To say that the Grumpy Vegan is a fan of author and New York Times columnist Frank Rich is to understate it. His Sunday column was a must-read — indeed, the only reason to buy the paper — until, well, NYT decided to hide it only to paying subscribers in its Times Select boutique. The toes curled, the wry grin smiled and the brain was amused and stimulated by Frank’s satirical writing style. That’s why all summer I waited patiently for his Greatest Story Ever Sold.
What could be more delicious than an entire book of biting commentary on politics inflamed by a scathing critique of mainstream culture? Greatest Story is a must-read. But it is written in a writing style unlike his columns.
Frank describes how Bush et al took us to war with Iraq. The twist in his narrative is that this is a story of how an administration packaged and marketed the war while it was saying one thing but secretly knew the truth was something else. For example,
That cynical priority was what had dictated the timing of the rollout of the product in the first place: it wasn’t a mushroom cloud that imminent as the White House pressed for a congressional resolution in the fall of 2002, it was the midterms.
And, again,
Reeling from the criticism, Bush pleaded to ABC’s Diane Sawyer that people not “play politics during this period of time.” But just months earlier the president had flown from Crawford to Washington overnight to sign a symbolic bill intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-dead hospice patient flogged as a right-to-life cause by the Christian right. He was in no position now to lecture anyone about playing politics with tragedy.
To say that I wished I could write like Frank Rich — specially in the style of his NYT columns — is to understate it.
