it. Don't blame Lawrence O'Donnell for his ugly anti-Mormon rant. It was really the fault of O'Donnell's fellow panelists. That's Frank Rich's take on the unseemly episode on the McLaughin Group a couple Fridays ago. Rich claims in his NY Times column of today that O'Donnell was: "pushed over the edge by his peers’ polite chatter about Mitt Romney’s sermon on 'Faith in America.'”

As Republican primary campaign slogans go, "Endorsed by Frank Rich" might not be a candidate's strongest play. But for better or worse Mike Huckabee is essentially stuck with it after Rich's NYT's column of yesterday. The ostensible theme of "The Republicans Find Their Obama" is that Republican voters are leaning toward Huckabee for the same reason that Dems are trending to Obama: that both men are relatively young, speak across racial lines, are witty and avoid hyper-partisanship. But dig down a bit deeper, and it appears that Huckabee's real appeal for Rich is that, social issues aside, he is the...

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal. This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights.

When Rudy’s candidacy started to show legs, pundits and family values activists alike assumed that ignorant voters knew only his 9/11 video reel and not his personal history or his stands on issues. “Americans do not yet realize how far outside of the mainstream of conservative thought that Mayor Giuliani’s social views really are,” declared Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council leader, in February. But despite Rudy’s fleeting stabs at fudging his views, they are well known now, and still he leads in national polls of Republican voters and is neck and neck with Fred Thompson in the Bible Belt...

It's not as if Frank Rich has a deep and abiding hatred of his nation's leadership, or contempt for his fellow Americans. It's just that he accuses the Bush administration of using tactics worthy of the Gestapo -- the Nazi secret police headed by Heinrich Himmler -- and his fellow Americans of being like citizens of Hitler's Germany who turned a blind eye to the atrocities in their midst. Those "see no evil' residents of the Third Reich came to be known as the "good Germans," and Rich unsubtly sets the tone for his New York Times column of this...

If you buy into the Washington logic that a flawless campaign is one that doesn’t make gaffes, never goes off-message and never makes news, then this analysis makes sense. The Clinton machine runs as smoothly and efficiently as a Rolls. And like a fine car, it is just as likely to lull its driver into complacent coasting and its passengers to sleep. What I saw on television last Sunday was the incipient second coming of the can’t-miss 2000 campaign of Al Gore. That Mr. Gore, some may recall, was not the firebrand who emerged from defeat, speaking up early against...

I DID nothing wrong," said Larry Craig at the start of his long national nightmare as America's favorite running, or perhaps sitting, gag. That's the truth. Justice lovers of all sexual persuasions must rally to save the Idaho senator before he is forced to prematurely evacuate his seat. Time's running out. The final reckoning may arrive this week. On Wednesday, a Minnesota court will hear Mr. Craig's argument to throw out the guilty plea he submitted by mail after being caught in a June sex sting in the Minneapolis airport. If he succeeds, there's a chance he might rescind his...

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff... ...This is why the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, including those more accurate than Mr. Bush's recent false analogies, can take us only so far. Our situation is graver than it was during Vietnam. ...Certainly there were some eerie symmetries between General Petraeus's...

The gravest charge you can level at a military man, as MoveOn.org essentially did to Gen. Petraeus with its infamous "General Betray Us" ad, is to call him a traitor.But surely close behind in the catalog of calumny is to call a soldier a coward. And that's what Frank Rich did in his [p.p.v.] New York Times column of today.Writes Rich [emphasis added]: General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of...

Sometimes where a thing is said is bigger news than what was said. That happened on Monday, when The New York Times ran a guest op-ed detailing the progress in Iraq. Long before the fall of Baghdad, The New York Times was as dogmatically pessimistic about the Bush administration's efforts as it was gushingly supportive of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. It even promoted the least-qualified op-ed writer in North America as its point man for its attacks on our military: Frank Rich, whose experience was with ballet slippers, not combat boots. Rich must feel like a dying swan just...

Hating George W. Bush is a full-time job, but it's a labor of love for most of his critics, even for those who get paid to do it. Frank Rich of the New York Times, a perfectly nice man if you run into him at a party or at the deli, goes off his meds when he sits down to write about anyone who doesn't lust to throw a rotten egg, an overripe tomato or a shoe at the president. Frank thinks getting shot by an overeager Secret Service bodyguard, trained to rough up bystanders and ask questions later, would...

The public-interest group Judicial Watch has released the results of a nationwide poll that indicates nearly half of likely American voters are worried about corruption in the White House if Hillary Clinton becomes the next U.S. president. Judicial Watch conducted the poll in partnership with Zogby International. A total of 38 percent of those polled were Democrats, 36 percent were Republicans, and 26 percent were Independents. Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton says the results of the poll were quite revealing. "Forty-five percent [of the respondents] are concerned or very concerned about Hillary Clinton corruption and that there will be high...

A review of The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, by Frank Rich A small but significant sentence occurs in one of the early chapters of this book: "Like the 'lovely war' the British foresaw in the early going of World War I, the illusion of a painless engagement in Iraq was short-lived." Now, it is true that some British jingoists believed that the combat begun on August 4, 1914, would be "all over by Christmas," and that this early euphoria forms a small part of the tragic sense with which that...

"Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle." - Edward R. Murrow Give Frank Rich credit for this: he doesn't run from his theater-critic past. Like a mirror-image Churchill, the man now paid by the New York Times to think great thoughts rather than to laugh till he cries mobilizes theater metaphors in his pay-per-view, anti-war opus of this morning, He’s in the Bunker Now.Rich begins by informing us that President Bush has morphed from Harold Hill in "The Music Man" into Willy Loman from "Death of a Salesman." And we all know what that means.Rich next...

To a lover in the thrall of blissful delirium, there is nothing that doesn't relate to his beloved. Frank Rich is the morose mirror image. Not a leaf falls but that it reminds him of Iraq and the perfidy of the Bush administration. The ostensible topic of Rich's NY Times column of this morning was Time magazine's solipsistic choice of "you" as person of the year. What this has to do with Iraq might not be apparent to you. But you're not Frank Rich. Let's see how Rich managed to make the connection with some annotated excerpts: "Like Time today,...

Last year, Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, wrote to the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, telling him to "be ready starting now" for America to run from Iraq, reminding him how America cut and ran from Vietnam and the "aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam, and how they ran and left their agents." Alas, Zarqawi never got to implement his Iraq takeover plan because the same troops that are allegedly losing the war right now killed him in June. But al Qaeda in America isn't ready to quit, yet! New York Times...

How did we go from winning the war in Iraq to losing overnight? Was this decided by the same committee that changed "Peking" to "Beijing"? These word changes are a fortiori evidence that liberals are part of a conspiracy. On what date did "horrible" and "actress" vanish from the English language to be replaced with "horrific" and "actor"? Who decided that? (Meanwhile, I'm still writing "Puff Daddy" in my nightly dream journal when everybody else has started calling him "Diddy.") When did "B.C." (before Christ) and "A.D." (anno Domini, "in the year of the Lord") get replaced with "BCE" (before...

IN America we like quick fixes, closure and an uplifting show. Such were the high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, and on one of the three it delivered... ..Its account of how the country Mr. Bush called a “grave and gathering danger” in September 2002 has devolved into a “grave and deteriorating” catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the president knew this already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from diagnosis to prescription. Its recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are completely unattainable. Of course, it would be...

We're not "not winning." We've lost. So declares Bush critic Frank Rich in Sunday runs of the NEW YORK TIMES. MORE Taking it all the way, this time, Rich writes: "The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq." "The Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking," Rich explains, in an op-ed he has titled: "THE SUNSHINE BOYS CAN'T SAVE IRAQ." Rich declares: "As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. "The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still...

turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the...

When it comes to MSM outrage over pro-Republican TV ads, it's hard to top Chris Matthews. He pounded for days on the RNC ad about Harold Ford, Jr., accusing RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman of "cesspool" tactics and claiming the ad played to white fears of "losing white women to black guys."Matthews had a similar over-the-top reaction to an ad [see it here] running in NJ that uses a mobbed-up character to mock ethically-challenged Bob Menendez. Here's how Stephen Spruiell at National Review's Media Blog noted Matthews comments:"Well maybe because I've spent so much of my life in New Jersey... but...

October 15, 2006 Op-Ed Columnist The Gay Old Party Comes Out By FRANK RICH Here’s a gay Republican story you probably did not hear last week. On Tuesday a card-carrying homosexual, Mark Dybul, was sworn into office at the State Department with his partner holding the Bible. Dr. Dybul, was flanked by Laura Bush and Condi Rice. In her official remarks, the secretary of state referred to the mother of Dr. Dybul’s partner as his “mother-in-law.” If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals...

New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who is now hawking a book bashing the Bush Administration, has a secret. He was one of those gullible media figures who bought into the phony conspiracy theory that the White House was out to destroy "whistle-blower" Joe Wilson. In a series of fanciful columns in 2005, Rich repeatedly accused the White House of trying to destroy Joe Wilson and his wife. Rich saw a sinister group of "neo-con zealots" active in the highest reaches of the Bush Administration, some of whom were determined in a systematic way to smear, trash, or take down...

Yesterday, Slate posted this piece criticizing Frank Rich's New York Times column about the 9/11 photo shown here. The picture was taken by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker on the afternoon of 9/11. Calling the image "shocking," Rich suggested that the five New Yorkers were "relaxing" and were already "mov[ing] on" from the attacks. Slate's David Plotz disputed that characterization of the picture, arguing that the subjects had almost certainly gathered to discuss the attacks and to find solace in others' company. Rather than showing callousness, as Rich suggested, it depicted civic engagement. But since neither Rich nor Plotz knew exactly...

by Mark Finkelstein September 3, 2006 - 06:52 It wasn't easy, but I battled my way this morning to the end of Frank Rich's pay-per-view column, Donald Rumsfeld’s Dance With the Nazis. Tempting as it was, I didn't turn the cyber-page. This despite prose - such as this condemning Sec. Rumsfeld's recent speech - that you might find in the dictionary next to the definition of 'turgid': "[a] toxic effort to impugn the patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run surrender and incipient treason." My persistence was rewarded with two nuggets from the column's concluding paragraphs....

A new book by New York Times columnist Frank Rich, "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina" will be published by Penguin on Sept. 26. In the book, Rich delivers a savaging sermon on the US government's "rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of 'compassionate conservativism,' the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts"—and so much more. - snip- By Rich's account, of course, that parade of missteps is organic; Bush and company cannot help but err. In an effort to disguise that track record, the Republicans have exercised...

If anyone doubts that the most serious threat to American security is the lack of fundamental loyalty on the part of significant segments of our population beginning with members of our intelligence and military agencies (egged on by irresponsibile leaders of the Democratic Party and the media), one has only to read this item from Reuters in today's news. Apparently some officials in the Pentagon, concerned that the White House might take action against Iran have leaked classified information to the press (which the press, of course, is all to eager to publish for our enemies to view). This particular tidbit of...

OPINION Frank Rich Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ... By FRANK RICH Published: November 27, 2005 An angry country has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth about the Iraq war. To continue reading this article, you must be a subscriber to TimesSelect.

Ever since the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, New York Times scribe Frank Rich has gone into overdrive with complaints that the Bush administration lied about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capability. But on Saturday Rich sounded clueless when confronted with reports that Saddam had stockpiled some 500-tons of uranium - news reported just last year on the front page of his own paper. The usually informed-sounding Timesman fumbled for answers during the following exchange with WABC Radio's Mark Simone: SIMONE: Speaking of uranium, your own paper, on May 22, 2004, reported on 500-tons of uranium we found in Iraq. RICH: I...

This morning I was skimming through the NY Times Editorial/Opinion section, and just happened to see the letter-to-the-editor that follows. It's a gem, an absolute jewel. You want cheer, and cry at the same time.. It speaks for itself, so please give it a read...

The American left may like to reprise Vietnam, but they're badly wrong, writes Michael Gawenda. THE New York Times columnist Frank Rich is the voice of America's late middle-aged baby boomers for whom opposition to the Vietnam War became the prism through which they would subsequently judge US foreign policy. Rich, who was once the most feared theatre critic in America when he was initially on the Times, able to close a Broadway show with a lukewarm review, is now back at the paper writing a weekly column that has become a rallying call for opponents of the war in...

August 21, 2005 The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan By FRANK RICH CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in Haditha, his national radio address that morning...