A Good Idea…
…to be sure, this automatic Herbert generator…
I’d like to take the opportunity to compare my prescient post ‘How To Write A Frank Rich Column: 7 Simple Rules That Could Change Your Life Forever’, with the current offering (posted here quite illegally):
Rule Number 1: Start off with a big analogy between some current event and some completely unrelated event in the past, as if they were somehow connected.
Current Rich: All too fittingly, Tony Snow’s appointment was announced just before May Day, a red-letter day twice over in the history of the Iraq war. It was on May 1 three years ago that Mr. Bush did his victory jig on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. It was May 1 last year that The Sunday Times of London published the so-called Downing Street memo. These events bracket all that has gone wrong and will keep going wrong for this president until he comes clean.
That’s a solid check on number one!
Rule Number 2: Repeat over and over that Iraq did not attack the United States on 9/11, never mind that the President never said that it did.
Current Rich: Trying to deflect a citizen’s hostile question about prewar intelligence claims, the president asserted at a public forum last month that he had never said “there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein.” But on May 1, 2003, as on countless other occasions, he repeatedly made that direct connection. “With those attacks the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States,” he intoned then. “And war is what they got.” It was typical of the bait-and-switch rhetoric he used to substitute a war of choice against an enemy who did not attack us on 9/11 for the war against the non-Iraqi terrorists who did.
Oh, yeah, I nailed number two…
Rule Number 3: Pretend Democrats lose elections because of Republican dirty tricks, not because they run candidates that most people wouldn’t buy a used car from.
Number three: absent from this number (hey, nobody’s perfect!)…
Rule Number 4: Remember, everything in the world is like Vietnam. I can’t stress this enough: Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. If possible, use the word ‘quagmire’ for bonus points.
Current Rich: Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place.
That’s a big 10-4, good buddy…
Rule Number 5: Remember that kitchen sink ground rule? Here’s your chance…keep a handy reference chart of all your previous columns, and reference every last one of them in each future column.
Number 5 is right on target as well: Rich mentions the Downing Street Memo (!!!), “Mission Accomplished” (!!!), Nigerian uranium (!!!), and every other thing he’s ever mentioned in every single column he’s ever delivered.
Rule Number 6: When Democrats spew bile all over the President and his supporters, it’s ’speaking truth to power’. When Republicans point out the bile that has just been spewed on them, that just shows how hateful conservatives are.
Current Rich: The Fitzgerald investigation continues to yield revelations of administration W.M.D. subterfuge, president-authorized leaks included.
Partial victory on number 6…
Rule Number 7: Remember, you write for the New York Times! If you write something, that makes it true! Never mind pesky reality; you can build your own reality.
Current Rich: Each week brings new confirmation that the White House, as the head of British intelligence put it, was determined to fix “the intelligence and facts” around its predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. Today Mr. Bush tries to pass the buck on the missing W.M.D. to “faulty intelligence,” but his alibi is springing leaks faster than the White House and the C.I.A. can clamp down on them. We now know the president knew that the intelligence he cherry-picked was faulty — and flogged it anyway to sell us the war.
Oh, yeah, baby. If you’re keeping score, that’s 5 1/2 out of 7, or 79%, for an analysis written on August 20, 2005 applied to a Frank Rich column dated April 30, 2006. Not bad, if I do say so myself…
OK, I’ll take the bait – I can’t let you get away with being both player and umpire at the same time –
#1: granted, Frank Rich uses polemic devices – but no more than the Wall Street Journal editors –
#2: Rich gives an example of Bush insinuating that Iraq was involved in attacking us – you should take away the point you gave yourself
#3: agreed
#4: well, it is a quagmire – what’s wrong with calling a kettle black?
#5: these three things are all prime examples of deception – why shouldn’t they be included? – if you were to write a piece on O. J. Simpson, would you leave out the murder of his wife and Ron Goldman?
#6: where’s the bile? These are facts –
#7: what is untrue about the excerpt here?
I would give you a half point for 1 and 4 and a full point for 3 – so two points out of seven –
I stand by my scoring – anyone else?…
And peter, your comment on number 2 (‘insinuating’) – oh, please. I’m sorry, that’s total b.s. … I can show you direct quotes where Bush denies a direct connection between 9/11 and Saddam…I don’t have to weasel around with ‘insinuations’…
Your other exceptions are also off-target; I mentioned that a Frank Rich column would always include these things…I didn’t say anything about the relative merits of the arguments…and you don’t deny that #s 4, 5, 6, and 7 are present…
1) What Bush said starts with a true statement – “With those attacks the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States” – followed by a non sequitor (“war is what they got”). In other words, the Iraqis (i.e., those who “got war”) were the same as those who “declared war on the United States.” If you diagram the two sentences, you get A=B. This is not just an insinuation – it is a direct correlation in black and white.
2) Bush admitted that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11 after it was plainly evident that this was not the case – in the march to war, there were numerous occasions where Bush and Cheney clearly implied that Iraq had a role in 9/11:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html
3) I won’t dispute that Rich is repetitive, but I think that “the relative merits of the arguments” outweigh any lack of originality. Which is more important: style or substance?
Hey, if Frank can base a whole career on rewriting the same repetitive column week after week for a period of years, more power to him…just don’t expect me to stand up and applaud his monkey act…there’s no talent or journalism involved in what he does, just the same old hateful polemics.
You keep going back to ‘insinuated’, ‘implied’ – weasel words all…show me a statement where George W. Bush said Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11 – period. You can’t do it, because it doesn’t exist, yet Rich says it over and over again, despite it all…
Also, peter, when Bush says war is what they got – well, didn’t they? Aren’t we fighting the terrorists in Iraq? Aren’t we fighting them in Afghanistan? It’s not the ‘Iraqis’ we are at war with…it’s the terrorists. I can’t spend time in every thread I ever post on this blog going through what I think is the justification for the war in Iraq re: the War on Terror. It’s not productive. My viewpoint is out there for anyone who wants to find it…just use the search function in the upper left.
We’ll never agree on this point…I think the war was justified, you think it wasn’t.
My point in this post was to point out that Frank Rich is so completely, utterably, laughably predictable that I could pinpoint the contents of almost any piece he’s ever done in 7 easy steps…and I came remarkably close, I think…
1) The quote in your excerpt is “a statement where George W. Bush said Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11.” There is no conclusion which can be drawn except that we were attacked by Iraq.
2) The home grown insurgents we are fighting in Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorists who attacked us in 2001. We are also fighting non-Iraqis who entered the country after we invaded, and several years after we were attacked. To borrow from high school math, the intersection of terrorists who attacked us and those we are now attacking is the null set.
3) As you note, we will never agree on using 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq, as in my view attacking Iraq was at best tangential to the war on terror.
peter, please – respect me enough not to twist my words. I didn’t mention ‘using 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq’. I said I thought the war was justified. And I stand by my intention not to refight this battle in every post…
I find it odd that you have apparently never heard of al-Qaeda in Iraq, nor do you seem to realize it is led by the Jordanian al-Zarqawi…
1) Not twisting words: “What I think is the justification for the war in Iraq re: the War on Terror.” Am I missing something?
2) Al Qaeda’s presence before the invasion was minimal, certainly compared with many other countries which we did not attack. After we destabilized the country, there were lots of Al Qaeda types who entered Iraq — but their negligible connections to Hussein’s regime were far too insubstantial to justify an invasion.
All right, let me be clear…I don’t think 9/11, the event, justified the invasion of Iraq. 9/11 is perhaps THE defining moment in the War On Terror, but even without 9/11, Iraq would have had to be dealt with.
Want a justification? How about its repeated violations of the ceasefire of Gulf War I?…and that’s just for starters.
I’m not trying to have my cake and eat it, too…I’m trying to say that the removal of Saddam did not have a direct correlation to the events of 9/11 itself, except inasmuch as they highlighted the need to be more aggressive in combating the sources of instability in the breeding ground for terrorists, with the Hussein regime, regardless of terrorist affiliation, being a long-standing thorn in the side of sane policy in the region.
Satisfied? I somehow doubt it…
Very satisfied: it’s a nuanced and consistent argument (even though I disagree with it).
I may be unyielding, but I play fair: when you twist what someone else says, it’s an implicit admission that you’re not willing to contradict his argument and instead you taking the easy road by misrepresenting the other side. I don’t think I twisted what you said above: if you read the words in post seven literally, you seem to be conflating 9/11 with the invasion. Thanks for the instant clarification!
Hey, we’re all friends here…as I’ve said many times, thank God we have some frequent commenters from the left, too, to keep us intellectually honest (or at least in the vicinity).
On a completely unrelated note, your suggestion on adding numbers to the comments is working out nicely, isn’t it? It’s nice to be able to just say “if you read what you said in number 7″…
stick with me and you will be wearing walnuts the size of diamonds…