{"id":99,"date":"2006-11-04T17:52:05","date_gmt":"2006-11-04T21:52:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/?p=99"},"modified":"2006-11-04T17:52:05","modified_gmt":"2006-11-04T21:52:05","slug":"99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/04\/99\/","title":{"rendered":"Frank Rich"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/greateststory150.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image\" \/><\/a>To say that the Grumpy Vegan is a fan of author and <em>New York Times<\/em> columnist Frank Rich is to understate it. His Sunday column was a must-read &#8212; indeed, the <em>only<\/em> reason to buy the paper &#8212; 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&#8217;s satirical writing style. That&#8217;s why all summer I waited patiently for his  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.frankrich.com\/index.htm\"><em>Greatest Story Ever Sold<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>What could be more delicious than an entire book of biting commentary on politics inflamed by a scathing critique of mainstream culture? <em>Greatest Story<\/em> is a must-read. But it is written in a writing style unlike his columns. <\/p>\n<p>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,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>That cynical priority was what had dictated the timing of the rollout of the product in the first place: it wasn&#8217;t a mushroom cloud that imminent as the White House pressed for a congressional resolution in the fall of 2002, it was the midterms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And, again,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Reeling from the criticism, Bush pleaded to ABC&#8217;s Diane Sawyer that people not &#8220;play politics during this period of time.&#8221; 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To say that I wished I could write like Frank Rich &#8212; specially in the style of his NYT columns &#8212; is to understate it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8212; indeed, the only reason to buy the paper &#8212; until, well, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/04\/99\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thinking","tag-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}