Frank Rich Needs To STFU

Frank Rich, or Conrad, or whatever he's called. I just call him an idiot.

That's it. I've had it with this guy; I'm angrier than Michael Savage in 100-degree weather. Frank Rich. Some snotty NYT editorialist, he's the worst kind of media man. I want to take some time to refute his article, "McCain's Suspension Bridge To Nowhere". It's just garbage.

For instance, his introduction:

WHAT we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to get to the White House.

This is BS. Why? Find out after more BS.

When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat.

Not a bit true. What Frankie is saying here is that McCain went to Washington for his own selfish reasons to try and sabotage any progress being made on a bailout in order to "save his campaign". This is a 100%, absolute, categorical, you-are-pants and it's no. Henry Paulson, commander of the bailout plan, wanted the House Republicans' support on the deal, which they were refusing to give. Lindsey Graham, a moderate like McCain and someone close to Paulson, was contacted by none other than Paulson himself, who said (and I suppose I'm paraphrasing), "You have to get McCain. He's the only one who can do it." Doing it, in this case, means using his political clout in the House to get enought support from the Republicans on the fence. So, McCain reluctantly suspended his campaign to go to Washington. What, do you think he could have convinced them on the phone!? E-mail (which, by the way, McCain doesn't do, thanks Obama)!? Frank is totally misguided, but hey, he's just parroting the typical liberal talking point, that's it's just some conspiracy to save his poll numbers.

Oh yeah, about that. Right when McCain went to Washington, a Gallup poll and Zogby poll were released. The former had him exactly tied, and the latter had him ahead. What bollocks. Also, Frank mentions a "bipartisan agreement", essentially a deal. There never was one, as the Weekly Standard points out.

So, Frankie goes on:

The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis. I’ll leave any physiological explanations to gerontologists — if they can get hold of his complete medical records — and any armchair psychoanalysis to the sundry McCain press acolytes who have sorrowfully tried to rationalize his erratic behavior this year.

Yes, that's right. He actually suggested that McCain's dementia is playing a part in a decision that his campaign allowed him to make. He's not president yet, folks; he's got that little ball-and-chain called a campaign staff. Anyway, I saw a poster the other day, an anti-Reagan poster. Used in the '84 campaign, I think. It just said "Reagan: Too Old." Well, we all know how that turned out. Just the largest economic growth this country's seen.

You must remember that McCain not only knows little about the economy but that he has not previously expressed any urgency about its meltdown. It was on Sept. 15 — the day after his former idol Alan Greenspan pronounced the current crisis a “once-in-a-century” catastrophe — that McCain reaffirmed for the umpteenth time that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

Yeah, he's said he doesn't know much about the economy. Neither does Barry, but Barry's not honest enough to admit it. His policies do that for him. And yes; McCain has expressed concern over this. He did all the way back in 2005/2006, his housing regulatory bill, which (ironically) put him at odds with everyone, and didn't pass. The bill would have enforced regulation of Fannie and Freddie, but he's a Republican, so who cares? I haven't seen anything like that from Obama. Come on, Frankie, where is it? Where's Obama's accomplishments in this realm? Oh, yeah, he doesn't have any. He could be considered an accomplice in this meltdown.

One more point-- when McCain talks about the fundamentals of the economy, he's not talking about banks, government policies, or housing monsters. He's talking about the American people; the ones who keep the country running. That's not the government, liberals. That's the taxpaying, working Americans. And yeah, they're fundamentally strong, as evidenced how we've had nothing but positive growth so far this year. Sorry, no recession for you.

Then, Frank says this:

As recently as Tuesday he had not yet even read the two-and-a-half-page bailout proposal first circulated by Hank Paulson last weekend. “I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” he explained. (Maybe he was waiting for it to arrive by Western Union instead of PDF.)

As American Spectator points out, Obama didn't know either. In fact, when he came to the WH meeting, he trashed the Republican position on it without even knowing what the Republican position was.

That was not the only bad news raining down on McCain. His camp knew what Katie Couric had in the can from her interview with Sarah Palin. The first excerpt was to be broadcast by CBS that night, and it had to be upstaged fast.

But even that wasn’t the top political threat McCain faced last week. Bigger still was the mounting evidence of the seamless synergy between his campaign and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage monsters at the heart of the housing bust that set off our current calamity. Most of all, it was the fast-moving events on that front that precipitated his panic to roll out his diversionary, over-the-top theatrics on Wednesday.

Yeah, the Sarah Palin interview wasn't even bad. In fact, there was bias against Palin in the interview itself; American Spectator pointed out that Couric and Co. denied to call her Governor, and did everything she could to minimize her position. But that's not the point. The "seamless synergy between his campaign and FM&FM" refers to the Times' reporting on how campaign manager Rick Davis' former lobbying firm has been receiving contributions from FM&FM. Forget that Davis hasn't hasn't seen a penny from that firm since 2006, or that Barack Obama has been given, as American Thinker points out, $120,349 in political contributions from FM&FM. This, despite being in the Senate for just 3 years. Sound strange? It sure sounds fishy. The only person receiving more is Sen. Chris Dodd, who has been in Congress for 33 years. But nothing about this from the Times. It's all about McCain's campaign manager's firm!

Aargh. So, then this:

It ran attack ads about Obama’s own links to the mortgage giants. But neither of the former Freddie-Fannie executives vilified in those ads, Franklin Raines and James Johnson, had worked at those companies lately or are currently associated with the Obama campaign. (Raines never worked for the campaign at all.)

Notice how he says "currently". Johnson had incredible associations with FM&FM, and we Republicans attacked him for it. So then Obama threw him under the bus. Big double standard for Davis' firm. In comparison, Raines had been advising Obama's advisors on the economy (reported by the Washington Post) as early as February. He wasn't formally associated with the campaign, though. Lucky break?

By contrast, Davis is the tip of the Freddie-Fannie-McCain iceberg. McCain’s senior adviser, his campaign’s vice chairman, his Congressional liaison and the reported head of his White House transition team all either made fortunes from recent Freddie-Fannie lobbying or were players in firms that did.

So...four people in all? That's not much of an iceberg. Considering that you didn't even list McCain, the candidate for the Presidency. Obama can't say that.

It’s then that Angry Old Ironsides McCain suddenly emerged to bark that our financial distress was “the greatest crisis we’ve faced, clearly, since World War II” — even greater than the Russia-Georgia conflict, which in August he had called the “first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the cold war.” Campaigns, debates and no doubt Bristol Palin’s nuptials had to be suspended immediately so he could ride to the rescue, with Joe Lieberman as his Robin.

Aren't you clever, bringing in Bristol Palin like that? No doubt you have to wag another finger at that suffering girl in order to villify McCain's effort. For shame. As for the "contradiction", look at the context of those quotes. McCain is obviously referring to the economic state we were at, entering WWII. On the other hand, he calls the other one "an international crisis". Not exactly a genius stroke, Frank. And how in the heck would Joe Lieberman help consolidate support among House Republicans? That's either a statement of remarkable ignorance or a terrible joke.

Most of the rest of the article is just a rant about the McCain and Letterman fiasco. Undoubtedly he didn't want to bring the WH meeting up; the meeting where Bush would defer to Democrats to try and get their opinions on the bailout proposal, and then those Dems would defer to Obama in attempts to prove he's a leader and give credibility to his so-called "presidential aura". Rather, Obama didn't pull through, and the meeting fell apart. As Rush put it, "it was essentially a meeting chaired by Obama, and then it fell apart."

Meanwhile, we've got the Governor of Missouri saying that that Barack Obama conspired to misuse his state's law enforcement resources to "threaten and intimidate his critics."

Where's Frank Rich on this? Maybe he's been traveling on "McCain's Suspension Bridge To Nowhere" for far too long.

Some sources:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/obama_dollars.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/15/AR2008071502827.html
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/608daafj.asp
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122238645982877051.html
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13947
http://www.spectator.org/blogger_jump.asp?BlogID=14879
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWU2ODgzNzg2MmIyN2Y3ZWFjY2ZlODVmMTgzYjMwMjY=
http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/mccain_kept_head_down_in_meeti.php
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_092608/content/01125107.guest.html