Is the Republican party a political organization or “a terrarium of retrograde fauna”? Both, suggested Esquire blogger Charles Pierce in a Monday post, 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 Hill, that "Elizabeth Warren is the mirror image of Ted Cruz, and if we aren't careful, she'll drive the Democrats into the same ditch Cruz is trying to drive the Republicans." Pierce called the ex-staffer “an idiot” and went on to deride the Warren-Cruz comparison (bolding added):
Cruz is an authentic extremist; his views on church-and-state are blatantly theocratic, and his notion of the federal union stopped evolving when the results came in from the presidential election of 1860. Elizabeth Warren's primary mission during her time in the Senate is the re-establishment of an economic order with which most people were happy from 1945 until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. There's nothing radical about the Glass-Steagall Act. There's nothing extreme about supporting both Social Security, M[e]dicare, and Medicaid in their traditional forms. On the other hand, Ted Cruz has gone a long way toward mainstreaming crackpot notions that everyone thought dead and buried with the Goldwater campaign, if not the Confederate States of America…
The comparison is stupid and wrong, but it is quintessential Washington political journalism. The absolute refusal to look at the most fundamental truth of our politics squarely continues to be the worst episode of journalistic malpractice that I can recall. It cannot be that one of our political parties has become demented and now exists as a terrarium of retrograde fauna. It must be the the whole political and constitutional order is fcked [sic] to a fare-thee-well. So we must find some Democratic politicians that we can cast as being as far to the "left" as Cruz is to starboard. Next, I guess, they'll look for a Democratic equivalent for Louie Gohmert.
