Esquire

Among the insights: Fiorina "has a notable facility for delivering answers that thrill conservatives but fall apart under close examination"; a discussion of childhood vaccines showed that the party is "fervid, claustrophobic, recklessly insinuating, and, at the same time, utterly timid when it comes to extremism in its own ranks”; and the GOP as a whole is "wedded to the tenets of [George W.]…

Apropos of Wednesday night’s Republican debates, Esquire’s Charles Pierce worried that political reporters may be treating the race for the party’s presidential nomination as if it were a Brad Thor novel rather than a highly consequential real-world event. “How do you cover a campaign in which 15 candidates are running on the basis of things that simply are not true…that simply do not exist?”…

There’s going to be a Top Gun sequel, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous is coming back, and Bloom County has already returned. Still, suggests Esquire's Pierce, when it comes to things that have the 1980s written all over them, these days Donald Trump is the king of the mountain. In a Tuesday post, Pierce contended that Trump “was one of the purest products of the Age of Reagan, which was…

Whether or not Chattanooga shooter Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was a jihadist, opined Esquire’s Pierce in a Friday blog post, the key to Thursday’s murders is that he had a quintessentially American trait: he was gun-crazy. “He had a grudge. The basis of that grudge, whether it was rooted in a bloody-minded version of religion or an anger at the country's policies across the seas, is beside the…

Monday was a big day for journalists to suggest similarities between mass murderers and Republicans. Newsweek writer Nina Burleigh claimed that certain of Timothy McVeigh’s “militia ideals have gone mainstream” in the GOP, but Esquire's Pierce really put the ideological pedal to the metal when he likened Dick Cheney to one of the all-time worst genocidal maniacs, opining that Cheney’s relatively…

Tuesday’s New York Times piece on how the problematic phrase “established by the state” got into and stayed in the Affordable Care Act provoked a great many blasts from lefty bloggers at the plaintiffs’ case in King v. Burwell. Two especially heated posts came from MSNBC’s Steve Benen and Esquire’s Charles Pierce. Benen, a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the show’s…

Esquire’s Pierce considers the web site/newspaper Politico an embarrassment to journalism (he habitually refers to it as “Tiger Beat on the Potomac”). Recently, Pierce found more fuel for his ire, a Politico story that to his disgust 1) merely hinted, rather than stated, that Scott Walker is an “unprincipled scoundrel,” and 2) virtually endorsed Walker’s “fundamental mendacity” as long as it’s…

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.”