Politics & Power Quote by Frank Rich

Rich’s complaint isn’t just that politicians lie; it’s that they lie with the boredom of muscle memory. “Tedious” is the tell. He’s describing a media-age fatigue where the scandal isn’t the deception itself but the predictability of the performance: the same outrage cues, the same strategic amnesia, the same calibrated humility or defiance, swapped onto new “facts” like fresh costumes on an old stage.

The line “parse politicians” quietly indicts the audience too. Parsing is what serious people do when they still believe meaning is hidden somewhere in the syntax. Rich suggests that, after enough cycles, parsing becomes complicity - a ritual of overinterpretation that grants the masquerade its glamour. The public and press keep treating each week’s narrative as a puzzle to be solved, when it’s really a recurring script designed to stall, distract, and survive the news cycle.

“Facts change from week to week” nods to the modern condition: information moves fast, contradictions stack up, and yesterday’s certainty is today’s “misunderstanding.” Yet “the masquerade doesn’t” captures the deeper continuity of political theater: the incentives remain stable even when reality doesn’t. Rich’s intent is to shift attention from the content of any one controversy to the machinery behind it - message discipline, crisis PR, tribal signaling - and to argue that the real story is institutional, not episodic.

The wit lands because it’s weary rather than outraged. He’s not shocked; he’s done being impressed. That exhaustion is the sharpest critique of all.