Reading notes

Frank Rich’s wordsmithing at The New York Times continues to be a thing of beauty. Two meaty paragraphs worth savoring:

But those who live by Fox News can die by Fox News. If you limit your diet to Fox and its talk-radio and blogging satellites, you may think that the only pressing non-Laci Peterson, non-Kobe, non-hurricane stories are “Rathergate” and the antics of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Your diet of bad news from Iraq is restricted, and Abu Ghraib becomes an over-the-top frat hazing. You are certain that John Kerry can’t score in the debates because everyone knows he’s an overtanned, overmanicured metrosexual. You reside in such an isolated echo chamber that you aren’t aware that even the third-rated network news broadcast, that anchored by the boogeyman Dan Rather, draws 50 percent more viewers on a bad night than “The O’Reilly Factor” does on a great one (the Bush interview).

Eventually you become a prisoner of your own fiction and lose touch with reality. … You could see this the week before the debate, when the president rolled out Mr. Allawi for a series of staged Washington appearances that were even less effective than his predecessor Ahmad Chalabi’s State of the Union photo op with Laura Bush. No one at the White House seemed to realize that if you want to keep a puppet from being ridiculed as a puppet you don’t put him on camera to deliver sound bites … that are paraphrases of the president’s much replayed golden oldies.

Thank you, Frank.

How will we assimilate the multiple Mount St. Helens’ worth of righteous anger erupting from heretofore disciples of this administration as they realize just how callously they’ve been taken advantage of? Every “W” sticker becomes then a badge of dishonor; I keep imagining Damascus Road epiphanies in the millions across this country as enraged and now-awake citizens rip these stickers from their vehicles, recommitting their formidable energies to saner, more effective, more intelligent, more honorable, more godly ends.

And you know what I realize to my delight? I welcome every one with open arms.

[via DemFromCT]