Informed Speculation

As a public service announcement, because I know all of us simply can’t abide the six days a week we are without Frank Rich columns, I now present a primer on how to write your very own Frank Rich column, anyday, anytime.

We’ll use this week’s column as a handy illustration of our points as we go along.

Let’s set down some ground rules, first.

1. George W. Bush is bad.

2. Anyone opposed to George W. Bush is good.

3. Rich Manhattan liberals love to have their opinions confirmed, so don’t hold back – the more outrageous the conspiracy you can draw, week after week, the better; remember, the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.

Got it? Good, let’s get started:

Rule Number 1: Start off with a big analogy between some current event and some completely unrelated event in the past, as if they were somehow connected.

Cindy Sheehan couldn’t have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States” by going fishing.

Rule Number 2: Repeat over and over that Iraq did not attack the United States on 9/11, never mind that the President never said that it did.

So it goes with a president who hasn’t foreseen any of the setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not attack inside the United States in 2001.

Rule Number 3: Pretend Democrats lose elections because of Republican dirty tricks, not because they run candidates that most people wouldn’t buy a used car from.

Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had “other priorities” during Vietnam.

Conveniently, Rule Number 4 was covered above, also: remember, everything in the world is like Vietnam. I can’t stress this enough: Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. If possible, use the word ‘quagmire’ for bonus points.

Rule Number 5: Remember that kitchen sink ground rule? Here’s your chance…keep a handy reference chart of all your previous columns, and reference every last one of them in each future column.

The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson – the diplomat described by the first President Bush as “courageous” and “a true American hero” for confronting Saddam to save American hostages in 1991 – was so toxic it may yet send its perpetrators to jail.

Rule Number 6: When Democrats spew bile all over the President and his supporters, it’s ‘speaking truth to power’. When Republicans point out the bile that has just been spewed on them, that just shows how hateful conservatives are.

…[T]he attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a “crackpot” by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

The finale – Rule Number 7: Remember, you write for the New York Times! If you write something, that makes it true! Never mind pesky reality; you can build your own reality.

THIS summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once too often. When Mr. Bush’s motorcade left a grieving mother in the dust to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too far. The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war’s critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.

Now you need never go hungry for that Frank Rich fix – another masterpiece is just 7 simple rules away. No need to thank me, I live to serve…