Chop suey commentary
: Frank Rich writes Chinese menu columns: He slaps together one thought from column A and one thought from column B that don’t belong together. And, yes, an hour later, your brain feels empty.
In his column tomorrow, he starts bemoaning the FCC’s censorship and the chill that brought 66 stations to preempt Saving Private Ryan.
Merely the threat that the F.C.C. might punish a TV station or a network is all that’s needed to push them onto the slippery slope of self-censorship before anyone in Washington even bothers to act. This is McCarthyism, “moral values” style.
But then, because the F words came in a movie about war, he tries — pulling from column B — to make this an issue not of government censorship but of the prowar Republicans. Get it? A movie about war was censored while we’re at war and so this must be a Bush coverup.
Can you say non sequitur?