Some of Frank Rich's greatest hits from his New York Times columns

Here are excerpts from some oped columns by Frank Rich in the last few months.

• "On ABC's 'This Week,' a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe." 3/28/2010

• ". . . the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his 'Hell no, you can't!' incantation . . . Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons." 3/28/10

• "How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn't recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far." 3/28/10

• ". . . an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from ‘Kill the bill!' to Sarah Palin's cry for her followers to ‘reload.'"3/28/10

• "If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that's their right. . . . But they can't emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts."3/28/10

• "How our current spike in neo-Confederate rebellion will end is unknown."4/17/10

• "What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness."4/17/10

• "Former Bush propagandists will never lack for work in this climate."4/10/10

• "Depending on where you stand—or the given day—he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley." 4/3/10

• "Last week, after I wrote about the role race plays in some of the apocalyptic right-wing hysteria about the health care bill, a friend who is a prominent liberal Obama supporter sent me an e-mail flipping my point." 4/3/10

• "Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove's memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney's daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol."3/14/10

• "Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick?" 3/14/10

• "Liz Cheney's crackpot hit squad . . ."3/14/10

• "The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged." 2/27/10

• "The leaders embraced by the new grass-roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. . . . But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism." 2/27/10

• "This G.O.P. populism is all bunk, of course."'2/14/10

• "Shelby is so unashamedly addicted to earmarks that he used a senatorial ‘hold' to halt confirmation votes on 70 Obama administration appointees until his costly shopping list of Alabama pork projects was granted."2/14/10

• "Even the G.O.P./Tea Party heartthrob of the hour, Scott Brown, is not the barn-coat-wearing populist he purports to be."2/14/10

• "The Republicans are so disciplined at claiming the fiscal-hawk high road that even Jenny Sanford, the wronged first lady of South Carolina, is still defending her husband, Mark, as an uncompromising defender of ‘hard-earned tax dollars' in her new tell-all memoir, ‘Staying True.' Though she gives us the skinny on her husband's philandering, she never mentions the subsequent revelations that expenses for his trysts and other personal travel were billed to taxpayers."2/14/10

• "John McCain, commandeering the spotlight as usual, did fulminate against the repeal of ‘don't ask, don't tell.' But the press focus on McCain, the crazy man in Washington's attic, was misleading. His yapping was an exception, not the rule."2/6/10

• "Now that explicit anti-gay animus is an albatross, those who oppose gay civil rights are driven to invent ever loopier rationales for denying those rights, whether in the military or in marriage."2/6/10

• "It's in this political context that we can see that there may have been some method to Obama's troublesome tardiness on gay issues after all. But as we learned about this White House and the Democratic Congress in the health-care debacle, they are perfectly capable of dropping the ball at any moment."2/6/10

• "Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama's signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn't make good on a year's worth of false starts."3/7/10

• "But the buck stops with the president, not his chief of staff. And if there's one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful—both about his own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor."3/7/10

[TIP OF THE HAT TO MARK BAUERLEIN AT EMORY UNIVERSITY]