Book-length Dick.
Dick Morris has the opportunist's knack for picking the winning side in a fight. As a political consultant and pollster, his client list includes Bill Clinton, Jesse Helms, Trent Lott and Ed Koch. All benefited from Morris' love of power and lack of commitment to any cause other than winning the election.
Morris is now comfortably seated in his position as New York Post columnist, FOX News commentator, and with his new book, Off With Their Heads, rising moral crusader against all that's wrong with this country.
Morris spends most of the book attacking his current employers' most hated enemies: the New York Times, liberal Hollywood and France. While there are plenty of reasons to attack these three pretentious windbags, Morris' childlike logic and uninspired attacks fail to do anything but remind the reader that the author knows exactly who butters his bread.
A true huckster, Morris structures most of the book's arguments on absurdly weak premises, hammering his point home time and again with only the most scant and carefully chosen evidence to prop up his house of cards. While taking the New York Times to task for daring to print stories about the war in Afghanistan that didn't fall into the "our soldiers are heroes, we've already won" vein, Morris tips his hand. He reprints all manner of audacious Times headlines to show how antiwar, anti-Bush and anti-American the paper's coverage was. Stories such as: "The Tough Afghan Terrain" and "Scarcity of Afghanistan Targets Prompts U.S. to Change Strategy" drive Morris up the wall. What right does the Times have to comment on the factual characteristics of the topography our troops would be facing? Not when there's a war on, Mr. Raines! Morris is also appalled by the fact that the Times saw fit to cover the erosion of civil liberties dealt by the USA Patriot Act in the aftermath of 9/11. Headlines like "Bush's New Rules to Fight Terror Transform the Legal Landscape" are beyond the pale for Morris.
Under the Raines stewardship, the Times hasn't been the most objective of news outlets, but by using such idiotic examples of a newspaper simply doing its job, and using them as proof of some sort of conspiracy, Morris looks ridiculous. He's also furious that during the summer of 2002, the Times ran numerous stories on the faltering economy. Morris thinks it was a plot to distract Americans from the war on terror and discredit Bush, when in fact the economy was hemorrhaging jobs as fast as the pink slips could be printed. Sixty pages into the book, Morris is babbling in a Bill O'Reilly-esque stupor.
In his celebrity-bashing diatribe, as in his other arguments, Morris shows himself to be an intellectual coward. In castigating the beautifully braindead-Sheryl Crow, Babs, Woody Harrelson, Dustin Hoffman, Bonnie Raitt and George Clooney-he's got more ammunition than he can possibly use. We all know that they say some mind-bendingly stupid things, but what's the fun in shooting buffalo from the train? Why can't Morris step up and attack Noam Chomsky? Joe Conason? Howard Zinn? It's because Morris is only confident enough to go for the easy mark, declaring victory by not challenging himself to make a full argument. Morris is like a playground bully mocking the special-ed kids, not realizing that he's only a couple brain cells from the short bus himself.
With the French, Morris goes the extra mile, claiming that "anti-Semitism in the [French] national psyche" leads them to oppose the war in Iraq because they hate Israel and the Jews so much. He traces America's contentious post-war history with the French, beginning with de Gaulle's attempt to kick U.S. forces out following WWII, and seems to think that France's debt to us is unending. Morris also blasts the French for supplying Hussein's government with military aid; again evincing his selective amnesia in failing to address our own bloody hands, and the fact that Rumsfeld made a friendly visit to Baghdad while Hussein was gassing Iranian troops.
The last few chapters briefly hit on a variety of subjects, slamming healthcare for the elderly and the tobacco industry. Morris actually makes some good points in taking Congress to task for their recent redistricting efforts, in effect ensuring that the current incumbents will be reelected for at least the next 10 years. He makes a pretty good case that Congress essentially staged a coup, locking themselves in power and offering the voters no opportunity to get them out.
In the end, though, you can place this book next to similar volumes by Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly and Savage, filing them under "hysterical rants from the right." The only difference between them and Morris is that it's doubtful Morris believes his own arguments.