As usual Frank Rich doesn't mince words in looking at ABC's Debate:

Shoddy! Tawdry! A Televised Train Wreck!

Of course, Obama fans were angry because of the barrage of McCarthyesque guilt-by-association charges against their candidate, portraying him as a fellow traveler of bomb-throwing, America-hating, flag-denigrating terrorists.

This line of attack trys to ignore the fact that America's most dammaging traitors now occupy our White House.

Ludicrous as the whole spectacle was, ABC would not have been so widely pilloried had it not tapped into a larger national discontent with news media fatuousness. The debate didn't happen in a vacuum; it was the culmination of the orgy of press hysteria over Mr. Obama's remarks about "bitter" small-town voters. For nearly a week, you couldn't change channels without hearing how Mr. Obama had destroyed his campaign with this single slip at a San Francisco fund-raiser. By Wednesday night, the public was overdosing.

I agree that Americans are fed up with this kind of hysterical trivia reaching a saturation point in the media.

via MAL Contends
Madison, Wisconsin--Frank Rick has a piece in this morning's Times arguing that Obama and Hillary "are flat-out wrong" in condemning John McCain for McCain's allegedly having expressed a willingness "... to keep this (Iraq) war going for 100 years," as the two Democrats on the campaign trail state their desire for withdrawal, contra McCain.

Rich, among the most perceptive columnists today, cites other writers and fact checkers making the same point, including Zachary Roth in the Columbia Journalism Review.

While the competition has been keen at the New York Times to secure the mantle as the most virulent Hillary hater, Frank Rich is in a class by himself. No other columnist now writing for the "Gray Lady" is more intellectually dishonest and lacking in basic integrity than Frank Rich, the bloviating former theater critic turned professional Hillary basher. Maureen Dowd? Alternating between catty and crazy, Dowd's nose is out of joint apparently because Hillary looks better in boots. How about Bob Herbert? You can't fault an African American who wants to give a brother a break and devotes his time to peddling moralizing conventional wisdom and cheer leading like there's no tomorrow for Obama. And William Kristol and David Brooks? They are just neocon party-liners. (Only one among the NY Times line up ever writes anything complimentary about Hillary-Paul Krugman, who has a day job at Princeton as an economist, actually knows something, and let's the chips fall where they may.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinio n/24rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&o ref=slogin

Clinton fans don't see their standard-bearer's troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones's Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it's the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it's a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate's message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

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Rich is 100% on point and tells a good story on what exactly happened.  I am sure i will find very few people who will agree, and most will just outright dismiss it, but i do believe the man is very correct.

The campaign was simply run horribly.  Does anyone know why she choose Penn and Wolfson over Begala and Carville?  Do they not want to do campaigns any more?

Frank Rich has a brain.  I used to enjoy reading him and watching him stick it to whatever Republican talking point that most raised his ire on a given week.  But I don't understand why he has chosen to be so subjectively hateful of late to Senator Clinton. For example, after discussing her recent Town Hall event in a tone dripping with sarcasm, Rich says (link):

What's more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come.

Frank Rich is making some of the points Obama, Edwards and others have made regarding Hillary both in terms of doubletalk, being bush-lite and enabling Bush on Iran.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/opinio n/04rich.html?n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%2 0and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/Frank%20Ri ch

But what happens if President Bush does not bomb Iran? That is good news for the world, but potentially terrible news for the Democrats. If we do go to war in Iran, the election will indeed be a referendum on the results, which the Republican Party will own no matter whom it nominates for president. But if we don't, the Democratic standard-bearer will have to take a clear stand on the defining issue of the race. As we saw once again at Tuesday night's debate, the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, does not have one.

.....

This time around, with the exception of Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidates seem to be saying what they really believe rather than trying to play both sides against the middle. Only Mrs. Clinton voted for this fall's nonbinding Kyl-Lieberman Senate resolution, designed by its hawk authors to validate Mr. Bush's Iran policy. The House isn't even going to bring up this malevolent bill because, as Nancy Pelosi has said, there has "never been a declaration by a Congress before in our history" that "declared a piece of a country's army to be a terrorist organization."

............

Potentially facing that Republican may be a Democrat who is not in favor of rushing to war in Iran but, now as in 2002, may well be in favor of walking to war. In any event, she will not have been a leader in making the strenuous case for an alternative policy that defuses rather than escalates tensions with Tehran.

Noun + verb + 9/11 -- also Mr. Bush's strategy in 2004, lest we forget -- would once again square off against a Democratic opponent who was for a pre-emptive war before being against it.

I fully expect the middle portion of this youtube on Hillary's contradictory Iraq positions to end up in a TV commercial.

Two weeks ago, Frank Rich berated persons like me because:

On the Democratic side, the left is furious at the new Congress’s failure to instantly fulfill its November mandate to end the war in Iraq. . . . It’s not exactly clear how a legislative Groundhog Day could accomplish this feat when the president’s obstinacy knows no bounds and the Democrats’ lack of a veto-proof Congressional majority poses no threat to his truculence.

Rich professed faith in John Warner to come to the rescue. This week Rich writes: