Frank Rich's Sunday column has an embarrassing typo across the top of the page: "Time for the [sic] This Big Dog to Bite Back [1]," and the rest isn't as energetic as Rich's usual fare, perhaps because the subject, imploring Obama to show more fight, is so dispiriting. The paper's former drama critic usually embellishes his leftist views with movie references, but on Sunday he let his inner Bob Herbert (notorious for his soporific columns) through, with a barely veiled denunciation of (yawn) the greedy 80s:
If Obama can speak lucidly about a subject as thorny as race, he can surely do a far more specific job of telling the story of how we got to this economic impasse. He must join the many who are talking about why the top 1 percent of American earners now take home nearly a quarter of Americans' total income - perhaps the single most revealing indicator of how three decades of greed and free-market absolutism have eviscerated America's fundamental ideals of fairness. It can't all be reduced to the shorthand of "George W. Bush."
