NY Times Pinhead: GOP Candidates Running for Dictator

An even more hysterical column that usual for New York Times theater-critic turned political analyst Frank Rich.

We've spent seven years hearing from the left how incredibly stupid George W. Bush is, yet he amazingly has managed to turn the United States into a dictatorship while we were all sleeping.

Even more distressing to Rich, now Democrat Senators Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein are aiding and abetting Chimpy McHitlerburton as he turns America into a police state where people are waterboarded on every street corner.

The corruption is now so ingrained, the current GOP candidates are just running for President, they aspire to be the next dictator.

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.

Where do you even begin with such paranoid lunacy?

First of all, has Rich and his ilk even commented on places where there are real dictatorships blooming, like in Venezuela? Doubtful, since that's a burgeoning Communist dictatorship, and the New York Times has never had any problem with those.

Second, in case Rich hasn't noticed, we keep releasing Gitmo detainees and are looking for ways to close it, but I guess that news has escaped him. Perhaps he ought to read his own newspaper (headline: U.S. weighs plan for closing Guantanamo - NY Times).

Third, the ridiculous assertion that Rudy Giuliani tried a coup to keep himself in office simply is not supported by the facts. Yes, 9/11 occurred the day of the scheduled mayoral primary in 2001, and in the aftermath, was rescheduled. The idea was floated that perhaps Giuliani's term should be extended a bit, but was quickly dismissed and Michael Bloomberg was properly inaugurated as New York Mayor January 1, 2002.

Rich knows this, but in his hysteria, cannot rationally report the facts; he just makes ridiculous assertions unworthy of being printed in a newspaper. Dreck like this is better left for the fever swaps of the left. Then again, that suits the New York Times.

Rich sums it up appropriately for someone in the throes of incurable Bush Derangement Syndrome.

We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.

Speak for yourself, Frank.