I blame Golf Digest

Frank Rich gets paid to write one weekly column. One. And the best he could do (I no more link to him than I do to his fellow Heather, Mo. Dowd) was rehash a gossip story that's nearly a month old. And, of course, ties it back to the notion he's been waiting since 2000 to visit, that a Democratic candidate for president was some kind of offensive poseur.

Well, I'll let Mr. D.H. Riley explain it more colorfully then I ever could.

Now look: I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure that by most reckonings The Naughts were more than a year-and-a-half old when 9/11 Changed Everything, and that much of that time had been given over to a Presidential campaign which was decided on the pressing issues of Al Gore's make-up, Al Gore's sighing, Al Gore's choice of suits, and Al Gore's outlandish claims that he 1) invented the Internet; 2) personally cleaned up Love Canal; 3) wrote, directed, and starred in that Love Story piece of shit, which was based on his cleaning up Love Canal while in college; and 4) did not enlist in the Army, and go to Vietnam, just to show George W. Bush up. And even though there is as yet no historical consensus on whether these matters were Total Fucking Bullshit or simply So Mother-Fucking Trivial as to Bugger Belief, there is no question that among their most ardent champions was one Frank Rich, Times Opinionator.

So do go on, Frank, with that "the television press has rarely owned up to its failure" routine. I can't tell you how fascinating I find that observation, coming as it does in the middle of a piece which ignores your own responsibility for setting this piece of shit decade in motion.

Because, fuck, Frank, teevee news is nothing more than a less-popular version of So You Think You Can Sing Like a Fifth-Grader? It may not have apologized for wrapping Bush's Iraq Adventurism in Old Glory, but then the worst War Whoredoggery on FOX can't have measured one-third the way up Judith Miller's contribution. Print media has a helluva lot to apologize for, Frank. And furthermore, I don't recall authorizing anybody to accept those apologies in my name. And, what's more, I don't.

Look, I'm sorry Frank Rich had a man-crush on Tiger Woods and is hurt that he's done something that no one other than his wife and, perhaps, his sponsors, should really give a rat's ass about. Similarly, I'm sorry that, oh, I don't know, a stimulus package or a health care reform bill that required the assent of 60 senators all of whom with their own agendas and political calculations, somehow is evidence that all the Hopey and Changeyness was an Obaman ruse to separate the rubes from their moneys. Scrawls Rich, suddenly turning the page from Bonds and Woods to Obama:

This can be seen in the increasingly urgent political plight of Barack Obama. Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it). The truth may well be neither, but after a decade of being spun silly, Americans can’t be blamed for being cynical about any leader trying to sell anything. As we say goodbye to the year of Tiger Woods, it is the country, sad to say, that is left mired in a sand trap with no obvious way out.

By the way, a stimulus package that saved the U.S. economy from plunging still deeper and a health care bill that's the biggest piece of quality of life legislation since the 19 fucking 60s.

Is Rich not paid to read the news and analysis on which he prattles on and on, covering the most important real estate in opinion journalism each week? No, apparently not, because despite all available evidence to the contrary, he's convinced that Obama done him wrong and campaigned as something he is not. Like Al Gore's brown suit, that's a much easier and more compelling factoid than actually going back to see if Obama's campaign rhetoric over-promised or not. Easier still than attempting to inform and educate his readers.

Frank Rich is a lazy hack. Like his colleague Gail Collins who feels put out at having to learn the names of a few senators, the hard work of legislating (or golfing for that matter), bores him. All that's left is how shiny the surface can be kept polished.

Somewhere in journalism hell, whatever Sulzberger that decided a theater critic would make a superb liberal political columnist, is slowly being turned on a spit.

Shrillitude!

As Somerby has been reminding us for, lo, these last eight years, Frank Rich did as much as anyone to advance the false media "analysis" that would kill Al Gore's chance to keep George W. Bush out of power. He is, of course, at it again.

The inclusiveness preached by Obama-Oprah is practiced by the other Democrats in the presidential race, Mrs. Clinton most certainly included. Is Mr. Obama gaining votes over rivals with often interchangeable views because some white voters feel better about themselves if they vote for an African-American? Or is it because Mrs. Clinton’s shrill campaign continues to cast her as Nixon to Mr. Obama’s Kennedy? Even after she apologized to Mr. Obama for a top adviser’s “unauthorized” invocation of Mr. Obama’s long-admitted drug use as a young man, her chief strategist, Mark Penn, was apparently authorized to go on “Hardball” to sleazily insinuate the word “cocaine” into prime time again. Somewhere Tricky Dick is laughing.

Not only is Clinton "shrill" in a way that none of her male counterparts are, apparently, capable, but now she's positively Nixonian. Yes, "Tricky Dick" would no doubt be laughing...he was the master of creating a narrative about his opponents for a gullible press.

Our "liberal" columnists are our greatest impediment.

Re-gored

I'm sure Bob Somerby will be all over this in a day or two, but I couldn't help shaking my head as Frank Rich warns this morning that the Hilary Clinton campaign is as weak and and calculating as the Gore campaign was in 2000. Rich fails to mention his role in weakening Gore, piling on with his gal Friday, Maureen Dowd.

If you'd like to take the walk down memory lane Rich does his best to avoid, here are some useful links to the history, as told by the incomparable Daily Howler.

HOWLER HISTORY: How did George Bush reach the White House? We advise you to read all of this piece—including the segment, found at the end, in which we see the way Frank Rich covered Bush and Gore’s final debate. Through the campaign, the haughty scribe kept insisting: There was no difference between Bush and Gore. Anyone could see how foolish that was. But Frankly, we think you ought to see the way Rich struggled and strained to “prove” it.

Special report—Frankly, that’s Rich!

READ EACH INSTALLMENT: We had to laugh when a certain pundit reviewed Al Gore’s deeply troubling new film. But Frankly, Rich has produced this sort of nonsensical work for years. Be sure to read every installment:

PART 1: Gore was right on every big judgment—but Rich is in love with a narrative. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/31/06.

PART 2: Gore had made a string of sound judgments. But omigod! Someone laughed at his jokes! See THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/1/06.

PART 3: Gore was right in 2002, Rich says. In 2002, he said different. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/2/06.

PART 4: Before the Swift Boats, Rich invented Love Story. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/5/06.

Today, we Frankly revisit the way Rich “covered” Campaign 2000.

[...]

Frankly, Rich was always ready to mock the two hopefuls—and to say that Bush and Gore were just alike. After Super Tuesday, for example, his haughty wisdom was ours to admire:

RICH (3/11/00): Eight months to go—but hey, who's counting?—and we're stranded with two establishment, tightly scripted, often robotic candidates who are about as different from one another as J. Crew and Banana Republic. Both are wealthy, Ivy-League-educated boomers who took safe paths through the Vietnam War, whose career advancement was greased by their dads, who advertise their intimacy with Jesus, who reek of smarmy soft money and who will do anything to win, whether it be Mr. Gore's lying about his own Congressional voting record in a debate or Mr. Bush's heartless exploitation of women's fears of breast cancer in a scurrilous attack ad.

Poor Frank! The voters had selected a matched set of bozos! Bush and Gore were just alike! Yes, it was hard to get much dumber than this—even before we saw Bush run a war. But as Rich gazed down at Bush and Gore, the great savant saw no real difference. And yes, they were both like Bill Clinton!

RICH: In the true Clinton manner, both are also chameleons, ready to don new guises in a flash—from Mr. Gore's down-home wardrobe to Mr. Bush's last-minute emergence as a champion of campaign finance reform, patients' rights and clean air. The substantive disputes between the men are, in truth, minimal in a prosperous post-cold-war era when both parties aspire to Rockefeller Republicanism (literally so in that each standard-bearer is the prince of a brand-name American dynasty).

Frankly, what was the difference? Rich asked. And there you see the dumb-ass judgment which eventually sent George Bush to the White House—and gave us our miserable War in Iraq. There you see the type of Rich insight we got all through Campaign 2K.

Sigh, it looks like Rich will now lead the charge on Hilary Clinton.

Is Hillary Clinton the New Old Al Gore?

By FRANK RICH

THE Democrats can't lose the White House in 2008, can they?

[...]

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 the Iraq war and leading the international charge on global warming. It was instead the cautious Gore whose public persona changed from debate to debate and whose answers were often long-winded and equivocal (even about the Kansas Board of Education's decision to ban the teaching of evolution). Incredibly, he minimized both his environmental passions and his own administration's achievements throughout the campaign.

He, too, had initially been deemed a winner, the potential recipient of a landslide rather than a narrow popular-vote majority. The signs were nearly as good for Democrats then as they are now. The impeachment crusade had backfired on the Republicans in the 1998 midterms; the economy was booming; Mr. Gore's opponent was seen as a lightweight who couldn't match him in articulateness or his mastery of policy, let alone his eight years of Clinton White House experience.

Mrs. Clinton wouldn't repeat Mr. Gore's foolhardy mistake of running away from her popular husband and his record, even if she could. But almost every answer she gave last Sunday was a rambling and often tedious Gore-like filibuster. Like the former vice president, she often came across as a pontificator and an automaton — in contrast to the personable and humorous person she is known to be off-camera. And she seemed especially evasive when dealing with questions requiring human reflection instead of wonkery.

Well, here we go. Rich has spoken. Clinton is a robot-like Gore-clone. Then, of course, there's the long discussion of "the laugh" or "the cackle," depending on which story you read in the Times today -- there was another one, in addition to Rich's take down.

But it would be nice -- and intellectually honest -- for Rich to admit his role in hammering home the ridiculous notion that Gore's "rambling" answers in the debates were no better than Bush's knowledge-free ones.

Postings will be light for the next few days. Stay tuned to Somerby for more, I'm sure, on this maddening topic.