Whenever I, or any other blogger, takes on someone like Maureen Dowd or Andrew Sullivan, inevitably a number of commentators question why any of us bother to pay attention to these media absurdities. Why not just ignore them?

The short answer: Because they and their ilk rule our discourse, politically, surely, and even, in many ways, culturally. On any list of what got George Bush elected, both in 2000 and 2004, appearing right below Bush-Rove would surely be the performance of the SCLM.

It has been the aim of this two-part post to show that even a writer as apparently "liberal" as Frank Rich is a fully committed member of the SCLM club, all dues paid up, which means that Rich is just as likely to include clueless dissing, in his columns, of all Democrats and all liberals and progressives, using the same fictional narratives and unexamined tropes as a Chris Matthews, or a Joe Klein, or any of the other names on that despairingly long list of media whores you might care to name.

Below the fold we will examine Frank Rich's response to Al Gore's October 2002 speech on Iraq, which presented a thorough, nuanced, unapologetic critique of the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq, and the consequent failures of its foreign policy initiatives everywhere. As a strident critic of the Bush administration, who had, himself, written negatively about the Bush drive to invade Iraq, you might have thought that Rich would have welcomed Gore's speech.

Part One of this post can be found here.
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Instead, he ignored it. Though not because he ignored Gore. No, indeed; Al Gore was back on the political scene, and there was fun to be had.

src="http://static.flickr.com/64/157319611_3de2402715_m.jpg" width="128" height="240" alt="Frank Rich Daumier" />

Twas not always so. Actually, it's not really all that "so" even now.

This Sunday, as you may have heard, Frank Rich put his imprimatur, (a somewhat muddy paw print as it turns out), on the possibility of a 2008 Gore run for President.

A more insulting endorsement would be hard to imagine.

I know that Frank Rich has become something of a hero to many of us who populate the left-of-center blogisphere, but let me be clear; the hero referenced in the tag "Heroes and Heroines" is Al Gore, not Frank Rich.

If you think that Frank Rich is on the side of any configuration of political beliefs that could be called liberal or progressive, if you think that Frank Rich is one wit different from any of the dim bulbs who make up the firmament of American punditry, you just haven't been paying attention.