So far this week, the targets of Esquire blogger Charles Pierce’s invective have included opponents of the new U.S. policy towards Cuba; critics of the president and first lady’s comments on racism in their interview with People magazine; and Mark Levin’s mother. Seriously.
Pierce rejoiced on Wednesday that “the Republicans now have two major freak-outs in their base” -- over Cuba and Obama’s executive action on immigration -- “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.”
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
[I]n response to six years of being told he was un-American, and a friend to the country's enemies, [Obama has] handed them the ultimate exploding cigar…
…The idiotic Cuban boycott has isolated the Cuban people from the greatest weapons in our soft power arsenal, and I renew my longstanding call for Major League Baseball to put a team in Havana at the earliest opportunity...We almost blew up the world over Cuba. Whatever we owe the shrinking band of angry Batista fans in Florida…is a debt we paid in full long ago. As policy, this is a no-lose proposition.
As politics, of course, it's completely brilliant. Fresh off the Triumph Of The Morons, 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…
But there's more, too. The president and his wife have given an interview to People about their personal experiences with the systemic racism in this country, and they did so in the context of what occurred in Ferguson and on Staten Island and in Cleveland.
"There's no black male my age, who's a professional, who hasn't come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn't hand them their car keys," said the president, adding that, yes, it had happened to him. Mrs. Obama recalled another incident: "He was wearing a tuxedo at a black-tie dinner, and somebody asked him to get coffee." Things have gotten better, both Obamas agreed, but there's still more progress to be made…President Obama said [,] "It's one thing for me to be mistaken for a waiter at a gala. It's another thing for my son to be mistaken for a robber and to be handcuffed, or worse, if he happens to be walking down the street and is dressed the way teenagers dress."
Oh, sweet Jesus H. Christ on a jet-pack, this is going to set them off. It already has begun on the distant shores of the Island Of The Misfit Witless and it will steadily build to a crescendo in the more respectable precincts.
And, in a brief Tuesday post about the mother of liberal operative Brad Woodhouse and conservative operative Dallas Woodhouse calling in during the brothers’ joint appearance on C-SPAN to request that they keep the political arguments to a minimum when they visit at Christmas, Pierce unfathomably concluded, “One day, I hope that the she-weasel who spawned Mark Levin learns to dial a telephone.”
