It’s hard to believe but Frank Rich’s latest exercise in the fantasist’s art comparing JFK to Obama is a wonder to behold. It really is. One might think it satire if Rich had never been presented as a serious essayist by the New York intelligentsia. If this were to be his first public writing, one might think him the new Jonathan Swift for its central premise is simply amazing for its utter deviation from reality. Rich, it seems, thinks that Obama is just like John Kennedy because Kennedy was somehow killed by the “hate that ended his presidency,” or something.
The part that is so fantastic is that Rich devolves to a long ago discredited theory that Kennedy was killed that dark November day in 1963 somehow because of right-wing hate for him. What is so absurd about Rich’s fantastic claim is that he wholly discounts the fact that Kennedy’s killer was a communist. In fact, Rich never even mentions that Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed communist. He hints at it obliquely but does so in a way that dismisses the ideology as in any way important.
It has been a long time since I’ve read a piece on a public figure that is one part hero worship, one part discounting of that same figure, one part pure fantasy, and one part baseless comparison to the life of a whole other public figure that is also worshiped as a hero without a legitimate reason. But Frank Rich has done it here in a way that brings to mind make J.R.R. Tolkein’s intricate and complicated plotting.
There’s so much wrong in this one piece that it’s hard to figure out where to start first, but Rich’s central premise is that JFK was killed because of a climate of “hate” engendered by the blindness of Kennedy’s detractors on the right. This, Rich seems to think, is somehow just like Obama. Well, except that Obama is still alive and no one has even made a single attempt to kill him, and all (God forbid).
Interestingly, Rich does seem to notice that John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidency did not live up to its hype. Rich notes that historians have basically rated JFK’s short tenure in the White House as a wash, neither good nor horribly bad. But even with that admission, Rich writes glowingly of Kennedy. It is still all “Camelots” and “brief shinning moments” with little justification for any other reason than mere hero worship. With that, though, Rich succumbs to the worship like so many starry-eyed members of his deluded generation.
Tea Pluribus Unum. The brew of individual liberty. What’s good for One is good for the Many.
That’s my simple message to Paul Krugman, who, along with Frank Rich, serves as the New York Times’ chief peddler of Tea-ophobia these days. If you watch ABC’s “This Week”on Sunday or read his columns, you are familiar with the Keynesian ravings of Krugman, who calls for additional government spending on a near-daily basis. If this were ancient Rome, he’d be named Stimulus Maximus and we’d mock him with scathing epodes at the monthly Bacchus festival.
But this is not ancient Rome, and 21st-century Americans are a much kinder, nobler people, motivated by charity and gratitude. Therefore, I say, Tea Party supporters, it’s time to give back to Paul Krugman. It’s time to thank the Nobel laureate for statements such as these from his latest NYT op-ed (“Divided We Fail”):
Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect? …Future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness… So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Breitbartians are crashing the gate of ABC’s election night coverage, while still other media outlets appear to be obsessed, as if the Right has gotten inside their heads.
It’s great to see ABC inviting Dana and Andrew into their election night coverage. See here for more, including some of what the Bigs have in store for election night.
ABC announced their election night coverage early on and Big Journalism Editor Dana Loesch will join the network in studio for 6 p.m. – 2 a.m. election night; Bigs founder and head of the Breitbart empire Andrew Breitbart will be bringing analysis live from Arizona.
As regards two other recent media-based stories, HBO seems to have figured out what some on the Right have known all along, Frank Rich’s bag always has been satire. Gee, who might this be based upon? The Left is obsessed in this regard. While some might see it as just one more slap at Sarah Palin, just think about how much of their relatively rare mind-space she owns.
HBO has greenlighted Veep, a Washington DC-set comedy pilot about a female Vice President of the U.S. from British comedian, writer and director Armando Ianucci. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is in talks for the lead in the project, set “very near the White House” and centered on former Senator Selina Meyer who finds being Vice President of the United States is nothing like she expected and everything everyone ever warned about. Ianucci will co-write and direct the pilot as well as executive produce with Chris Godsick and Frank Rich under the New York Times columnist’s deal with HBO.
According to some estimates, Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally drew almost 300,000 people to Washington D.C. on August 28. Had it been a rally led by Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, the mainstream media would have used precision camera angles to exaggerate the number of participants and revel in the fact that there had been another “Million Man March.” Instead, it was just 300,000 conservatives converging on the nation’s capital, so writers like the New York Times’ Frank Rich had to strain to find some way to pervert the reason behind the gathering or defile those who supported it.
In the end, Rich settled on defiling the financial backers of the rally by “outing” them. In fact, he was so diligent in publishing their names, discussing their opposition to liberalism, and cataloging the massive amounts of money they’ve given to conservative causes, that it almost seemed like he had an axe to grind.
For example, after fingering Rupert Murdoch, Rich pointed to David and Charles Koch as the “fat cats” behind the Tea Party movement, noting that TEa Partiers “may not know who these brothers are,” (which is liberal-political-speak for “I’m getting ready to give you all the dirt I can on these two guys”). (more…)
Trying to write eight-ten articles a day makes one something of a news junkie. Between 7 a.m. and 1 a.m., whole days are spent reading one of the 607 news feeds I have input into my feed reader, following up stories on the phone and maneuvering the TV remote between CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and when I can find it, even the BBC. Thanks to an agile thumb, at times I can follow the same story on all the networks at the same time.
Watching that mostly distorted coverage can drive a blogger crazy. And worse it makes one think really nasty things about the media. But no longer, no more negative thoughts. I’ve had an epiphany. Now I feel nothing but sympathy for these reporters who used to be the object of my scorn. You see they can’t help themselves. The mainstream media is not biased, they have tiny brains. That’s why the tunnel vision. These reporters are taught to categorize things into neat little boxes and do not have the capacity to think beyond those categories.
Take a look at the coverage of Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally. The press could not comprehend that people would actually travel to Washington, D.C., and attend a rally that was about concepts such as Honor and Faith, so they had to put the event into their little Tea Party or Conservative box. Despite the fact that Beck has never been part of the Tea Party movement, or the host’s declaration that the rally would not be political, reporters still got all tied up in their underwear looking for a way to stuff the rally into the boxes they know: (more…)
Frank Rich’s column in the New York Times opinion section this weekend was at the very least two things: Lies and the rehashed work of another writer. But it was also a third thing and that third thing was cover for his buddy in the Oval office and for the hard-core left-wing agenda he’s trying to force down our throats. Rich lent that cover by desperately trying to discredit “the Tea Party “as a funded-from-the-top, sham of a movement. The truth is, though, that “the Tea Party” is not funded by shadowy, rich right-wingers. It isn’t funded at all in most cases.
First of all most of what Rich wrote was but rehashed words from Jane Mayer’s slam against the Koch Brothers of New York. Three quarters of what Rich penned really came from Mayer’s New Yorker piece on the philanthropists. So, big demerits for Frank Rich for simply appropriating Mayer’s piece.
But the real point of Rich’s piece was to pile onto Mayer’s slanted attack piece with some echoed slams against the Tea Party movement in order to discredit it all. The conspiracy-minded Rich is desperate to make the movement seem like a marionette show with rich “sugar daddies” funding it and controlling it from the top. (more…)
Sometimes the best examples of the New York Times’s increasingly delusional, anti-rational, anti-American and, let’s face it, anti-human-nature mindset are to be found not on the front page, where their slavish adoration of the Obama Administration continues apace, if somewhat diminished, but in the feature pages. There, their crackpot social theories and their chic cultural Marxism are given free rein to inject their slow-acting poison into the bloodstream of the body politic, with what serious consequences we can now all see after more than four decades of this nonsense. Which is why this piece, innocuously published in the Fashion & Style section, is so important.
If you want to encounter the smiling face of evil, read on:
A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding
After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.
But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?
You read that right: the Times has just declared war on best friends. By now, nothing that emerges from that seething pile of maleficent animosity toward every decent thing should surprise us, but this is a new low, even for the paper that publishes Frank Rich. And it gets worse: (more…)
As a public service, and so you don’t have to read Frank Rich in the New York Times, here’s some inspiration for his next fusion of cheap pop-cultural references and political punditry. We’re sure he’ll be able to discover some parallels between this 1994 Coen brothers’ classic and our contemporary situation:
The arc of the MSM is at once predictable and satisfying, especially when it comes to the liberal media’s slowly dawning realization that the Obamessiah ain’t all they cracked him up to be. First, a willful decision to opt for fantasy over reality, then denials, then the most modest of criticisms (delivered more in sorrow than in anger), then the who-cares turn of the worm, then outright hostility, then the acceptance of defeat… and finally, Jimmy Carter-like, rehabilitation and reassement.
In the “Being There” presidency of Barack Obama, we have now arrived somewhere between step 4 and step 5, the part of the movie where the media, having been treated like cheap slatterns, drabs and courtesans, wakes up one morning face down in the gutter and realizes she’s no good. Not yet ready to start regaining her lost dignity, she blames herself for the misfortune than has befallen her lover — she’s not worthy!
The occasion for these reflections is the disastrous Oval Office, empty-desk speech made by the president manque the other night as he attempted to convince the nation that he is, in fact, in charge of something other than his malevolent shredding of a Constitution he obviously so clearly despises. It was a speech panned by nearly everybody (except the reliably ridiculous Paul Begala, a man who gives the word “toady” a bad name), made all the more risible by the ludicrous sight of Obama sitting behind the empty Resolute desk, like a ’60s college radical who’s briefly occupying the president’s study. From a thumb-sucker by Adam Nagourney in the New York Times:
On blogs, on a blur of cable news shows, on magazine Web sites, in the morning newspapers, the verdict within 12 hours was nearly unanimous: Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday night about the oil spill had been pedantic, vague and uninspiring — a lost opportunity.
“It’s the first Obama speech ever panned by the talking heads,” Mike Allen reported in the Politico Playbook.
But so what? Does it really matter if you lose the pundits anymore?
Did you ever wish you were one of those big-time journalists in Manhattan, sitting in a nice office, opining on the state of the world each week and getting well paid for it? Would you like to say the same thing over and over again at tiresome length, in prose that reads like it was translated from the original Hungarian? Would you like to occupy and depreciate some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the country?
Well, you can. All you have to do is follow a few simple rules.
Like most of his fellow, very bad, Op-Ed writers on the New York Times, Frank Rich — non-bestselling author and showbiz wannabee — has a few little bugbears and bogeymen he likes to write about each week in the course of wasting oceans of ink and newsprint in his mind-numbing essays about… well, pretty much nothing, except the usual suspects: show tunes, gay rights, and Those Darned Republicans.
Bernie Goldberg is a master of hyperbole. Jon Stewart is a master of deflection. For those of you who missed the action, the Goldberg-Stewart Wars have heated up again over the last couple of days, with long-range missiles volleyed back and forth between The O’Reilly Factor studio at Fox and Stewart’s camp over at Comedy Central.
The latest skirmish began Monday night when Goldberg described Stewart’s softball interview of the Times’ Frank Rich as a “lap dance,” adding that Stewart “practically had your tongue down his [Rich’s] throat.”
Goldberg not only knows hyperbole, he wields it as if he invented it. Just look at the title of his most recent book—A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.
But Stewart, a smart and funny man with impeccable comic timing, is equally skilled in the art of diversionary tactics. He launched a counterattack on Tuesday. His flippant rejoinder to the Rich French kiss salvo was—referring to past interviews with conservatives on his show—that he and Bill Kristol cavorted in “the Champagne Room,” and he and John McCain were “f—ing like bunnies.”
New York Times’ columnist Frank Rich outs himself as a conspiracy theorist in his Saturday column, “Welcome to Confederate History Month,” wherein he fabricates a synthesis of current anti-Obamacare sentiments and events. To build his theory, he connects dots that don’t exist, and realigns a few that do, into a mishmash construct bordering on a rant.
His goal is to use the new “N” Class word to refer to the millions of American citizens who have rallied against the vast expansion of the federal government at public events called Tea Parties. In Rich’s mind, these Americans are the “R” Word.
This piece, by Andrew Ferguson in Commentary, isalmost too easy, but it sure is fun. Did the little furry mammals tuck into the dinosaur eggs with so much gusto?
The tiny corner of the New York Times empire where David Barstow works is called the investigative unit. The name has an impressive urgency to it, like the title of a TV spin-off—CSI: Times Investigative Unit. You can imagine guys in Weejuns and khakis getting a hot tip and springing into action, yanking their tweed coats off the backs of chairs and shouting something irreverent and ironical over their shoulders as they bolt for the newsroom door.
Perhaps a new “torture memo” has been leaked; maybe a politician has committed an act of creative accounting on Supplement B (3) subpart vii of his financial-disclosure form. Or maybe a large number of Americans way out there in the land beyond the Bronx have been caught holding political opinions that are dangerously bizarre. TIU is on the case.
These strange-thinking Americans, loosely roped together as the Tea Party movement, sent David Barstow on his most recent investigation. His assignment lasted for five uninterrupted months and bore literary fruit, with a 4,500-word front-page story on February 16. “Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right,” the headline read—aptly enough, for a premonitory suggestion of bombs going off just over the horizon rumbled through Barstow’s story. To the astute Times reader lingering with the paper over breakfast, the hints were unmistakable.
There was the dateline, for one thing: Sandpoint, Idaho. The reader might rub his chin?.?.?.?-Sandpoint? Vaguely familiar…rings a bell…let’s see…Wait! God Almighty! Yes, that Sandpoint, notorious 15 years ago as the home of gun-slinging Randy Weaver and his Ruby Ridge survivalist compound, the headquarters of the Aryan Nation group of gun owners, a hothouse of gun-owning militias and paramilitary groups with their guns?.?.?.
Why does Frank Rich still have a job? Not only is Rich the last and least interesting of the Op-Ed columnists of the New York Times — and, given that his competition includes Maureen Dowd and Paul “The End is Near!” Krugman, that is really saying something — he’s also the Times’s worst drama critic, whose judgments have not stood the test of even two decades, a non-bestselling author and a failed showbiz wannabee.
Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were. True, there is video evidence of the homophobic venom directed at Barney Frank — but, hey, Frank is white, so no racism there!
As you know, more young people get their news from Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show that anyplace else. For a sizable swath of the population, it hasn’t happened until they’ve seen it on Stewart’s Comedy Central show, and that includes reading about it in the New York Times. So when Stewart takes on the high-minded, but utterly false, media meme of those “racist tea-baggers,” so assiduously peddled by tired old white men of the Times like Frank Rich, people are going to notice.
Click on the link and watch the opening segment with Wyatt Cenac, making good ribald fun of the MSM tropes that the Tea Partiers hate black people and gay people. Of course, this being Stewart, there’s a good deal of Fox News bashing as well
But the larger point it this: when you’ve lost Jon Stewart — when a fake newscaster gets closer to the truth than the “real” newscasters — then the MSM’s fast-fading pretense to authority has just about disappeared.
Hard to know what to make of this piece by Eliott C. McLaughlin — except, of course, that it pretty much sums up the state of journalistic thinking in the MSM these days, which includes a reflexive disdain for constitutional principles it disagrees with while trying to be “fair and balanced.”
Experts: Angry rhetoric protected, but can be disturbing
Here’s how it begins:
Letting disgruntled citizens vent is important to national security, experts say, but some messages emanating from angry Americans in recent weeks have pressed the boundaries of free speech.
Important to national security? Free speech is important for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that, since John Milton’s Areopagiticaessay, it has been the basis of all the liberties of modern democracy. And what, exactly, are the “boundaries of free speech” in a society whose Constitution states, in the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law.. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
Politicians have reported slurs as well as threatening letters and phone calls. Congressmen have reported vandalism to their offices. One said he was spit on. Another said his brother’s gas line was cut after a Tea Party member posted his address online.
Tea Party leaders denounce the threats and deny involvement, pointing to fringe elements — not Tea Party members, per se, but groups with degrees of overlapping ideologies.
But the angry rhetoric is not isolated to fringe groups. Both mainstream liberal and conservative camps have joined the chorus, and while some of the language sounds threatening, most of it is protected.
Are you a progressive network or newspaper that has sought to portray the Tea Party Movement as racist with selective video editing, and now you have those same Tea Party Members pointing out the lack of diversity at your network or paper?
Well fear not. Progressives Hosts and Writers, the same people who brought you the slogan, “some of my best friends are Black,” are pleased to announce our latest business venture named “Members of our News Contributors Team are Black.”
Yes that right if you are your network’s or newspaper’s Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Dana Milbank or Frank Rich,, you no longer secretly have to feel like a hypocrite when leveling charges of racism against conservatives while hiding the lack of diversity at your employer’s when you shop at “Members of our News Contributors Team are Black.”
Just in time for 2010 and the mid-term elections, we have stocked the best quality Black Progressive Shills to be on your personal news contributor team. Just think of your comfort level during your media parties with Progressive politicians as you rattle off the list of Black Contributors that we have provided for you as you rip into Rush, Hannity, Beck and others with pride.
We have stocked a whole range of quality Blacks of various stereotypes: (more…)
You know those awful Tea Partiers — racist, stump-toothed,Republican-voting rednecked hillbillies who drive around in gas-guzzling recreational vehicles and answer the call of Sarah Palin’s Facebook page whenever it orders them to attack gays, Democrats and blacks, unless they’re too busy organizing Christian militias and showing off their their collections of Nazi memorabilia while attending gun shows. After all, that’s what professional opinion-mongers like Frank Rich of the New York Times keep telling us.
Yeah, right. Here’s Rick Moran, taking a look at some recent polls:
And it was all going so well for Democrats and liberals in the media.
Display a picture or vid clip of angry, contorted faces of the tea partiers, add the race card, accuse the “core” of the movement of being birthers, and generally play to the idea that this vast, grassroots movement is a small, insignificant bunch of sour grape Republicans who hate Obama.
Well, it worked for a while. But something funny happened on the way to smearing millions of ordinary Americans worried about the future; surveys of tea partiers show them to be as mainstream as a McDonald’s french fry.
Bill Whittle posted this video essay on Big Journalism recently, which got us to thinking: what would today’s media make of the sentiments that animated the Declaration of Independence? You remember, this musty old thing:
Not so much the famous bit about “when in the course of human events,” but the stuff further down, the things that really angered the colonists about the form of government they were about to cast off.
Let the Facts be submitted to a candid world: (more…)
The “mainstream media” are losing patience with, and even interest in, their erstwhile hero. President Barack Obama never had a chance with the Ailes-Murdoch crowd, of course, and it didn’t take the president long to offend the fierce left wing of the blogosphere. But now, finally, the MSM, which views itself as ideologically neutral, has found ideologically neutral reasons to lose patience with him: that he may be ineffectual; that he doesn’t know how to play the game; that he can’t get anything done. Exhibit A: the health-care bill. The Times’s Frank Rich, the astute dean of the commentariat, wrote recently that Obama has failed to “communicate a compelling narrative” in office and, as a result, “could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts.”
Leaving aside for the moment the hilarious statement that Frank Rich, the erstwhile “Butcher of Broadway,” showbiz wannabe and non-bestselling author, is now the “astute dean of the commentariart” — wonder what David Broder has to say about that? — this would seem on the surface to be that moment in the movie when the hero realizes he’s been duped all along and now must take charge of the situation and expose the bad guys for who they really are:
But since this is, after all, Howard Fineman, one ought not to take these brave words of independence at face value. And sure enough, one would be right not to:
And yet this collective falling out of love is great news for Obama. Calling it quits with the MSM is just what he needs. A breakup might even save his presidency.
Now that this deviously clever psywar operation has been revealed, Fineman goes on to explain: (more…)
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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