Charles Pierce

Was Ronald Reagan the original Washington wizard? Esquire’s Charles Pierce seems to think so. Pierce argued on Wednesday that in the 1980s, an ideological “spell…was cast” by the Gipper and his allies, and that as a result of various right-wing policies enacted since then, Harvey-related damage to the Houston area will be a lot worse than it should have been. “The spell…was cast 30 years ago,…

On Saturday afternoon, an act of racist terrorism was committed in Charlottesville, Virginia. Among those responsible, according to Esquire’s Charles Pierce, were Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “Every Republican who ever played footsie with the militias out west owns this bloodshed,” disgorged Pierce in a Sunday post. “Every Republican president -- actually, there's only one -- who began a…

The liberal media never help themselves, do they? Late Monday night, they showed just how shamelessly hypocritical they are when it comes to civility, trashing cancer-stricken Republican Senator John McCain (Ariz.) as someone who would send millions to their deaths by voting on the motion to proceed for repealing and replacing ObamaCare.

The New York Times has been quite dismissive of the right to free speech when the right wing is involved, calling it a “canard” abused by racists. Yet the Times can be quite protective when it comes to (imaginary) threats to its own free speech, as shown by two stories on Monday. Both stories reacted to a provocative tweet by Donald Trump -- a video repurposing an old clip of Trump doing a bit at…

To Esquire’s Pierce, the Clintons’ image as scandal-plagued is in large part attributable to the Times, which since the early ’90s has reported extensively on stories that “were, by and large, complete bullshit, inflated by Republicans and a willing and timid elite political press into a Questions Remain culture of faux-scandal that persisted through the entirety of the 2016 campaign. And it…

Esquire’s Charles Pierce is accusing President Trump of adding to something he vowed to subtract from. In a Thursday post, Pierce called the White House’s proposed federal budget a “vast, noxious swamp into which all those tributaries of modern conservative thought have emptied themselves. People die in there, swallowed up in deep sinkholes of empowered bigotry and class anger.”

John McCain’s 2008 campaign slogan, “Country First,” does not describe the worldview of Republicans, suggested Pierce on Monday. For them, the Esquire blogger implied, it’s more like “GOP über alles.” The peg for the post was chit-chat in the political and media worlds about whether President Trump is of sound mind, or, as Pierce put it, about “the possibility that the presidential trolley has…

Esquire’s Pierce readily concedes that Ben Carson (“an elite neurosurgeon”) and Mike Pompeo (“graduated at the top of his class at West Point”) are smart guys. In a way, though, they’re also tragic figures, he suggests, since they’ve “had to tailor their politics and their public personae to cater to the anti-rational, theocratic, anti-intellectual Id of modern conservatism…This means that both…

The Hamilton electors, whatever their number, are being cheered on by Hamilton bloggers, one of whom is Esquire’s Pierce. In a Saturday post, Pierce argued that in the country the Founding Fathers envisioned, the Electoral College would vote down a Donald Trump presidency. Pierce wrote, “Let us assume for a moment that our constitutional institutions are as strong and functional as they are…

If you asked a hundred conservatives to name the de facto flagship publication of American liberalism, The New York Times probably would get more mentions than any other. Still, it hasn’t been hard to find lefties upset with the paper about matters such as its supposed longstanding hostility toward Bill and Hillary Clinton. How the Times, especially its coverage of the e-mail story, may have made…

In a Tuesday post, Esquire blogger Pierce complained that Ronald Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric discouraged many from voting, thereby benefiting Republicans, but Donald Trump’s anti-government rhetoric encouraged many to vote, thereby benefiting Republicans. Pierce noted that Reagan, in his first inaugural address, declared “that government was not a solution to the problem, that government…

President Obama spent a fairly large chunk of his Thursday speech in Columbus, Ohio needling conservatives and Republicans, alleging, among other things, that GOPers have “been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years.” Esquire’s Pierce called it the speech he’d “been waiting for someone to give ever since Donald Trump became the Republican nominee” and gushed, “There were no words minced…

Commentators on the right gave Mike Pence high marks for his showing in the vice-presidential debate, largely because he, unlike Donald Trump, articulates straight-no-chaser conservatism. To Pierce, however, the ideological divide between Pence and Trump is about as wide as a crack in the sidewalk. In a Wednesday post, Pierce predicted that even though Trump represents the “obvious culmination”…

Bill Clinton has told the truth. I repeat. Bill Clinton has told the truth. And it this case it was a truth about Obamacare which is sure to make liberals very uncomfortable. So how can they explain it away? Simple. By claiming that Bill Clinton has lost his political abilities.  Such was the argument of Esquire politics writer, Charles Pierce, who claims that Bill Clinton has lost his political…