Charles Pierce

Is the Republican party a political organization or “a terrarium of retrograde fauna”? Both, suggests Esquire’s Pierce, and if too few of the American people understand that, it’s in large part a result of, in his words, “the worst episode of journalistic malpractice that I can recall.” What set Pierce off was a remark from a former Democratic congressional staffer, quoted in the newspaper The…

The New Yorker’s Borowitz and Esquire’s Pierce trash the Texas senator (Pierce claims that Cruz “represents politics and a vision of government that was out of date in 1860” and that he’s “connected, rhetorically for the most part, to the darkest manifestations of the American political Id”).

Esquire’s Pierce claims that Republicans’ subversive efforts are fueled by a mixture of avarice (“they want the country to come apart so they can sell off the pieces to the people who run their campaigns”) and racism: “This heresy, which should have died at Gettysburg, is part and parcel of the modern conservative movement, which was born out of the flotsam left behind by the (partial) fall of…

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos thinks the flap over Hillary Clinton’s private e-mails is a “nothing-burger.” Charles Pierce of Esquire, who may be on a meatless diet for Lent, says it’s simply “nothing.” That left each to blast the media for its supposedly egregious coverage of what DKos is calling “eGhazi.”

Esquire’s Pierce doesn’t exactly minimize the State Department e-mail story, but he’s much more upset about Hillary’s failure to fully understand that she’s a wacko magnet: “For going on 30 years, she has been the target of every strange conspiracy theory…Just in the past six years, she's watched the Benghazi, Benghazi! BENGHAZI! dreamscape blossom lushly with the wilder flora planted in the…

Esquire’s Pierce writes that the judge who just ruled against President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, as well as many other conservatives on the federal bench, are “moving silently within the judicial underbrush, their camouflage nearly perfect, invisible until the strike and deadly when they do.”

The Esquire pundit admits that Democrats are vulnerable because of the “very active, and loud, liberal claque opposed to compulsory vaccination,” and notes that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama “wobbled on the issue a bit while campaigning six years ago.”

Esquire blogger Pierce alleges that right-wingers have turned the civil-rights movement “into a weapon against issues on which Dr. King surely would have come down on the progressive side,” and declares that the movement “no longer can be used as history's truncheon against the legitimate social, cultural, and political aspirations of the people who are its truest heirs.”

Esquire’s Pierce deems Ryan “the single biggest fake in American public life” and declares that he “should have no more credibility on [fiscal] issues than does Sarah Palin, his predecessor in the second spot on the [Republican] ticket. Any Democratic congresscritter who seeks to make a deal with him should be drummed out of Washington. Any reporter or pundit who takes his plans for the economy…

The Esquire pundit urged Democrats to “screw with [the Republicans] every way you can… Monkeywrench the whole business and explain in simple terms to the country why you're doing it. This has to start in the White House. The rest of the country needs to be protected from the hazardous material for which a third of it voted.”

The Esquire blogger opines that the GOP is “the Political Party Of Dorian Grey. Steve Scalise is the public face. But, up in the corner of the attic, there's a portrait of the rotting, decomposing corpse of Strom Thurmond.”

For the last several days, NewsBusters has been showcasing the Media Research Center’s Best Notable Quotables of 2014 as a way to review the worst media bias of 2014. Today’s categories: the self-explanatory Damn Those Conservatives Award and the Twisted Tweets Award.

The Esquire blogger is pleased that with Obama’s executive action on immigration and the shift on Cuba, “the Republicans now have two major freak-outs in their base that will do nothing except inflame the implacable Right, and thereby cripple the party's ability to reach out to the new Hispanic voters it claims it wants to attract.”

The Esquire blogger argues that anti-Obamacare lawsuits and an effort to weaken Dodd-Frank derivatives regulation are examples of how “the slow, steady and inexorable campaign to render this president a non-person in the long sweep of history continues apace.”