Of Frank Rich, Bigfoot and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

New York Times’ columnist Frank Rich outs himself as a conspiracy theorist in his Saturday column, “Welcome to Confederate History Month,” wherein he fabricates a synthesis of current anti-Obamacare sentiments and events. To build his theory, he connects dots that don’t exist, and realigns a few that do, into a mishmash construct bordering on a rant.

His goal is to use the new “N” Class word to refer to the millions of American citizens who have rallied against the vast expansion of the federal government at public events called Tea Parties. In Rich’s mind, these Americans are the “R” Word.

Racists.

In Rich’s logic, the absence of evidence to document racial and sexual-orientation insults, verbal and non-verbal, allegedly aimed at Democrat members of Congress, proves that the events happened. It like claiming that having no definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot only proves he exists. Such is Frank’s upside-down logic. Not that logic matters: deep down Rich, like all liberals, just knows he’s right.

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Three-fourths of Rich’s column struggles to tie Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell’s proclamation of April as Confederate History Month to McDonnell’s alleged racist intent. (He reads minds, too, it seems.) To prove this, he links McDonnell to Pat Robertson University, who, Rich posits, was McDonnell’s political mentor. Feeling himself on shaky ground, he adds,

…Robertson is closer politically to his protégé than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ever was to Barack Obama.

And Rich knows this how?

Then, with one broad stoke, he paints the attorneys general of the states jointly suing the federal government over the healthcare bill with the “R” Word.

The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons.

Now there’s an irrefutable argument: The attorneys general are fanning the race-based flames of the old slave-owning South by pushing those “old hot buttons.”

In the mind-of-Frank, it’s all connected to the “neo-Confederate rebellion,” typified by the “same ideology that animated Timothy McVeigh.”

Finally, with every one of the usual suspects in the line-up except Bernie Madoff, he trots out the evil Republicans:

What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness.

His “irrefutable proof” of that claim is the incompetent, but still employed (because the G.O.P. cannot fire him) Michael Steele. How can you argue with such razor-sharp logic?

You can’t. There’s none there with which to argue.

Rich’s case – which at its core applies the “R” Word to the Tea Partiers – isn’t based on empirical, observable, documented evidence. It’s based on emotions. He’s become that very thing he aims to disassemble with his columnist’s keyboard. Frank Rich is a partisan ideologue who happens to be a devotee of the far Left, and a hardcore believer in the vast right-wing conspiracy, whatever that is.

He’s a literary descendent of the 18^th Century American Tory, loyal to the British Crown, who ridiculed the original Tea Partiers, mostly out of fear.

That his column passes in the minds of some – though fewer every day – for enlightened journalism is…well, sad.