Rich Available (for a Short Time Only?)

As I mentioned last week, The New York Times took its columnists and went home. Well, at least it went behind a new NYTimes pay curtain, so the columnists can't come out to play any more. If you look around into the nooks and crannies of various blogs, though, you can sometimes find some of these people available to read. Today's Frank Rich column, "Bring Back Warren Harding," can be found at ratboy's anvil, at least until the Times make them take it down. Rich is taking on the subject of Bush cronyism, something that's been fairly well covered over the past week, but it's still worth the read. Here's a snippet:

Ours will be remembered as the Enron era. Enron itself is a distant memory--much like all that circa 2000 talk of a smoothly efficient C.E.O. presidency led by a Harvard M.B.A. and a former chief executive of Halliburton. But even as American business has since been purged by prosecutions and reforms, the mutant Enron version of the C.E.O. culture still rules in Washington: uninhibited cronyism, cooked books, special-favors networks, the banishment of whistle-blowers and accountability. More than ideology, this ethos has sabotaged even the best of American intentions, whether in Iraq or New Orleans. Unchecked, it promises greater disasters to come.