Behold columnist Frank Rich's latest excruciating metaphor from his Sunday Week in Review perch - "Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy [1]." Rich was referencing a front-page November 24 Times story claiming Wall Street was getting its swagger back when he committed this endlessly painful paragraph:
Wall Street is already celebrating the approach of bonus season by partying like it's 2007. In The Times's account of this return to conspicuous consumption, we learned of a Morgan Stanley trader, since fired for unspecified reasons, who went to costly ends to try to hire a dwarf for a Miami bachelor party prank that would require the dwarf to be handcuffed to the bachelor. If this were a metaphor - if only! - Wall Street would be the bachelor, and America the dwarf, involuntarily chained to its master's hedonistic revels and fiscal recklessness with no prospect for escape.
On October 25, 2009, Rich found an anti-Bush message in the "balloon boy [2]" saga (which you had blessedly forgotten until now):
Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the "balloon boy" and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn't lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush's flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq.
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