Charlie Pierce

"...the scalded wasteland that is the modern conservative and Republican political mind..."

Esquire Magazine:

“...When Jesus was falsely accused of Treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers. During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus, than Democrats have afforded this president in this process.”
—Rep. Barry Loudermilk, Republican of Georgia, an actual member of Congress, on the impeachment of Donald J. Trump, President* of the United States

In the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, the title character’s Roman stepfather introduces him to an old friend who has just been named governor of the province of Judea. “Goats,” Pontius Pilate moans at the prospect of his new post, “and Jehovah.” When you come right down to it, and when the six hours of discussion of the two articles of impeachment that have now passed on to the Senate for trial, that’s pretty much all we saw when we saw the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives whole and unfiltered, straight, no chaser. That’s what they have—goats, or at least people who bray like them, and Jehovah, not to mention His Son, whose Name was put to banal and profane use that tested even my expansive limits for public blasphemy. Bringing out the Ecce Homo as a dodge for the single most obvious heathen ever to hold elected office is the kind of thing that would have had you in thumbscrews a few centuries back.

It was not a debate. It was a discussion. Its conclusion was a foregone conclusion. But the comprehensive view that we got of the scalded wasteland that is the modern conservative and Republican political mind was breathtaking. We speak often in the shebeen of the prion disease, but Wednesday’s proceedings was the most vivid diagnostic look at it that we ever had. Not a single one of them fashioned the completely arguable case that, yes, the president* did what we all know he did, but it was a foreign-policy blunder and not an impeachable offense under the Constitution. I wouldn’t agree, but at least the argument would track. Instead, we got howling and yowling, yet another performance from tobacco-auctioneer Doug Collins, an afternoon full of the impassioned defense of a lecherous grifthound who pays off porn stars and who almost nobody in the Republican Party wanted to be the nominee in 2016. It was completely astonishing. The Founders and the Savior, both marshaled in defense of an irreligious fiend as some kind of political avatar. Goats, and Jehovah.

Where does all this passion come from? Where was this enthusiasm for the president* in 2015 and 2016? I swear, the Republicans didn’t line up this fervently behind Richard Nixon or this ferociously against Bill Clinton. But for El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago? Everybody’s leaping to the barricades and throwing themselves on hand grenades. Speaking in my capacity as an internet psychologist, I have to wonder if they’ve all looked over the only life-form left on the dead landscape of their ideas and can’t stand the sight of it as it snuffles and snorts and devours the remaining bits of rotting offal that used to be a philosophy.

“This country’s end is now in sight,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert. The Republican defenses of the indefensible, and their evocations of piety in defense of a terminally impious president*, got more frenzied as they piled up, one atop the other. Were they really proud to stand beside this president*? Was it worth it to stand up and yell about CNN into what at that point was merely empty air? Do they ever wonder whether there might not be something wrong with a party that has talked itself into devouring this indigestible crud? It no longer appears that they do. The politicians and the base are now one organism, and it’s eaten so much bulk stupid that it’s starving itself to death in plain sight.

The Republican performance on Wednesday reminded me of nothing more than it did the prolonged and hideous ideological hijacking of the prolonged death of Terri Schiavo, an inhumane festival of conservative ghouls and monsters that revolted almost everyone else in the country. The Republicans were warned by friends and foes that they were riding this indecency over a moral cliff. Instead, they even tried to subpoena a woman whose brain had atrophied to come to Washington and to testify on her own behalf.

They learned nothing from that tawdry episode and, on Wednesday, they played out the same political sociopathy on a grander, but far less tragic, scale. They demonstrated with verve and passion. This time, however, there was nothing at the end of it but more ruin. They howled like dying goats, but there was nobody left to hear, and Jehovah had gone out of the business, at least for the moment. There was nothing left to summon, no dark spirits left to call. Just words on an old parchment, and they didn’t speak its language any more.

I'm still waiting for an explanation of exactly what Republicans want.

If it's really not what it appears - an utterly dystopian power-über-alles thing and nothing matters except getting your way so you can exert your dominance over all the other critters at the water hole, then just tell me - what the fuck is it?

Today's Charlie

Charlie Pierce, Esquire Magazine (rerun from a while back - worth repeating)

"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing "Amazing Grace" in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.

And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.

The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides.
Watch him make fun of the woman again. Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut the fuck up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.

Watch him again, behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."

Some Of Them Are Monsters

Charlie Pierce, Esquire - I copied the whole piece from behind the pay wall.

It took me a couple of tries to wade through the muck of the indictment that the Southern District of New York dropped on Jeffrey Epstein on Monday. Every time I got sort of rolling, I'd run into a sentence like this:

Epstein typically would also masturbate during these sexualized encounters, ask victims to touch him while he masturbated, and touch victims' genitals with his hands or with sex toys.

It is impossible that Epstein's many influential friends and houseguests didn't know about this. Apparently, Epstein was not shy about his predilections. The current President* of the United States was a frequent running buddy, and he said in New York magazine back in 2002:

I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.

And before the flying monkeys take wing, let me say that, if any Democratic politician was involved in these late Roman Empire hootenannys, that person should be convicted and buried under the jail as well. This is not a stick-to-politics moment. This is going to screw up the political moment good and proper, though. Unless Epstein cuts a quick deal at the encouragement of all those people who suddenly don't know him anymore, this is going to be a long and garish public spectacle. It's going to devour news cycle after news cycle. And if anything emerges connecting the president* directly to Epstein's alleged crimes, there isn't going to be a news cycle anymore. There will be only this story, over and over again.

This, after all, is the lubricious dark side of the Masters of the Universe mentality that brought us the near collapse of the world economy, and which too many powerful people in our politics became far too comfortable in embracing. If there are no rules worth keeping in business, why should there be any rules worth keeping in your off-hours? (How confident was Epstein that the bell would never toll for him? According to the FBI, they found he'd carefully labeled all the kiddie porn in his collection.) If everything is a commodity to be bought and sold, and if the basic business plan of all your peers is fraud, why stop at just collateralizing home loans? Why not collateralize young girls? After all, of all the deadly sins, greed and lust are the closest cousins.

Meanwhile, a lot of women are finally going to get a chance to tell their stories, and to make whatever peace they can with having been caught up in a ghastly series of events that would shame the Borgias. If some of the people who exploited them are destroyed in the process, that is not their concern, nor ours. Fitzgerald was more right than he knew: the rich are different from you and me. Some of them are monsters.

I don't think I can be quite as optimistic as Charlie sounds here. I think the GOP has become obsessed with their Plutocracy Project, to the point where the calculus is already in place - they'll stay mum and let the thing slide, absorbing and assimilating the shittiness of it all, so the rubes can wear the shame of it like a fucking shield.

Once I get you to accept the absurdity, I can get talk you into committing the atrocity.

Bless You, Charlie

Charles P Pierce, Esquire Mag online:

There simply is no more loathsome creature walking the political landscape than the Majority Leader of the United States Senate. You have to go back to McCarthy or McCarran to find a Senate leader who did so much damage to democratic norms and principles than this yokel from Kentucky. Trump is bad enough, but he's just a jumped-up real-estate crook who's in over his head. McConnell is a career politician who knows full well what he's doing to democratic government and is doing it anyway because it gives him power, and it gives the rest of us a wingnut federal judiciary for the next 30 years. There is nothing that this president* can do that threatens McConnell's power as much as it threatens the survival of the republic, and that's where we are

All of McConnell's fuckery is in service to the effort to displace American democracy and establish a new regime - the Daddy State - using 45* as a beard.

Bless You, Charlie Pierce

Charlie Pierce - Esquire:

Remember that old saw about a lawyer who defends himself having a fool for a client? Well, the reverse is true, too. A client who becomes his own lawyer has a fool for a lawyer.

The court has been merciless toward Kobach and toward his prime witnesses, including the notorious Hans von Spakovsky, who has been a vital member of the posse in pursuit of the franchise ever since the Republicans dreamed it up. For his part, Kobach has evinced all the legal skills of a marmoset. His feet haven’t touched the bottom of the pool since he entered the court. The federal district judge, a patient woman named Julie Robinson, is completely fed up with having to preside over a trial while filling in the gaps in Kobach’s legal education, as this story from The Kansas City Star explains:

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson has repeatedly warned Kobach’s team about trying to introduce evidence that has not been shared with the plaintiffs during the first three days of the high stakes trial, which will determine whether thousands can vote in Kansas this November. Kobach complained that the parties in the case “are relying on numbers that are stale” after the judge blocked a line of questioning to Bryan Caskey, the state director of elections, on data that had not been provided to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case before the U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan.

This triggered a rebuke from Robinson after three days of polite warnings on the rules of legal procedure in the face of multiple hiccups from Kobach’s team. “We're not going to have a trial by ambush here... You're stuck with what you provided to them by the deadline,” Robinson said. "No, no. That's not how trials are conducted," she told Kobach during the exchange. Sue Becker, an attorney on Kobach’s team, tried to interject. “Let me finish,” the judge said as she continued on with her admonishment.
And it gets better from there.

May the Lord Zalmoxis keep you and protect you, Charlie.

Charlie Pierce

Charlie Pierce, Esquire Magazine:

The outrage against the piece was quick and volatile and, in truth, the story is a mess, as Fausset himself admitted in a very strange essay that ran virtually simultaneously to the story, the very existence of which leads the careful observer to conclude that the editors at the Times knew the story was a mess and told Fausset to cover the newspaper’s hindquarters.
The NYT's piece that sounded lot like normalization of America's Nazis drew a lot of fire (not undeserved IMO)

We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.

Every reporter has stories they wish they could have back. (It would be a shame if the inhabitants of this shebeen would Google some of the stuff I wrote about John Edwards back in the day.) But a newspaper is a collaborative effort. It is the job of editors to recognize when a story isn’t there—and especially so if, as Lacey claims, the story goes through multiple drafts and it still isn’t there, and especially so, as in this case, the paper has the reporter write an explainer about how the story wasn’t there. 

Pro tip, lads: if you send a guy out on a story like this in 2017, and he can’t come up with anything that Hannah Arendt didn’t say better in 1951, it really is time to move along. Anything else is flat dangerous. Ask Herbert Hoover if he'd like that speech back.

Charlie Pierce

Esquire's Charlie Pierce:

The only things one can be sure of regarding whatever it is that the Republican congressional majorities come up with for a tax plan is that it will shove more of the nation’s wealth upwards, that the math will be mostly magical thinking, and that there will be various strategies employed to keep the country from noticing these first two characteristics. From Politico, we learn that, yes, the Republicans are pretty much a mess on this front, too.
-and-

Look at this mess. Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, who is perhaps the worst legislative politician since the Five Minutes of Bob Livingston passed into history, desperately needs this win. Passage of this tax bill is the only reason he’s put up with the antics out of Camp Runamuck at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. But, unfortunately, those pesky 2018 midterms have put the gallows in everyone’s eyes, especially Ryan’s.
And let's not ignore this from some polling a coupla months ago: