Quote of the Day

"The idea that this can be written out of history, that it was on Cheney and Bush's watch that the biggest domestic attack of our lifetime happened and that somehow that's off the ledger -- we'll just begin the accounting on September 12th, 2011 -- It's so preposterous and it's amazing to me the extent to which in sort of normal public discourse they kind of get away with it."

-- Frank Rich on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, commenting on Dick Cheney's positively laughable criticism of the Obama Administration's performance during the Benghazi attack, which happened on September 11th of last year

Here was Cheney's exact quote, if you haven't seen it yet: "When we were there, on our watch, we were always ready on 9/11, on the anniversary."

For the record, when Cesca brought this up yesterday on the podcast, it was the only time I've ever expressed such utter, audible frustration that it actually made Bob laugh. It's fucking incomprehensible that, as Rich says, these idiots can continue to arrogantly strut and make the ludicrous claim that they "kept us safe" when the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history happened while they were in office. At the risk of violating Godwin's Law, by the logic they consistently use you could easily argue that Hitler was a pretty good guy to the Jews as long as you don't count that nasty Holocaust thing.

This isn't a matter of politics. This is objective fact and an insult to your, my, and all of our intelligence. The idea that we're expected to ignore the original 9/11 when we consider the Bush Administration's record of keeping Americans safe requires a kind of suspension of disbelief on our part -- and chutzpah on theirs -- that normal, non-sociopathic human beings are simply incapable of.

By the way, Maddow's entire takedown of the Republican conspiracy machine on her show last night was one for the ages.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Quote of the Day

"This defense is a smoke screen. The real transgressions of the Murdoch empire are not its outré partisanship, its tabloid sleaze, its Washington lobbying, or even what liberals most love to hate, the bogus 'fair and balanced' propaganda masquerading as journalism at Fox News. In fact, these misdemeanors are red herrings—distractions from the real News Corp. corruption that now threatens to bring down its management and radically reconfigure and reduce its international corporate footprint. The bigger story is this: An otherwise archetypal media colossus, with apolitical TV shows (American Idol), movies (Avatar), and cable channels (FX) like any other, is controlled by a family (and its tight coterie of made men and women, exemplified by the recently departed Rebekah Brooks) that countenances the intimidation and silencing of politicians, regulators, competitors, journalists, and even ordinary citizens to maximize its profits and power and to punish perceived corporate, political, and personal enemies. And, as we now know conclusively, some of this behavior has broken the law."

-- Frank Rich in New York Magazine

Take 20 minutes or so out of your day if you can and read Rich's entire piece; it's relentlessly detailed in its excoriation of Murdoch's empire as anything but your average media conglomerate.

Expanding on what both Rich and the previously linked Peter Daou piece have to say, you might also want to take a look at Fox News's latest completely-made-up controversy that's sure to turn into its next very public crusade. And then read a classic and thoroughly brilliant piece by Matt Osborne that dissects the Orwellian origins of the right-wing fear factory.

Yeah, it's a lot to take in -- but it's gotta be better than staring blankly at that little flashing cursor on your computer screen for hours on end.

The Whites of Their Ideals

As usual, Frank Rich steps up to the plate and knocks it into the parking lot. From his must-read op-ed in yesterday's New York Times:

"How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far...

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan 'Take our country back!,' these are the people they want to take the country back from."

Rich's eventual point is spot-on: The tea baggers who hold out for some kind of revolution to return them to their rightful place as the entitled rulers of the land are doomed from the start. They've already lost, because the actual demographic make-up of the country is changing so drastically that those whose hegemony they're defending -- good, old-fashioned white people -- will soon be in the minority. They know this, and it scares the hell out of them.

Quote of the Day

"There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy."

-- Frank Rich (the New York Times's most potent voice of reason), basically making the same argument I made here and at the Huffington Post last week, in a really good piece in today's Times on the fallout from the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts

Quote of the Day

"(Michael) Steele is widely regarded as a clown by observers of all political persuasions, but he is clownish like a fox. His actions in this incident offer some hilarious and instructive insights into what’s going on in the Republican hierarchy right now as it tries to cope not just with our first African-American president but with a restive base embracing right-wing tea-party populism that loathes the establishment in both parties. And though Steele is black, and perhaps the most enthusiastic player of the race card in American politics today, race was a red herring in his Reid vendetta. It threw most everyone off the scent of his real motivation, which had nothing to do with black versus white but everything to do with green, as in money."

-- Frank Rich, in a great piece in today's New York Times

Road to Ruin

Frank Rich one-ups everybody who's rightfully complaining about the staggeringly stupid overreaction to the failed underwear bombing by comparing it to something we actually should be worried about.

The New York Times: "The Other Plot To Wreck America" by Frank Rich/1.10.10

Seethe the Day

A couple of weeks ago, I finally cracked and admitted that I thought the ongoing right-wing rage directed at Barack Obama was based at least partially in a certain amount of racism. I instantly caught crap for this, both in my e-mail inbox, at the Huffington Post and on other websites. The thing is, in the initial piece I wrote that brought up the issue of racism, I went out of my way to mention that the race factor is by no means the only thing at play in the virulent, supposedly populist uprising aimed at the White House. There's a hell of a lot more going on than just that.

In today's New York Times, Frank Rich gets into that -- into, say, Glenn Beck's ability to tap into the vague and silly feeling some Americans have that they're living in the Matrix -- and does so with a really commendable level of balance.

"Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of [Joe] Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center."

The New York Times: "Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day" by Frank Rich/9.20.09

Drawing Fire

Leave it to Frank Rich to articulate many of my own thoughts throughout last week much better (or at least with less extraneous profanity) than I did.

"The biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

The New York Times: "The Guns of August" by Frank Rich/8.22.09