Once Again, Mr. Rich

I want to thank The New York Times for instituting their subscription policy for Internet access to their columnists. Before they did that, I was a somewhat regular reader of Frank Rich. I'd read him when I'd remember to, and it was always worth the time spent. But since they tried to make people pay to read him, as a little game, I started to see where I could find him for free. From that point on, I haven't missed his weekly column, and this week's is a barn-burner.

Referring to recent information that has slipped out about administration machinations in the run-up to war and the vitriolic response from both Bush and Cheney this week, Rich writes:

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

He also refers to stories from The LA Times and National Journal last week that I read but didn't pass on here in the build-up to Thanksgiving, and they're worth your time to read them now.

And if you didn't click the link above, read Rich's "Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...," as good a summation of where we are at this point as I've seen. The only question now is where do we go from here?

(By the way, I'm still on the boat and still without a spell-check, so pardon the typos.)