For intellectual laziness, lackluster writing and sheer historical dishonesty, it’s hard to beat Frank Rich of the New York Times.  Week after week, and at tiresome length, Rich dishes out his regurgitated pensées regarding his pet hobby-horses, including the evil Bush Administration, gay rights, and the fact that, sooner or later, the Christian Right is going to get your mama.  In every way except the physical courage to actually be on the scene, Rich is a worthy successor to the Times’s disgraceful Stalinist apparatchik, Walter Duranty, whose tainted Pulitzer the Times has yet to return.

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On Saturday, the undistinguished former drama critic, show-business wannabe and non-bestselling author — who unnaccountably occupies some of the most prime editorial real estate in the world — outdid himself with this eminently predictable yet nonetheless embarrassing and ludicrous piece of revisionism/wishful thinking: “The Axis of the Obsessed and the Deranged.” Lest you jump to a perfectly rational conclusion and think this is about the editorial board of the Times, think again:

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians,including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Yes, just as predicted here and here more than a week ago, the former Butcher of Broadway indulges in one of his typical smear-by-association campaigns, and implausibly links Stack (who quoted from the Communist Manifesto in his suicide note) to the Right, instead of to the Left. In the best tradition of his bête noir, Joe McCarthy, Rich writes:

Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

Rich has already been taken down hard by Ed Driscoll, and the great Ronald Radosh — whom the Left has long despised for his definitive study of the guilt of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — and Power Line’s John Hinderaker, who writes:

Frank Rich of the New York Times retired as a drama critic in order to take up his new role as the paper’s full-time drama queen. As an op-ed columnist for the Times, his assignment, apparently, is to write in such a hysterical fashion that Paul Krugman seems rational by comparison.

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Rich’s entire piece is a stunning, one-stop compendium of all the Times’s bugbears on one handy sheet of birdcage liner, and as such provides valuable insight into the increasingly deracinated world of the “intellectual” Left, who sit chained to the wall like the prisoners in Plato’s Cave, watching the puppet show inside their heads and mistaking their consensus for reality.