Frank Rich is Very Disobedient

As the only guest who has so far refused to provide Imus a list of his five favorite songs, Frank Rich had some splainin’ to do today.

“I’ve been brooding about it,” said Rich, a New York Times Op-Ed Columnist who is known to brood. He thought about giving a list of typical choices like “Gimme Shelter” or “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” but also considered how much fun it would be to put together five songs that would “drive you and listeners over the bend.”

Confused by Rich’s garbled use of a metaphor, Imus wondered, “Am I talking to Sarah Palin or Frank Rich?”

Rich denied not participating because he thinks the whole idea is stupid, saying the real problem is that he’s got thousands of songs on his I-pod, all representative of different eras of his life, and—

“You’re just way over-thinking this,” Imus interjected.

In yesterday’s column, Rich wrote about the “problems” with Karl Rove’s memoir, “Courage and Consequence,” which he called, “a very selective telling of history.”

While one would expect Rove, who was a top aide to President George W. Bush, to hold his boss in the best light, Rich was galled by Rove’s version of the run-up to war in Iraq.

“I find it incredible to postulate, as he does here, that Bush only did it because of WMD, and that he never would have done it if he had known there were no weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had,” Rich said. “It’s just simply not true.”

Bush was determined to go to war regardless of the intelligence, Rich added, and there’s plenty of evidence to prove it. Paraphrasing Colin Powell’s former Chief-of-Staff Larry Wilkerson, Rich said, “What a thing to say to the many American families who have lost sons and daughters to that war, or had family members grievously wounded.”

Rove’s book is “cavalier,” “very self-serving,” and “thin-skinned,” in Rich’s view. It also conveniently leaves out the Bush administration’s relationship with people like Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who appeared as a guest of Bush at 2004’s State of the Union address. Chalabi, it was later revealed, was feeding the U.S. a lot of bad intelligence.

More bad behavior was on display in the Middle East recently, with an official in the Israeli government telling Vice President Biden last week that Israel would build settlements in East Jerusalem. This move is considered provocative to the American government, and counterproductive to peace in the region. As for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s claim that he did not know about this plan, Rich said, “I don’t think it’s enough to have a ‘dog-ate-my-homework’ excuse.”

“Well,” said Imus, jumping to the defense of his pal Bibi. “They’ve got a lot of balls in the air.”

-Julie Kanfer