Back in June, liberal columnists at the New York Times lined up to link conservative talkers Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh to James von Brunn, the 88-year-old man who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum, and the murder by Scott Roeder of abortionist George Tiller.

Columnists Paul Krugman and Judith Warner both weighed in on June 12.

Krugman’s “The Big Hate” blamed Fox host Bill O’Reilly’s rhetoric (“Tiller the baby killer”) for the Tiller murder, as well as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, for contributing to the dangerously toxic atmosphere.

Warner’s online entry, “The Wages of Hate,” read: “You can't accuse Beck or Limbaugh of inciting violence. But they almost certainly do stoke the flames.”

Frank Rich also blamed O’Reilly for the Tiller murder in his Sunday column, "The Obama Hater's Silent Enablers," two days later.

"The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom have what Palin once called the 'actual responsibilities' of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity."

So wrote New York Times columnist Frank Rich in a piece that won't appear in print until Sunday, but was clearly intended to scare the Dickens out of the Times' few conservative readers on Halloween.

After all, in his "The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York," Rich unapologetically said no matter who wins in Tuesday's election for a House representative from New York's 23rd district, "the Republicans are the sure losers":

One could almost predict the desperately "current" New York Times editor/columnist Frank Rich would devote his Sunday column to try and make Balloon Boy an anti-Republican symbol of something or other, and he doesn't disappoint.

The result, "In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy' Dad," is even more silly than Rich's usual fare, playing devil's advocate for storm-chasing father Richard Heene. Rich found "some poignancy in [Heene's] determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream....If Heene's balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits." Rich is being serious.

Certainly the "balloon boy" incident is a reflection of our time -- much as the radio-induced "War of the Worlds" panic dramatized America's jitters on the eve of World War II, or the national preoccupation with the now-forgotten Congressman Gary Condit signaled America's pre-9/11 drift into escapism and complacency in the summer of 2001. But to see what "balloon boy" says about 2009, you have to look past the sentimental moral absolutes. You have to muster some sympathy for the devil of the piece, the Bad Dad.

Nine months into Obama's presidency, everything is still officially about Bush:

Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the "balloon boy" and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn't lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush's flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq.

The White House has berated Fox News for days now for purportedly pushing an agenda and calling it news. So Americans may have been surprised when, as reported by Noel Sheppard, Obama invited two of MSNBC's most divisive liberal pundits--Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow--to the White House for an off-the-record briefing.

As it turns out, Maddow and Olbermann were only two of the left's heavyweights at the briefing. Yesterday, TVNewser received from the White House a complete list of names. Virtually all of them have their histories of shilling for the administration or Democrats generally, and of bashing conservatives.

Let us review the colorful histories of these pundits, and the reader can decide whether they "have a perspective," in the words of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (in the context of a Fox News attack).

In Frank Rich's Sunday column for the New York Times, "Small Beer, Big Hangover," Rich drained the last dregs out of the White House beer summit, involving the president, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley, but not before using it to launch his grand unified field theory of the re-emergence of racism among conservatives in the wake of Obama's victory. 

Deploying his usual melodramatic flair (Rich was once the paper's theatre critic), Rich wrapped the Gates arrest controversy together with the Birther brigade, and tied on other events with the slightest hint of skin-color content, like Judge Sonia Sotomayor's impending Supreme Court confirmation.

The White House get-together took place to quell an outcry after Obama, during a national press conference, said the Cambridge police had acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates.

The comforting thing about each "national conversation on race" is that the "teachable moment" passes before any serious conversation can get going.

The serially dishonest Frank Rich, a New York Times columnist, wouldn't know an example of racism if it sat on his head.

In his latest column he haughtily bloviates in an attempt to turn the tables on Republican senators by accusing those who grilled Judge Sonia Sotomayor during her Supreme Court confirmation proceeding last week of being the real racists.

He writes

Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent. [...]

Listen to Rachel Maddow introduce a guest on her MSNBC show Wednesday night, as seen and heard in the embedded video, and savor a Freudian slip for the ages.

A question that comes to mind -- how does one accurately transcribe this? Is the correct spelling "wretch," defined in my Random House dictionary as "a deplorably unfortunate or unhappy person," or "retch," as in "to make efforts to vomit"?

Fortunately for Maddow, it could have been worse .... Joining us now is New York Times columnist Frank Bich ...

Reacting to a New York Times column in which Frank Rich claimed Fox News was responsible for violent acts like the murder of abortionist George Tiller or the Holocaust Museum shooting, on MSNBC on Friday, John Harwood remarked: "I love Frank's columns, but I don't believe that cable television causes people to become violent."

Harwood, who is a reporter for the Times as well as the co-host of a weekly Friday show on MSNBC, The New York Times Edition, began by quoting Rich’s latest Op-Ed: "And here's Frank Rich on the ‘silent enablers’ of what he calls ‘extremist Obama haters,’ like the actor John Voight. Frank writes, ‘Voight's devout wish was to "bring an end to this false prophet Obama." This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-scriptural call to action, is toxic. It's getting louder each day of the Obama presidency and no one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren't warned.’"

After Harwood expressed that he thought Rich went too far, co-host Norah O’Donnell agreed and added: "Yeah and I think people end up hearing what they want to hear. They latch on to something. And they hear – I've heard people listen to the same channel before and hear two different – totally different things. That’s part of it, I think."

Although blaming conservative talk show hosts for crimes committed by others is nothing new -- just ask Bill and Hillary Clinton if you don't believe me! -- this recent spate of media members accusing their colleagues on the right any time a white guy goes on a shooting spree has really gotten out of hand.

Take for example Frank Rich's recent column in the New York Times entitled "The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers."

In it, Rich defined and defended what appears to have replaced Bush Derangement Syndrome now that Barack Obama is president (h/t anonymous NB reader):

The media's pro-Obama love affair is so obvious, even overdramatic New York Times liberal columnist Frank Rich thinks his colleages are overdoing it. In his latest Sunday column, "Enough With the 100 Days Already," Rich briefly empathized with conservatives who think the press is pro-Obama:

Believe it or not, there are Americans who have a "very negative" opinion of Barack Obama (13 percent, in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll). Some are even angry at him (10 percent, New York Times/CBS News). As the First 100 Days hoopla started to jump the shark last week, I tried, as an experiment in empathy, to see the world through their eyes.

It was difficult at first, but an interview with the official White House photographer, Pete Souza, on CNN, pushed me over the edge. Souza was showing all those beguiling behind-the-scenes pictures that, though government issued, were more or less passed off as journalism by virtually every news outlet in the land.

Inevitably we got to The Dog. "I want to show this picture because I find this to be a fascinating picture," said the CNN anchor John King, who found almost every picture fascinating. "The president running down the hall with his new jogging partner there, Bo." What, he asked Souza, is it like "to add this to the diversity of your work at the White House?"

I'll leave the photographer's answer to your imagination. But for a second, anyway, I could imagine what it's like to be among the Limbaugh-Cheney deadenders who loathe Obama. Those who feel the whole world is against them. Those who think the press corps is in the tank. Those so sickened by the fawning that they'd throw a brick through the television screen if the Bush-Cheney economy had left them with enough money to buy a new set.

Five years after The Passion of the the Christ conquered the multiplex, it might be instructive to recall the media coverage as Brent Bozell chronicled it in two columns. He offered tribute to Mel Gibson and a rebuke to godless Hollywood in the week before the movie came out:

The mass unveiling of Mel Gibson’s cinematic vision of "The Passion of the Christ" on 2,000 screens – a massive debut for a foreign-language film with subtitles -- has the entertainment elite a bit frightened. After all, how many decades have elapsed since Hollywood has been in any way associated with Christian orthodoxy?

The one who is not frightened is Gibson. He is a man who has made his own brave and generous sacrifice, putting tens of millions of dollars and his own film career on the line for a daring and controversial cultural event. He is a man who can sit in front of Diane Sawyer as she looks like she’s sucking on a lemon and honestly proclaim his humble Christian beliefs, to be a "fool for Christ" before the world.

As a social liberal, Frank Rich is feeling his oats. The New York Times columnist has declared the culture wars (one-sided affairs waged only by conservatives) to be over. But in his March 14 New York Times column, he couldn’t resist a last gloating shot at the “ayatollahs” and “family-values dinosaurs” that have the temerity to suggest there’s a place for traditional morality in the American public square.

"Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown," wrote Rich. "Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford."

The good folks in the Obama administration and in the media took on the wrong foe with Jim Cramer, for the outspoken CNBC personality struck back at his ill-informed and economically-challenged critics Monday in a fashion those that have watched him for years have grown to expect.

In his self-titled "Cramer Takes on the White House, Frank Rich and Jon Stewart," the "Mad Money" host: referred to the current White House as "exacerbating the crisis with its budget and policies"; accurately exposed the New York Times' Frank Rich and comedian Jon Stewart for cherry-picking snippets of his on-air recommendations in order to discredit him, and; complimented the civility of folks on the right declaring, "I always love anyone from Fox on the team because they are fierce in their defense with much less gratuitous slamming."

How delicious. Here are some of the highlights:

Frank Rich has apparently figured out that after January 20, it's not going to be as much fun for him.  True, the Times columnist will surely disinter W as necessary to explain away Obama's missteps. But the buck for whatever post-inauguration problems the country faces will land ever more resoundingly on the new president's desk.

And so, like a vaudevillian tapping as fast as he can while anticipating the hook, Rich seems determined to spend these last few weeks of the Bush administration dancing on GOP graves and luxuriating in Republicans' perceived pain.  You might say Frank is making hatred while the sun shines.

As we discussed last week in Have Fun For Now, Frank, Rich's immediate post-election column was one long poke in the Republican eye.  The Timester is back at it again this morning, outdoing himself in sheer vitriol as he pour buckets of salt, generously seasoned with schadenfreude, into Republican wounds.

Annotated excerpts from The Moose Stops Here:

I don't begrudge Obama supporters a celebration.  After eight years in the presidential wilderness and an election that was, yes, historic, it's natural to whoop it up.

Even so, if Frank Rich were an NFL player [willing suspension of disbelief required], his end-zone dance of a column today would earn him a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Annotated excerpts:

On Thursday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, New York Times columnist Frank Rich charged that it looks "morally bad" and "idiotic" that Republicans have not elected a black candidate to federal office in six years. The Republican party also seemed to remind Rich of South Africa’s racist Apartheid policy of the past: "The fact is, this isn`t South Africa 25 years ago, this is a major political party that is essentially all white. And the hierarchy of it is definitely white. There hasn`t been a new black Republican elected to federal office, I think, in six years. And so, what does that tell us about the party? And how does that look to voters? I think it looks like it`s the party of the last century. It looks bad. Not only is it morally bad, but politically. I think it`s idiotic because it`s against the whole demographics of this country and where they’re going."

CBS political correspondent Jeff Greenfield, who after last week's second presidential debate lashed out at John McCain for referring to Barack Obama as “that one” (“Was it demeaning? Was it an insult?”), just over two hours before the third and final debate suggested McCain should not bring up Williams Ayers or Jeremiah Wright -- and he used far-left/conservative-hating New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who he at least tagged a “liberal,” as one of his experts. Citing Ayers and Sarah Palin's attack on Obama for “palling around” with him, Greenfield asked: “Is all this fair game? Yes, says a conservative writer.” That would be National Review's Byron York, but Greenfield countered him with two others, asserting: “It's dangerous, argues a liberal columnist.” Frank Rich presumed Greenfield (who could be seen talking to Rich) shares his views (“You or I may not agree with it”) as he scolded McCain:

If he wants to say your association with Jeremiah Wright or with William Ayers because they're too left wing or anti-American, whatever. That's all fine. You or I may not agree with it, but it's different from calling someone an -- being involved with active terrorists, palling around with terrorists. That's the line.

Greenfield followed with how “a one-time Ronald Reagan speechwriter says the tone strikes a discordant note.” That would be Peggy Noonan.

Bill Maher's new alleged "docu-comedy" came in tenth at the weekend box office. Brent Bozell's culture column noted that the God-mocking HBO star can't seem to scare up a controversy (despite appearances on ABC, CBS, and NBC shows):

The film is called "Religulous" – a lame merger of "religious" and "ridiculous." One reason it’s not urgently mentioned is that while everyone knew "The Passion" was going to be an enormous box-office hit, Maher is hearing the sound of crickets in the fields of controversy, which may match cricket sounds at the box office.

Frank Rich of the New York Times attacked Mel Gibson and "The Passion" with a feverish pitch, but he hasn’t penned a word about Maher. Maher can mock Hasidic Jews as subhuman monkeys in his Internet ads, but Frank Rich is too busy chasing after Sarah Palin with his flamethrower. He has a problem with orthodox Christians, but certainly not with Hollywood atheists who think the Jews are as silly as any other faith community.

A beautiful woman, at once a scheming, ambitious right-wing ideologue, and the powerful, evil forces behind her, plot to seize the presidency from the man—foolish enough to have made her his running-mate—who may be concealing just how seriously sick he is, both physically and mentally!

As the stuff of straight-to-video filmmaking, not bad, perhaps.  But as the theory of an ostensibly serious column in America's newspaper of record?  And yet, that is the paranoid picture Frank Rich paints today in Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain.

Annotated excerpts:

[T]he 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race . . .  and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.

Watch in horror, as the scheming woman plots behind the muddled McCain's back!

My NewsBusters colleague Noel Sheppard, in the course of detailing how the New York Times devoted four items and over 6,000 words today to attacking Sarah Palin, cited Frank Rich's column and its malicious message.  Rich's piece is such a treasure trove for chroniclers of Palin Derangement Syndrome that I'd like to devote a bit more time to deconstructing it. 

For sheer paranoid fantasy, it will be hard to outdo the scenario Rich sketches. In having mentioned Harry Truman in her convention speech, Rich sees nothing less than a "creepy" clue to what Palin has in mind. Truman, you see [roll the menacing music] . . . ascended to the presidency due to the death of the president whom he served as VP.   Rich imagines  a "Palin presidency" that is nothing less than a far-right, McCarthyite coup. 

Annotated excerpts from Rich's The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket [emphasis added]: