That's Rich!

We were pleased to see that Frank Rich agreed with us about the relative surprise level of the NSA leak, i.e. that it really wasn't terribly surprising to learn that this administration exceeded the law in its information gathering, given everything else we knew about them at that point. (Enemy combatants' access to due process and fast-and-loose torture rules, to name but two.)

See It Now (Standing Eight)
See It Now (Frank Rich)

Here's a key graf from the latest Rich piece:

"That motive is not, as many liberals would have it, a simple ideological crusade to gut the Bill of Rights. Real conservatives, after all, are opposed to Big Brother; even the staunch Bush ally Grover Norquist has criticized the N.S.A.'s overreaching. The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is instead to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth.
Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures."

Remember the good old days when Frank was a theater critic and one bad review from him could shut your whole show down? Wouldn't it be great if he could wield that kind of clout writing about Washington's reality-drama (which on Fox would be called "The D.C.")?