Frank Rich’s frontal lobes go dark
John Hinderacker files the psychiatric report:
Frank Rich of the New York Times retired as a drama critic in order to take up his new role as the paper’s full-time drama queen. As an op-ed columnist for the Times, his assignment, apparently, is to write in such a hysterical fashion that Paul Krugman seems rational by comparison.
Currently, the most-recommended article on the Times web site is Rich’s column, “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged.” The “axis,” as described by Rich, includes 1) a murderer, 2) kooks, 3) Tea Partiers, and 4) Republican politicians and Presidential candidates. The point of Rich’s column is to suggest, in his usual subtle fashion, that these groups are more or less interchangeable.
Rich starts with “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.” The last sentence is classic Rich. I’ll hazard a guess that Stack’s murder-suicide was not an omen of anything, and will not ignite a rash of intentional airplane crashes.
Now, for instance, if there was some political cadidate out there who had spent, let’s say, twenty years listening to some fanatical preacher going on about the AIDS virus being a government plot against blacks and screaming “God Damn America” at the top of his lungs, we certainly wouldn’t want to take a chance electing that person to any serious office. But this was a country founded on tax protest, and in the modern era, from Proposition 13 in California and Ronald Reagan on through the Tea Parties last summer, no one has thought that flying airplanes into IRS headquarters was a solution. Frank Rich, on the other hand, in his shadowland of Manhattan gooberism, has lost the capacity to mark distinctions that separate his hatreds from reality.