Frank Rich: Bring Back The Politics of Personal Destruction

[Veronica.Franco]

If you had to put a date on when the Iraq war did in the Bush administration, it would be late summer 2005. That's when the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina re-enacted the White House bungling of the war, this time with Americans as the principal victims. The stuff happening on Brownie's watch in New Orleans was recognizably the same stuff that had happened on Donald Rumsfeld's watch in Baghdad. Television viewers connected the dots and the president's poll numbers fell into the 30s. There they have largely remained - at least until Friday, when the latest New York Times-CBS News Poll put him at 29.

Now this pattern is repeating itself: a searing re-enactment of the Iraq war's lethal mismanagement is playing out on the home front, again with potentially grave political consequences. The Washington Post's exposé of the squalor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center - where some of our most grievously wounded troops were treated less like patients than detainees - has kicked off the same spiral of high-level lying and blame-shifting that followed FEMA's Katrina disasters.

Just as the debacle on the gulf was a call to arms for NBC's Brian Williams and CNN's Anderson Cooper, so the former ABC anchor Bob Woodruff has returned from his own near-death experience in Iraq to champion wounded troops let down by their government. And not just at Walter Reed. His powerful ABC News special last week unearthed both a systemic national breakdown in veterans' medical care and a cover-up. The Veterans Affairs Department keeps "two sets of books" - one telling the public that the official count of nonfatal battlefield casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at 23,000, the other showing an actual patient count of 205,000. Why the discrepancy? A new Brownie - Jim Nicholson, the former Republican National Committee hack whom President Bush installed as veterans affairs secretary - tells Mr. Woodruff "a lot of them come in for dental problems."

Yet 2007 is not 2005, and little more damage can be inflicted on the lame-duck Bush White House. The long-running Iraq catastrophe is now poised to mow down a second generation of political prey: presidential hopefuls who might have strongly challenged Bush war policy when it counted and didn't. That list starts with the candidates long regarded as their parties' 2008 favorites, John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

http://roziusunbound.blogspot.com/2007/03/frank-rich-bring-back-politics-of.html

[Captain Hilts]

1. The facts presented have no link to the conclusions...nt

[Veronica.Franco]

8. Here is a better link ...

http://wealthyfrenchman.blogspot.com/2007/03/bring-back-politics-of-personal.html

[jaysunb]

2. I wish I'd said, ALL that.......

Please, go away, Sen Clinton. :evilfrown:

[Mojorabbit]

3. Interesting what he says about

Edwards too.

[Joe Bacon]

4. Gee, Frank, YOU destoyed Al Gore every chance you could in 2000

Bob Somerby documented all those Frank Rich slanders of Al Gore in THE DAILY HOWLER.

Which I why I ignore anything Rich writes, he whines like the little boy who shut the barn door after the animals ran out.

[Tsiyu]

6. Thank you

"Hi! I'm Frank Rich.

Today for Show and Tell, I'm dressed up like Captain Obvious!"

[Kolesar]

10. Frank Rich was a theater critic until about a year ago, wasn't he?

Why was he writing about Al Gore? Actually, I had never heard of Rich before the NY Times moved him to the editorial page about a year ago.

[Joe Bacon]

11. Check The Daily Howler archives

Bob Somerby has all the background info on Frank Rich's repeated attacks on Al Gore in 2000.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/

[Kolesar]

12. I'm too busy to grind through some site I hardly ever look at...eom

[bklyncowgirl]

5. Frank Rich outlines very nicely why I will not vote for anyone who voted for the Iraq war.

As I see it, Clinton and (sadly) Edwards put their personal political ambitions ahead of the good of the country and ignored questions that other Democrats and independent minded Republicans were raising about the evidence for WMD or the wisdom of rushing to war without adequate preparation.

You don't get a do over on something like that.

[pokercat999]

7. A very serious American problem is that you can count

on your fingers the congress persons that are not the same i.e. they put their personal political ambitions ahead of EVERYTHING else, family, friends and the "good" of the country they "serve". Terms limits would be part of the solution to some of our political problems.

[Joanne98]

9. Two sets of books. That's happening a lot lately. K&R!