Reading up on Frank Rich

Feature | greta, February 3rd, 2006

Here’s what we’re reviewing to prep for Monday’s show (call up the full articles on TimesSelect. They’re worth the read):

As everyone knows now — except for the 22 percent, according to a recent Harris poll, who still believe that Saddam helped plan 9/11 — it’s the truthiness of all those imminent mushroom clouds that sold the invasion of Iraq. What’s remarkable is how much fictionalization plays a role in almost every national debate. Even after a big humbug is exposed as blatantly as Professor Marvel in ”The Wizard of Oz” — FEMA’s heck of a job in New Orleans, for instance — we remain ready and eager to be duped by the next tall tale. It’s as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.

The selling of Samuel Alito is a perfect illustration of how our world works…

Frank Rich, “Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito,” The New York Times, January 22, 2006

WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don’t get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers’ fictions to discern what’s really happening. What we’re seeing now is the wheels coming off: As the administration’s stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G…

Frank Rich, “It Takes a Potemkin Village,” The New York Times, December 11, 2005

THERE hasn’t been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on ”The Early Show” on CBS. Last week the setting was ”Today” on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer’s questions about Karl Rove…Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove’s serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in ”Psycho.” Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

Frank Rich, “It’s Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby,” The New York Times, October 26, 2005

Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. ”We will stay the course,” he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man? A president can’t stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won’t stay with him.

Frank Rich, “Someone Tell the President the War is Over,” The New York Times, August 14, 2005

…What’s more, ”The Daily Show” has fulfilled its mission without being particularly ideological. On the day of Baghdad’s liberation, Mr. Stewart told his viewers that ”if you are incapable of feeling at least a tiny amount of joy at watching ordinary Iraqis celebrate this, you are lost to the ideological left.” Then he added: ”If you are incapable of feeling badly that we even had to use force in the first place, you are ideologically lost to the right.” He implored ”both of those groups to leave the room now.” That would still leave a vast audience. The coordinates of his comedy, falling somewhere between the poles of left and right, may delineate the precise location of the ambivalence and anxiety that many, if not most, Americans have felt about their first pre-emptive war (even in victory, according to last week’s CBS/New York Times poll). If that means Mr. Stewart has located the political center, his humor is so sharp that it never seems like the mushy middle.

Frank Rich, “Jon Stewart’s Perfect Pitch,” The New York Times,
April 20, 2003