Unfortunately, yes — it’s Frank Rich. His latest column in the New York Times (“The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged”) has all the hallmarks of offhand vituperation and contempt that we’ve come to expect from the butcher of Broadway. Ron Radosh takes on some of his distortions in a fine response: Frank Rich: An Embarrassment to the New York Times.

In Sunday’s New York Times, its far-left shotgun columnist Frank Rich has written a column with the title “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged,” which is ironic, since the title so well describes most of his own articles! In a paper whose editors think of themselves as moderates or centrists, but in which most of the columnists and many of the news stories tilt so far to the Left that it approximates the style and contents of the 60’s Village Voice, Rich stands out as the most extreme of their writers.

This time he goes after the tea party movement, and instead of a nuanced and balanced appraisal, he begins by trying to blame the murder suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, who flew his small plane into a building housing an IRS division in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 18th, on the new movement. Rich ignores what we know about Mr. Stack. He was furious about IRS rules that prohibited him from using knowledge he had as a software engineer to start his own business. In his rambling, sometimes incoherent letter, Stack attacks “organized religion” and different laws for the rich rather than the poor (standard leftist boilerplate), and goes after the late “neo-con” Senator Daniel P. Moynihan as his arch villain, all targets that distinguish him a great deal from today’s tea party advocates. George W. Bush, whom certainly Frank Rich did his share of attacking for months on end, is described by Stack as “the presidential puppet” of the rich who pull the strings.

Tea partier indeed! Oh, Rich covers himself by writing that he was obviously “a lone madman,” and that it would be “glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying tea partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.’” But then Rich, having made the accusation while pretending to disavow it, goes on to say that his manifesto is a “frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage” that “overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.” In other words, he was not formally a tea party member or advocate, but nevertheless well might have been because he shares their views! A distinction without a difference!

Read the rest.

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