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.

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. (more…)

Never heard of Leo Hindery?  Here’s his profile:

Leo Hindery, Jr., is Managing Partner of InterMedia Partners VII, LP, a New York-based media industry private equity fund which he founded in 2005 and which is a successor to six previous InterMedia investment funds that he formed beginning in 1988. The investments of those earlier funds were sold in 1998-1999.

Until October 2004, Mr. Hindery was Chairman (and until May 2004 Chief Executive Officer) of The YES Network, the nation’s largest regional sports network which he founded in the summer of 2001 as the television home of the New York Yankees, where he won five executive producer Emmys for outstanding programming. From December 1999 until January 2001, Mr. Hindery was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GlobalCenter Inc., a major Internet services company, which was then merged into Exodus Communications, Inc. Until November 1999, Mr. Hindery was President and Chief Executive Officer of AT&T Broadband, which was formed out of the March 1999 merger of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) into AT&T. (AT&T Broadband encompassed all of AT&T’s video, local telephone and Internet services operations.) Mr. Hindery was elected President of TCI and all of its affiliated companies, then the world’s largest cable television system operator and programming entity, in February 1997.

Mr. Hindery is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and from 2003 through December 2007 was Senate-appointed Vice Chair of the HELP Commission formed by an Act of Congress to improve U.S. foreign assistance. From December 2006 until February 2008, he served as Senior Economic Policy Advisor for presidential candidate John Edwards.

Okay, so Leo got snookered by John Edwards. And, there’s been some criticism of some of his business activities. That doesn’t discount his importance within the Democrat Party — or what he’s saying now. (more…)