The New York Times published an article Monday about the anger some Vietnam veterans feel over the vessel they used to serve on, Swift Boat, now being synonymous with "the nastiest of campaign smears."

In dredging up this issue, Times' writer Kate Zernike not only misrepresented many of the facts surrounding the claims made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but also completely ignored the mainstream media's role in turning the name of this patrol craft into a political pejorative.

In fact, something the Times conveniently chose not to share with its readers was how one of its own columnists, Frank Rich, wrote one of the earliest and most prominent pieces recharacterizing this nautical term as a smear tactic in his August 21, 2005, article "The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan."

But before we get there, here's what the Times had to say Monday (emphasis added throughout, h/t NBer Bingo):

Not sure that would be a winning campaign slogan for Barack Obama, but on today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski expressed skepticism as to whether Americans really care about winning in Iraq. Mika made her comments in the course of touting Frank Rich's NYT column of yesterday [on which I commented here].

Brzezinski was clearly eager to make her point: after reading an extended excerpt from Rich's column and inviting comment from the panel, she didn't let a bemused John Harwood of CNBC/NYT get more than a few words out before cutting him off to express her own opinion.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Anyone want to comment?

JOHN HARWOOD: Well, I don't think Americans forgot Iraq --

BRZEZINSKI: You know what? I think Americans are tired of being duped, and I think this is coming back, from the McClellan book. I mean, everyone talks about how Americans want to win, want to win. I don't know so much with Iraq.

If you're going to accuse a president of lying and committing crimes, it might be nice to provide some particulars. But Frank Rich sees no need for such niceties in his New York Times column of today.

The putative topic is the McClellan book, but the real subject is Rich's abject Bush hatred. After referring to Pres. Bush as "the loathed lame duck," Rich writes:

Americans don’t like being lied to by their leaders, especially if there are casualties involved and especially if there’s no accountability. We view it as a crime story, and we won’t be satisfied until there’s a resolution.

So Bush lied and people died, is that it? What was the lie, where was the crime? Is Rich referencing WMD here, the same WMD that President Clinton, every major Dem leader at the time, and countries from France to Russia also said Saddam had? Rich doesn't say. If not WMD, something else? If so, what? And just what is the "resolution" Rich demands? Even Keith Olbermann recently, regretfully, recognized it's probably too late for impeachment.

Let's have some fun deconstructing Frank Rich's NY Times column of today. The gist of The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama is that it will be nearly impossible for McCain to defeat Obama because the Arizona senator reflects the politics of an almost all-white GOP in the age of a changing America.

Rich begins by mocking the the "collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols" who flanked McCain during his victory speech on the night of the Potomac Primaries. Adding insult to injury, Rich replays Letterman's line about the GOP presidential hopefuls looking like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

[A] synthetic product leeched of most human qualities. -- Frank Rich, on how Hillary Clinton is being marketed, Feb. 10, 2008.

If Frank Rich is the voice of elite liberal opinion, Hillary Clinton is in deep, deep trouble. How many folks on the Upper West Side and reasonable facsimiles thereof from Boston to Madison to LA will be opening their hearts -- or credit cards -- to Hillary after reading Rich's stunning indictment of Clinton and her campaign this morning?

The jumping-off point for Rich's column is the live prime-time special the night before Super Tuesday that the Clinton campaign conducted. Flashing his theater-critic roots, Rich panned it as a "boring" "pseudo-event," noting that "some in attendance appeared to trance out." But if the staging was bad, the substance was much, much worse in Rich's view. For he claims that it reflected nothing less than Clinton playing from a "thick deck of race cards."

Writes Rich [emphasis added]:

Well, sports fans, as the Clintons continue to disingenuously carp and whine that they're not being treated fairly by the media, more and more press members and outlets are striking back.

On Sunday, the New York Times columnist Frank Rich jumped on the anti-Clinton bandwagon actually opining that the resurrection of Bill could help the Republicans retain the White House in November.

In a piece deliciously titled "The Billary Road to Republican Victory," Rich strongly made the case that America isn't ready for the tag team of Bill and Hill (emphasis added throughout):

How is that for a more visible example of a more virulent strain of Bush Derangement Syndrome?

The infected in question is a very long and very public sufferer, the New York Times' Frank Rich, and he just uttered said symptom on MSNBC.

Rich offered up his usual expert delusional analysis that the thus far flight of Democrats from the Hillary Clinton camp is not a result of her myriad unexamined scandals, her woefully unattractive personality or the reality that the "Ready" candidate is not really all that ready, having accomplished very little herself.

Just how much is former President Bill Clinton throwing his weight around in pressrooms across the country to ensure favorable coverage of his wife and her campaign?

As NewsBusters reported in September, Clinton killed a negative article about Hillary that was about to be published by GQ apparently by threatening the magazine with not having access to him in the future.

On Sunday, the New York Times' Frank Rich admitted that after he wrote a column in November that included some criticism of the junior senator from New York, her husband sent him a letter valiantly coming to her defense (emphasis added throughout):

It's a Christmas tradition: Times Watch has selected its worst Quotes of the Year from The New York Times for 2007. Here's a sampling of the categories and some of the most bizarre examples of liberal bias. For all the quotes, plus the picks of our Times-dissecting judges for their "favorite" quote of the year, visit Times Watch.

Oh, Those Awful Conservatives 

"Could adversity temper a jurisprudence that critics of the chief justice have discerned as bloodless and unduly distant from the messy reality of the lives of ordinary people who fail to file their appeals on time?" -- Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse's August 1 "Supreme Court Memo," the day after Chief Justice John Roberts suffered a seizure at his house.

The devil made Larry do it.

Don't blame Lawrence O'Donnell for his ugly anti-Mormon rant. It was really the fault of O'Donnell's fellow panelists. That's Frank Rich's take on the unseemly episode on the McLaughlin Group a couple Fridays ago.In his NY Times column of today, Rich claims that O'Donnell was:

pushed over the edge by his peers’ polite chatter about Mitt Romney’s sermon on “Faith in America.” [Emphasis added.]

Questions:

As Republican primary campaign slogans go, "Endorsed by Frank Rich!" might not be a candidate's strongest play. But for better or worse Mike Huckabee is essentially stuck with it after Rich's NYT's column of yesterday. The ostensible theme of "The Republicans Find Their Obama" is that Republican voters are leaning toward Huckabee for the same reasons that Dems are trending to Obama: that both men are relatively young, speak across racial lines, are witty and avoid hyper-partisanship.

But dig down a bit deeper, and it appears that Huckabee's real appeal for Rich is that, social issues aside, he is the most liberal of the GOP frontrunners. Making his case for Huckabee, Rich goes so far to dabble in Christian theology [emphasis added]:

It's not as if Frank Rich has a deep and abiding hatred of his nation's leadership, or contempt for his fellow Americans. It's just that he accuses the Bush administration of using tactics worthy of the Gestapo -- the Nazi secret police headed by Heinrich Himmler -- and his fellow Americans of being like citizens of Hitler's Germany who turned a blind eye to the atrocities in their midst.

Those "see no evil' residents of the Third Reich came to be known as the "good Germans," and Rich unsubtly sets the tone for his New York Times column of this morning by entitling it "The 'Good Germans; Among Us."

Rich approvingly cites Andrew Sullivan's claim in last weekend's Sunday Times of London to the effect that "America’s 'enhanced interrogation' techniques have a grotesque provenance":

See Update at foot with list of Petraeus press appearances.

The gravest charge you can level at a military man, as MoveOn.org essentially did to Gen. Petraeus with its infamous "General Betray Us" ad, is to call him a traitor.

But close behind in the catalog of calumny is to call a soldier a coward. And that's effectively what Frank Rich did in his [p.p.v.] New York Times column of today.

Writes Rich [emphasis added]:

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of merely 1.5 million true believers.

Not even CBS anchor Katie Couric is sufficiently liberal to satisfy New York Times drama critic turned political commentator Frank Rich, who in his latest epic Sunday column accused the CBS anchor, who recently went to Iraq, of "drinking the…Kool-Aid" regarding Bush's optimistic pronouncements on the war. (Screen shot is of Rich on the September 7 Late Show with David Letterman plugging the paperback edition of his book, 'The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America.'

Following the lefty line, Rich also referred to two scholars from the left-of-center Brookings Institution as "Pentagon junketeers" for daring to suggest things are improving on the ground in Iraq.

Times Watch hasn't dealt with arts editor-liberal columnist Frank Rich in a while (especially since the Times Select pay to read program walled him and other columnists out of view).

Folks, you haven't been missing a thing. Rich's anti-Republican frippery simply lights on different targets each week. This week it's retiring Bush advisor Karl Rove ("He Got Out While the Getting Was Good").

Rich introduced the main villain, Rove, through the side character ex-Virginia Sen. George Allen and his overblown "macaca moment":

The TimesSelect firewall at the contracting New York Times is coming down soon, according to a report by its growing rival, the New York Post:

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned.

..... The number of Web-only subscribers who pay $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year fell to just over 221,000 in June, down from more than 224,000 in April.

Not that it was a particularly insightful prediction, but yours truly wrote the following in November 2005 (first item at link), when the Times announced it had reached 135,000 online TimeSelect subscribers (current print subscribers get TimeSelect access free of charge):

On Tuesday, well known Bush hater Frank Rich appeared on liberal Stephanie Miller radio show. (Miller is being given a test run this week on MSNBC in the departed Don Imus’ spot.) Proving that there’s nothing the New York Times columnist can’t use to slam the President, Rich attacked Bush for not telling jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner and members of the media for not rebelling against it:

Frank Rich: "The, uh, the general play where Bush stand up and says he is not going to do his usual comedy routine because of Virginia Tech, that’s outrageous and the press sits there and applauds."

Frank Rich is from Venus; NewsBusters is from Mars.

NewsBusters documents the way that, day-in and day-out, the MSM slants its coverage against conservative principles in general and the Bush administration in particular.  Frank Rich looks at the same coverage and complains that the press is too Bush-friendly.

In his p.p.v. New York Times column of today, All the President’s Press, Rich takes the occasion of the recent White House correspondents dinner to complain "how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media."

Annotated excerpts:

The press has enabled stunts from the manufactured threat of imminent “mushroom clouds” to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished,” whose fourth anniversary arrives on Tuesday.

No one in the Bush administration ever spoke of "imminent mushroom clouds." Rich flatly misstates the truth.  Lynch's criticism of the way the military presented her story was all over the MSM this week.  And how incalculably many times over the last few years has the MSM run mocking coverage of President Bush's "Mission Accomlished" moment?

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) began its spring season of announcing its annual GLAAD Media Awards for pro-gay journalism last week at the Marriott Marquis in New York (thanks in part to 100 donors, including "Platinum Underwriter" Time Warner). Other ceremonies will follow in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami, but the bulk of their awards were celebrated in New York. Among the big winners: Rosie O'Donnell for her "All Aboard!" HBO documentary touting her gay and lesbian family cruise. She was there to accept the award with filmmaker Shari Cookson, and gave a nod to tennis legend Billie Jean King, subject of another nominated documentary, saying "if it hadn't been for Billie Jean King, there wouldn't have been a gay movement."

Also honored in the awards, offered to journalists and entertainers GLAAD thought were "fair, accurate, inclusive, and impossibly glam," were the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, ABC's "Nightline," and especially The New York Times, which won three.