Just Sayin’

In the midst of one of her excellent posts about the (largely unrepentant) Gary Condit lynch mob, Digby reminds us of this column from alleged liberal national treasure Frank Rich, reminding us how empty his banal critiques of similarly bluenosed conservatives are:

I love this story, though it’s essential that I hereby insert the standard disclaimers required of any journalist making that admission. (1) My paramount concerns — of course — are for Chandra Levy and for justice. (2) My secondary concern is for the Broader Themes, which include the scandalous behavior of our public servants, the limits of privacy and the presumption of innocence, the fate of women in the workplace, the balance of power in the House, and the heroism of the media in selflessly seeking out the truth even if that requires doing battle with such all-powerful adversaries as the D.C. police and a back-bencher congressman from Modesto, Calif.

I concur with Brian Williams of NBC’s ”Nightly News,” which has devoted more acreage by far to this story than its broadcast competitors, that Ms. Levy’s disappearance has also ”brought the science of lie detectors front and center” — and about time too! I join Bob Barr and The New Republic in calling for Gary Condit’s resignation, and only wish that I had had the courage to take this unpopular position as early as they did. It takes guts to confront those legions of Condit defenders out there who are sticking up for his right to impede a missing-person investigation, to engage in serial philandering and to allegedly ask a flight attendant both to sign a false affidavit and to participate in ”peculiar sexual fantasies.”

Perhaps Al Gore could have convinced Rich that he was at least a marginally better candidate than a moron who governed to the right of the Texas legislature if he had only spent a little more time analyzing the country’s important “Where the White Women At?” crisis instead of that silly environmental stuff. Although in fairness it’s pretty clear that (Democratic) politicians getting blowjobs was the most important problem the country faced in the summer of 2001.