I want a job like the job Frank Rich has got. Rich no doubt makes a very fine living writing a column for the New York Times once a week. While most of the columnists for the Times toil to contribute about 800 words twice a week, Rich writes a longer column than the others, so I guess he only has to do one a week. But the few hundred extra words seem to give Frank Rich the room he needs to paint some very clear pictures.
Frank Rich lives at the intersection of politics and culture. His job amounts to monitoring the news, and then commenting on how the various media report the news. And somehow, he manages to put it all together, and find the shreds of the truth that are drowned but by the static. His columns have a very high "signal to noise ratio." That's why sitting down and reading Frank Rich is one of the highlights of my Sundays.
So I'm just going to pass on a link to Frank Rich's column from this past Sunday's Times, where he weighs in on Cindy Sheehan, Bush's vacation, Pat Robertson (just Who Would Jesus Assassinate?) and the simmering cesspool we've made out of Iraq.
What I found most compelling about this particular column -- and the reason I feel compelled to pass it on -- is that Rich has the temerity to say what a lot of people in my circle are loathe to admit:
"It isn't just Mr. Bush who is in a tight corner now. Ms. Sheehan's protest was the catalyst for a new national argument about the war that managed to expose both the intellectual bankruptcy of its remaining supporters on the right and the utter bankruptcy of the Democrats who had rubber-stamped this misadventure in the first place."
Yes folks, the Democrats have just as much culpability for this mess as Bush and the neo-cons who pull his strings:
"If there's a moment that could stand for the Democrats' irrelevance it came on July 14, the day Americans woke up to learn of the suicide bomber in Baghdad who killed as many as 27 people, nearly all of them children gathered around American troops. In Washington that day, the presumptive presidential candidate Hillary Clinton held a press conference vowing to protect American children from the fantasy violence of video games."
Here is the link to Rich's August 28 column:
Op-Ed Columnist: The Vietnamization of Bush's Vacation
So read that and see if it doesn't make you start to think -- as I've been saying all along (haven't I?): that with a (very) few exceptions, the Democrats are just as responsible for this war as W and his neo-con-cronies. Both parties in Congress bought into it, hook line and sinker. Not a one of 'em had the presence of mind to see they wuz bein' snookered, or to scratch beneath the surface of the WMD "intelligence" to see that the fix was in. Least of all the guy we wound up running against the prime perpetrator in last year's election.
Me... I'm starting to lose patience with this whole political duopoly, which looks more and more every day like the the two sides of the plutocracy. What's so sacred about the "two-party" system, when both parties are in fact the opposite sides of the same coin?
What'd that Jefferson guy say about "When in the course of human events..." ??
Anyway, that's my opinion, and it should be yours, too.
--PS