I don't ordinarily read Frank Rich, who writes an op-ed column for the New York Times, but this book review in the New York Review of Books caught my eye. If you can believe it, Rich thinks that Barack Obama is insufficiently progressive. That tells you everything you need to know about Frank Rich and his world. Notice, as you read the review, the many scurrilous attacks on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Rich has an unhealthy obsession with these men, which is one of the reasons I don't read his columns. Here is a taste of Rich's review:
His [Obama's] achievements so far have been accomplished in spite of obstacles
that would fell most mortals—the almost uncountable messes he inherited
from Bush-Cheney, a cratered economy, a sclerotic Congress in thrall to
lobbyists and special-interest money, and a rabid opposition
underwritten by a media empire that owns both America’s most-watched
cable news channel and its most highly circulated newspaper. Indeed it
could be argued that the matrix of crises facing Obama would have
outmatched any Bush successor, no matter how talented. (They certainly
would have drowned John McCain, whose utter cluelessness about the
economic crisis alarmed even his Republican allies in 2008.) But Obama
knew what he was getting into when he ran for president, and the
question that matters now is how he can do the job better.
I love the part about Obama facing "rabid opposition underwritten by a media empire that owns both America's most-watched cable news channel [Fox] and its most highly circulated newspaper [the Wall Street Journal]." Does Rich not realize that the media in this country are overwhelmingly pro-Obama, and that they did everything they could, including conspire to lie about the opposition, to support his campaign? Does he not realize that these same media continue to mislead the American people about what Obama is doing and why? Do progressives really believe that conservatives control the media? If so, then they are less intelligent than I thought, and I already thought they were stupid.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 