Charles Pierce

To borrow the title of a Clint Eastwood movie, liberals are having trouble with the curve -- specifically, the curve which they claim the media are using to grade Donald Trump. President Obama and Paul Krugman are among those who’ve raised that objection. Esquire blogger Pierce agrees with them, but he also asserted in a Sunday post that the media’s supposedly lenient treatment of Trump is “…

Plenty of journalists saw Hillary Clinton’s Thursday speech on Donald Trump and white nationalists as an attempt to further separate the GOP nominee from Republicans who aren’t #NeverTrump but are leery of voting for him. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones “propose[d] a different explanation”: that Hillary “was giving the press permission to talk about Donald Trump's racism." But Esquire’s Charles Pierce…

The Republican Party needs to be soundly thrashed, or maybe even euthanized, believes Esquire’s Pierce, who wrote in a Friday post that “it long has been the duty of the Democratic Party to the nation to beat the crazy out of the Republican Party until it no longer behaves like a lunatic asylum. The opportunity to do this…never has been as wide and gleaming as it is right now." In Pierce’s view,…

They’re calling it the feel-good romantic hit of the summer, or at least of the Democratic convention. Bill Clinton’s long, granular tribute to Hillary Rodham Clinton had several liberal pundits swooning. Dahlia Lithwick of Slate wrote that it was during this speech that “for the first time…most of us met” Hillary, whom “we have all been following and misunderstanding and cartooning for decades…

There’s the entertaining kind of irascible old guy (e.g., Grampa Simpson) and there’s the scary kind, which several liberal pundits thought they beheld Monday night as they watched Rudy Giuliani speak at the Republican convention. Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall remarked that “ever since the late and great Molly Ivins quipped that she thought Pat Buchanan's speech at the…

Much like Phil Mickelson took a big early lead in the British Open, Esquire’s Charles Pierce has taken a big rhetorical-excess lead in early blogging about Donald Trump’s VP pick, Indiana governor Mike Pence, calling him a “very strange and completely unreconstructed wingnut” whose paper trail contains “a rich deposit of sweet crude crazy.” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones described Pence as "not…

Plenty of liberals who detest Donald Trump nonetheless thought Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent blasts at Trump were “ill-advised,” as Ginsburg herself eventually admitted they were. Some left-wingers, however, were down with RBG and believed that it was ridiculous to criticize her for getting political. Daily Kos writer Armando asserted that the SCOTUS “has acted politically through out [sic] its…

Bill Clinton’s personal conduct has exasperated liberals for roughly as long as his political success has exhilarated them. While some of them dismissed his get-together with attorney general Loretta Lynch as trivial, others saw it as yet another of his potentially damaging, impulse-driven unforced errors. Esquire’s Charles Pierce called the meeting “stupid and reckless” and fumed, “For the…

Showing the continuing conflation of big-time sports journalism and liberal activism, Howard Bryant's “Ali Everlasting” tribute for ESPN Magazine used the boxing legend as a tool to condemn American racism and inequality Meanwhile at Sports Illustrated, lefty journalist Charles Pierce bashed the former Cuban embargo for "shredding" the Cuban economy:

Esquire magazine writer Charles Pierce must be in a state of panic after the events following yesterday's Donald Trump rally in San Jose, California when anti-Trump protesters violently attacked Trump supporters. Last week Pierce wrote that such attacks only help Trump and that has him extremely worried. Unfortunately for him even some his fellow liberal journalists such as Emmett Rensin, who was…

A lot of big-time journalists believe they speak truth to power, but according to Esquire’s Charles Pierce, the attitude of the elite media toward presidents and certain presidential nominees is pretty much the opposite: “giddiness in the face of power.” Because of that longstanding state of affairs, suggested Pierce in a Tuesday post, “a fully armed and operational bullshit station” better known…

Leading off Monday's All In on MSNBC, host Chris Hayes and his fellow panelists giggled their way through a discussion about the possible collapse of the Never Trump movement to the point that they predicted that the push by conservatives to not support the billionaire frontrunner is on a "slow death march" to accepting and backing his nomination.

Esquire's Charles Pierce unleashed on Paul Ryan on MSNBC's All In on Monday during a panel discussion on a possible presidential bid by the House speaker: "I think he's as ambitious as Satan. I think he doesn't want to go out in the country where he was already deemed not worthy of the vice presidency, and try to run for president. But if they offer him the crown, he would loathe to lay his hands…

Conservatives and liberals often agree that the media have played an outsized role in making Donald Trump the Republican presidential frontrunner but differ about how they’ve done it. (Here’s a view from the right.) Lefty Esquire blogger Pierce argues that the list of offenders in this regard is long; in fact, it includes every journalist who’s failed to point out over the last few decades that…