Frank Rich was, at one time, drama critic for the New York Times. Apparently the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd finally got to the moonbat because the Times editoral staff eventually realized he’d gone ‘round the bend and decided to change his assignments – or at least have Mr. Rich ease off on skewering the New York theater community.

The logical place to move someone who’s burned out on watching things like the 25th revival of Oklahoma is…where else? the Op-Ed page. Apparently, Mr. Rich has always wanted to grow up and write about politics and government.

Given that Mr. Rich knows less about politics than he does about the theater, perhaps the Times should have made him their Restaurant Critic. At least then he would have been well-fed and could have saved his readers the unpleasant experience of up-chucking after reading him. After all, how unappetizing can you make a restaurant review? Considerably less nauseating than the gibberish he writes when scribbling earnestly about politics.

One would think that a knowledge of history would be a prerequisite for writing about politics and government – at least in this day and age. The great Time-Life reporter Theodore H. White wrote that the best political writers used to come from the sports pages. Sports writers with their colorful metaphors and a familiarity with making personalities come to life turned out to be perfect political reporters.

Maybe Mr. Rich could have been transferred to the sports page so that he could have gained a little experience before taking the plunge and writing about politics. Alas, I doubt whether the Times had a beat that covered Tiddlywinks. Or Bridge. Or perhaps, “Go Fish.”

From what I can tell of this article written for the Sunday New York Times, Mr. Rich should certainly give up writing about politics and make another career move; this time, he could write fiction. For children. He’d be a perfect modern day “Mother Goose.”

In fact, the only thing missing from his current column is “Once upon a time…”

Mr. Rich’s piece is a fairy tale about both the past and the present. The recent revelation of Deep Throat’s identity is Rich’s hook:

This confusion of Hollywood’s version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he “follow the money” into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.

Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate’s 30th anniversary, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn’t explain what the scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to being the “third-rate burglary” of Nixon administration spin. It is once again being covered up.

First of all, two thirds of America can’t remember what they had for breakfast last week much less what happened 33 years ago. And why don’t the American people “remember?” Could it be that they’re too busy learning about other, more multiculturally acceptable topics than something as mundane as American history? No, of course not.

And who, might I inquire, is “covering up” Watergate today? Could it be Mr. Rich’s own employer, the New York Times? Or perhaps even the biggest media benificiary of the scandal The Washington Post? Didn’t see any replays of folksy Sam Ervin or monotonal John Dean on T.V. either. I guess it was the press that’s covering up Watergate again. For shame!

Then Mr. Rich says something both curious and unintelligible at the same time:

Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. “The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before” was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon’s in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls “the best obtainable version of the truth.”

How would resucitating the scandal shed light on the Bush Administration or, as Mr. Rich poetically puts it our “own present nightmare?” And who has been “intimidated” or “snuffed out?” (A curious choice of words given Eason Jordan’s nightmarish scenario of the military deliberately targeting jourrnalists).

By implication, Mr. Rich has not been intimidated which, of course, makes him far superior to any other journalist who cowers in the shadows simply regurgitating White House press releases. What’s that you say? Are you trying to tell me that the media is generally opposed to the President and his policies and have exhibited the most unreasoning and harsh criticism ever let loose against a Chief Executive. Nope. Not according to the ex-drama critic.

Mr. Rich then takes a little trip…off the deep end:

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To foster it, Nixon’s special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn’t run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of “destroying the old establishment,” sound like the founding father of today’s blogging lynch mobs.

Gosh…maybe I should take down my autographed poster of Chuck Colson in a bathing suit. I wouldn’t want to be too obvious about my allegiance to the “founding father of today’s blogging lynch mob.” And as far as Mr. Rich is concerned…well, there’s never a rope around when you need one.

Now we get to the nub of Mr. Rich’s concerns. Evidently, the MSM doesn’t run full blown biographies of its guests prior to their appearances:

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt – and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. “I want kids to look up to heroes,” Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC’s “Today” show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring “the confidence of the president of the United States.” Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times’s Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The “Today” host, Matt Lauer, didn’t mention any of this – or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson – and he was ubiquitous – ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a “former White House counsel.”

Imagine that! Indentifying a former White House counsel as…as…A former White House counsel! Shocking! And Mr. Colson’s prison term was marked by something else Mr. Lauer never mentioned. A jail cell conversion to evangelical Christianity for which Mr. Colson has been praised from one end of the country to the other. Guess even Mr. Rich forgot that little tidbit. Or that people can change. Why look at Rich himself. From hysterical drama critic to hysterical political commentator. Now there’s a conversion!

And, by the way. “Former Nixon media maven” Roger Ailes was tangentially involved in the 1972 campaign. To call him a “media maven” of Nixon shows poor research on the part of Rich. But then, when you’re Drama Critic of the Times, all you have to read before you write a review is the program.

Mr. Rich then tries a little drama writing of his own:

In the most recent example, all the president’s men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam’s holy book. These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend’s little-read papers.

Tom McGuire did my leg work for me here:

Oh, dear – the “neo Colsons” include CNN, which cited the Pentagon assertion before rebutting it; the Washington Post, which implicated Newsweek in their lead paragraph; and the NY Times. Have the neo-Colson’s swept the board? (Read Mr. McGuire’s entire screed. He like, uses facts and things. You know, the kinds of stuff Mr. Rich usually forgets to include in his columns).

And in the most painful passage of his entire review, er column, Mr. Rich tries his durndest to connect you-know-what-with-you-know-who:

THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to connect those dots on the news media’s center stage of television. You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much “gotcha” journalism. That’s a rather absurd premise given that no “gotcha” journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.

Just a little perspective, please. When every student who ever enrolled in a journalism class since 1974 has daydreamed about being the next Woodward and Bernstein and when both newspapers and TV stations put a more tangible root to the rumor that “Gotcha” journalism was in by creating and funding entire departments of “investigative reporters” I would say that anyone who says Watergate spawned more ambush journalism was pretty much spot on.

Secondly, the “marathon length” of the Viet Nam war was nearly 8 years (combat operations from 1965-72). If the Iraq war is a marathon, let me run in it. Being an old, fat man it’s probably the only marathon that I could finish. How in the wide, wide, world of sports did we get an analogy of the length of the Viet Nam war with Iraq? How does 8 years compare with 2 years? Isn’t 2 years like 4 times shorter than 8 years? I nearly flunked math but even I can tell the difference between 2 years and 8 years.

Perhaps Mr. Rich is thinking in terms of a musical comedy. If that’s the case, we can forgive him. After all, a musical usually only has three acts. And reading Mr. Rich’s column is like sitting through a very bad production of Bertold Brecht’s incomprehensible Three Penny Opera. After “Mack the Knife,” you just want to pick up and go home.

UPDATE

Pat over at Brainsters has some good thoughts:

I looked at Rich’s column as a potential post for Lifelike, but skipped it because it was too predictable. You could read similar stuff over at the Daily Kos diaries any time. The press is in the back pocket of the Republicans, nobody ever asks the president about the Downing Street Memo, they’re all a bunch of neocons (although keeping with the Watergate theme, Rich refers to them as neo-Colsons). Hilariously he accuses the Bush Administration of releasing bad news on the Friday before Memorial Day; Tom checked his calendar and notes that it was the Friday after Memorial Day.

And Eric over at Classical Values tells us bloggers we’ve obviously got some serious work to do:

Much as I hate to admit it, Rich is right. What I want to know is, precisely how did he find out about the “ruthless program of intimidation”? Who leaked? Where the hell did that sneak find out that bloggers have been using the full weight of the federal government to threaten antitrust actions against the major networks? That, of course, is exactly what we do! Like Bush’s hubris, blogger misuse of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division outstrips Nixon’s by the day.

While it’s been tough work destroying the old establishment, by writing such exposes of the blogosphere in such a blatant and challenging way, Frank Rich highlights an embarrassing point: obviously the blogosphere has not been tough enough or thorough enough!