The Moose Stops Here (Rich / NYT)

[struggle4progress]

By FRANK RICH
Published: November 16, 2008

... Over at Fox News, Greta Van Susteren has been trashing the credibility of her own network’s chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, for his report on Sarah Palin’s inability to identify Africa as a continent, while Bill O’Reilly valiantly defends Cameron’s honor. At Slate, a post-mortem of conservative intellectuals descended into name-calling, with the writer Ross Douthat of The Atlantic labeling the legal scholar Douglas Kmiec a “useful idiot.”

In an exuberant class by himself is Michael Barone, a ubiquitous conservative commentator who last week said that journalists who trash Palin (more than a few of them conservatives) do so because “she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.” He was being “humorous,” he subsequently explained to Politico, though the joke may be on him. Barone writes for U.S. News & World Report, where his 2008 analyses included keepers like “Just Call Her Sarah ‘Delano’ Palin.” Just call it coincidence, but on Election Day, word spread that the once-weekly U.S. News was downsizing to a monthly — a step closer to the fate of Literary Digest, the weekly magazine that vanished two years after its straw poll predicted an Alf Landon landslide over Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 ...

The G.O.P. ran out of steam and ideas well before George W. Bush took office and Tom DeLay ran amok, and it is now more representative of 20th-century South Africa during apartheid than 21st-century America. The proof is in the vanilla pudding. When David Letterman said that the 10 G.O.P. presidential candidates at an early debate looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club,” he was the first to correctly call the election ...

There were as many Republican prejudices as candidates. In primary season, the whispered antipathy among some conservative evangelicals toward Mormons grew so loud that Mitt Romney felt compelled to give a speech defending his faith (but was so fearful of inciting further wrath that he said the word Mormon only once). The conservative gatekeeper Michael Medved spotlighted another whisper campaign in May, writing that the popular moderate Florida G.O.P. governor Charlie Crist had been “single since his divorce in 1980 (after a marriage that lasted only a year)” and was the subject of “nasty rumors of possible gay activity.” Crist announced his engagement to a woman weeks later, but by then he was no longer a serious contender for the ticket ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/opinion/16rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[BrklynLiberal]

1. FrankRich gets better and better..

[GOPNotForMe]

2. Glad he mentioned that Slate forum.

I was SHOCKED at how quickly it turned into a nasty inner-fight. I was actually very interested to see what they were going to say about this election and then they started getting really nasty really fast and it just stopped.

[FreeJG]

3. So glad Rich mentioned

Florida's gay governor. Wonder if he'll actually go through with getting married? He's been single now for almost 29 years!!!!




come on...come out come out where ever you are!

[bleever]

4. Such a lovely autopsy.

Mr. Rich brings history and poetry to his post-mortem, and it's a pity that both are lost on the Republicans.

Okay: not such a pity. :)

[Cha]

5. Frank Rich has so much

rich history to work with and he does it magnificently.

I hope more than a few readers learn from this moose article.