Frank Rich is a boob.

Perusing today's missive from movie reviewer-turned political analyst, Frank Rich, I was struck by what a witless boob he is. While I've always considered him a hack, I never realized he was this worthless. After all, I reasoned, he's an assistant editor for the New York Times. He must have some redeeming qualities or skills. But I was dead wrong. Check out this astonishing declaration:

The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

Not conviced? Try this one on:

THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to connect those dots on the news media's center stage of television. You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much "gotcha" journalism. That's a rather absurd premise given that no "gotcha" journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.

I'd actually fisk this lump of unhinged, poorly-written, factually incorrect, wishful partisanhip down to the nub, but anyone who reads the column is perfectly capable of seeing it for what it is. And this is passable analysis from the paper of record? Journalistic standards may be reaching their nadir in this country.