Independence Day? One, as Charles P. Pierce writes: "We're in Another One of Those Moments Where the Great Bluff Gets Called."

The speeches referred to by Pierce are lengthy, eloquent and worthy. In my estimation, they're best read prior to hamburgers and fireworks; for those seeking an antidote to The Trumpian tendency to spew verbal sewage, they're especially helpful.

But you see, you must want to learn genuine facts, as opposed to the bilge fed you since kindergarten days.

This Fourth of July, We're in Another One of Those Moments Where the Great Bluff Gets Called, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

It is the same bluff Frederick Douglass called in 1852, and Dr. King called in 1962.

This is a great year to have a Fourth of July. This is a great year to have a Fourth of July because we are in the middle of another one of those historical moments in which the great bluff gets called, loudly, raucously, and in the public square. You remember that great bluff. It is the bluff that Frederick Douglass called in Rochester in 1852.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

It is the bluff that Dr. King called in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1962.

In a sense we've come to our nation's Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds.”

It’s the one that is being called by thousands of people in the streets, and by the removal of every memorial to every traitorous gossoon, and by defiant young people who are pushing all their chips to the center of the table. This is the bluff they’re all calling ...

Charlie Pierce ravages Anonymous: "May I just say, for the record, to hell with this person."

Getty Images, via Esquire.

The space I inhabit is a remote contrarian corner to the left of the aisle, and too many of my compatriots closer to center are cheering the anonymous op-ed piece in the New York Times far too much.

For one thing, there's this paragraph.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

Charles P. Pierce helpfully translates this 1%-speak.

The monster has fulfilled its purpose: poisoned water, more of the nation's wealth catapulted upwards, and a massive new Navy in case Yamamoto comes back from the dead. Now you all have to help us kill it.

Speaking personally, apart from all other partisan considerations, I've no more patience with this misuse of anonymity as I did during Prof. Erika's excesses of olden local times. Indeed, there are cases when "whistle-blower" exceptions can be made.

This is not one of them, and as usual, Pierce nails it squarely.

Just Shut Up and Quit (Esquire)

Nobody elected the Anonymous Heroes executing a de facto coup against Donald Trump's presidency*.

May I just say, for the record, to hell with this person, whoever it is ...

... Enough of this stuff. Stand up in the light of day and tell your stories. All of them, right from the beginning. Admit that what you're confronting now is the end result of 40 years of conservative politics and all the government-is-the-problem malfeasance you've been imbibing since you were wingnuts in swaddling. The fire's licking at your ankles at last. Come out of the cupboards, you boys and girls. None of you are heroes.

And yes, it SHOULD be a national holiday.

Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency on August 8, 1974.

I was 14 years old, vacationing with my parents at Mt. Rainier National Park. Inside the lodge, there was a rectangular common area with a vast carpet occupying the center. Apparently there wasn't adequate television reception, because the news was coming from a radio sitting stop of a simple wooden chair at one end of the carpet.

People had lined up around the carpet's edge to listen, as though stepping on the carpet itself would be an impolite transgression. My father suggested returning to the car, where we turned on the radio and listened to Nixon's speech, his words bizarrely echoing through the parking lot from the cars of other visitors who had the same idea.

Meanwhile, the silent behemoth looked on, impassive, unimpressed with the transitory nature of human affairs.

Charlie Pierce: "I don't know what comes next. For now, it's family."

My thoughts are at the end ... down there ↓ but first, thoughts from one of my favorite scribes.

Even in Great Despair, There Is Hope, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

I don't know what comes next. For now, it's family.

It will do us all good, I think, to take a weekend off from the cares of a world that seems to be coming apart from its mind outwards. It will do us all good, I think, to take this particular holiday slowly as it comes around. Even the pagans needed some excuse to rejoice in the darkest time of the year, which is why Christians copped the notion in the first place, and this has been a year with more than its share of dark times, god knows. And there's no telling what's coming down out of the deep woods come the next turning of the calendar. But very likely it's something we've never seen before, or at least that's the way I'm betting.

I've highlighted one passage.

So, as long as we're all in this alien country in which all the landmarks are familiar, but not entirely so, and changed in some vague way at their foundations, it won't hurt us to sit down and catch our breath and realize that, in the end, we are all that we have, and to find, if not joy in that, at least some comfort. Coats against the cold, as the late Guy Clark would have said. I don't know what's coming next. (Truly, at this point, I don't even want to guess.) But there will be places to stand against it, if needs be. Those are the places in which we still can have faith in hope, and where we can see through the storm the golden light of one candle in one window. That should be enough for now.

Picking these places to stand will be the essence of your resistance. Think about them carefully. Although the e-universe exists to rush our thoughts, this is the time to step aside and consider choices carefully. My own resistance will be here, where I live.

But Charlie is right. Give it a rest this weekend. Ignore Trump's idiotic tweets and the death throes of Democrats in "opposition." Take care of business at home. Whether by blood, circumstance or choice, family is a fundamental building block. Indulge it.

Then, when the holiday season is over ...

"They are slinging so much mud, and I’m wearing a white suit.”

Our corporate class.

“My name is Lucy Brenton, but you probably don’t know who I am because I haven’t spent $30 million to win a job that pays under $200,000 a year.”

The Libertarian candidate's quip probably was the highlight of Tuesday's senatorial debate. Charlie Pierce noticed, so let's skip to the end -- but first, one of Pierce's classic lines:

"The essential patriotism of the American corporate class can be measured in a thimble, and you'd still have room left over."

No, Hillary Clinton Should Not Go Business Class When She Gets into Office, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

... On Tuesday night, because I could not sleep and do not have a life, I checked in on a replay of a recent debate between the candidates for the U.S. Senate seat from Indiana. The Democratic candidate is Evan Bayh, a classic Simpson-Bowlesite who left the Senate once before because the political climate had gotten too hot and the Senate too wild for his delicate constitution. He then became a lobbyist. Now he wants to get back to the Senate because…oh, hell, who cares. I tuned in just in time to hear Bayh brag that he was opposed to the estate tax and that he would vote for its repeal.

Except he didn't call it that.

He called it "the death tax."

The death tax.

I'm amazed that he isn't telling people he's running for the Senate as the candidate of the Democrat party.

Evan Bayh is half an anachronism and I suspect he doesn't know it. The country has changed. So has the Democratic party. I remain cautiously optimistic that its presidential candidate realizes that as well.

George F. Will helped bring us Donald Trump, but Will apparently does not patronize pottery stores: "You break it, you buy it."

The ubiquitous pundit George F. Will has spent the last 40 years serving as handy GOP shill, seldom questioning the party's varied 1% jihads and cultural dog whistles, as combining to give us Candidate Trump, the most odious of two awful major party presidential nominees.

As Charles P. Pierce observed last week, America has been waiting for Trump.

 ... If you have a party dedicated to vandalism and nihilism, how can you possibly be surprised when your presidential nomination is spirited away by a career vandal and a superior nihilist?

As an enthusiast of great polemics, and a Hoosier who understands how dreadful Poodle Pence has been for our state, I'm placing this bookmark by Will's opinion piece, but it is important to remember that he's savaging a monster of his own creation.

And it's hilarious to see and read.

Donald Trump is the GOP’s chemotherapy, by George F. Will (Washington Post)

... Trump is a marvelously efficient acid bath, stripping away his supporters’ surfaces, exposing their skeletal essences. Consider Mike Pence, a favorite of what Republicans devoutly praise as America’s “faith community.” Some of its representatives, their crucifixes glittering in the television lights, are still earnestly explaining the urgency of giving to Trump, who agreed that his daughter is “a piece of ass,” the task of improving America’s coarsened culture.

Because Pence looks relatively presidential when standing next to Trump — talk about defining adequacy down — some Republicans want Trump to slink away, allowing Pence to float to the top of the ticket and represent Republicanism resurrected. This idea ignores a pertinent point: Pence is standing next to Trump.

He salivated for the privilege of being Trump’s poodle, and he expresses his canine devotion in rhetorical treacle about “this good man.” What would a bad man look like to pastor Pence?

Bravo: "If Hillary Clinton Seeks (or Accepts) an Endorsement from Henry Kissinger, She's Lost My Vote."

List of Kissinger War Crimes.

At this point, I may write in my own name.

If Hillary Clinton Seeks (or Accepts) an Endorsement from Henry Kissinger, She's Lost My Vote, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

 ... So I can say this full in the knowledge that what I say will not have the slightest effect on the outcome of the presidential election. But it is not negotiable.

If Hillary Clinton actively seeks, or publicly accepts, the endorsement of Henry Kissinger, I will vote for Gary Johnson and Bill Weld on November 8.

(Jill Stein, you might've been a contender, but going off to Red Square to talk about Vladimir Putin and human rights? Being an honored guest of a Russian propaganda channel? I don't think so.) 

Kissinger is a bridge too far. He is responsible for more unnecessary deaths than any official of a putative Western democracy since the days when Lord John Russell was starving the Irish, if not the days when President Andy Jackson was inaugurating the genocide of the Cherokee. He should be coughing his life away as an inmate at The Hague, not whispering in the ears of a putatively progressive Democratic presidential candidate. I can tolerate (somewhat) the notion of her reaching out to the rest of the wax museum there, but Kissinger is a monster too far. He is my line in the sand. I can choose who I endorse to lead my country, a blessing that Henry Kissinger worked his whole career to deny to too many people ...

"For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die."

If the end of the GOP truly is near, and somehow I doubt it, it's causing me a great deal of unease. What will replace it?

Are You Ready for the End of the Republican Party? by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

 ... For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

Ever since the late 1970s, when it determined to ally itself with a politicized splinter of American evangelical Protestantism, having previously allied itself with the detritus of American apartheid, the Republican Party has been reeling toward catastrophe even as it succeeded at the ballot box, and taking the country along with it. Crackpot economic theories were mainstreamed in the 1980s. Crackpot conspiracy theories and god-drunk fantasies were mainstreamed in the 1990s. Crackpot imperial adventures abroad were mainstreamed in the 2000s. And all of these were mainstreamed at once in opposition to the country's first African American president over the past eight years.

Modern conservatism has proven to be not a philosophy, but a huge dose of badly manufactured absinthe. It squats in an intellectual hovel now, waiting for its next fix, while a public madman filches its tattered banner and runs around wiping his ass with it. It always was coming to this.

"What We Lose with Every Mass Shooting."

“You can't talk about fucking in America, people say you're dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that's cool.”
― Richard Pryor

Back in the day, Thomas Jefferson observed that so long as evil is tolerable, people will not seek redress by abolishing the forms to which they're accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpation reaches a tipping point, there comes a time to throw off the evil.

Are we there yet?

What We Lose with Every Mass Shooting, by Charles Pierce (Esquire)

​Orlando is not merely the destruction of innocence. It's worse.​

... This being the 15th one of these he's had to give over the eight years of his presidency, he probably feels somewhat burdened by how little has changed in the wake of the previous 14 statements he'd given on the subject. I would not blame the man if, at this point, he simply threw up his hands at the possibility of weaning this country off its suicidal affection for its firearms.

So I was struck by the thought that Barack Obama has had to preside over more mass shootings of Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln. That was a bit sobering, I must admit, and it must be moreso for him.

(The only possible flaw in my calculation would be those presidents after Lincoln who presided over the mass killings of Native Americans. This will require further research as this country's suicidal affection for its firearms has a long and bloody history.)

“See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.”
― Noam Chomsky

To me, the key point is this.

The events in Orlando do nothing more than demolish our most treasured illusions about ourselves and our country and—most trivially—our politics. How many of the congresscritters now sending "thoughts and prayers" to the victims in Orlando, and to their families, spent a lot of time in their day jobs making the everyday lives of those victims more miserable than they had to be? There's still an audience for clean-shaven, well-tailored bigotry of all faiths.

Hate crimes, terrorism ... violence.

The original American birthright.

Statistically, the perpetrators are few in number, but the accessories and accomplices are many. To spend every waking hour demonizing is to find and create willing disciples, and when public "safety" has been outsourced to the gun rack at Wal-Mart (Jamey Noel will give you directions to the nearest store), there simply isn't much cause for optimism.

Or, as a friend phrased it on Twitter:

If you've said that people aren't good enough for heaven, nobody wants to hear you say you're sorry they're dead.

Obama in Flint: "The speech in Boston was a pillow. This was a brick through a window."

Leave it to Charlie Pierce to reach the heart of the matter.

Don't Let Trump's Taco Bowl Distract You From Obama's Speech on Flint, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

The president went to Flint on Wednesday. He should have gone there long before this, and there was something unsettling about his conspicuously taking a drink of water, although I don't think it was as bad as Michael Moore does. But what may have gone unnoticed—especially by Ron Fournier, who went to Flint and filtered what he learned through his special Both Sides Do It filtering mechanism—is that the president took a big old sledgehammer to the philosophical foundation of 40 years of conservative political vandalism.

Just this pull.

But volunteers don't build county water systems and keep lead from leaching into our drinking glasses. We can't rely on faith groups to reinforce bridges and repave runways at the airport. We can't ask second-graders, even ones as patriotic as Isiah Britt who raised all that money, to raise enough money to keep our kids healthy. You hear a lot about government overreach, how Obama—he's for big government. Listen, it's not government overreach to say that our government is responsible for making sure you can wash your hands in your own sink, or shower in your own home, or cook for your family. These are the most basic services. There is no more basic element sustaining human life than water. It's not too much to expect for all Americans that their water is going to be safe.

Matt Taibbi and Charlie Pierce on Drumpf, HRC, Tailginner Ted and Bernie.

First, Charles P. Pierce in the aftermath of Stupor Tuesday (bold/underline is Roger's).

At This Point, It's Either the Vulgar Talking Yam or Ted Cruz -- And on the other side, Bernie ought to stick around for a while, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

 ... There is no reason at all for Sanders to drop out now. He raised a spectacular $42 million in February. But the best reason for Sanders to fight this all the way to the convention could be found in one passage in Hillary Rodham Clinton's Super Tuesday speech.

Unfortunately, too many of those with the most wealth and the most power in this country today seem to have forgotten that basic truth about America. Yesterday I was at the old south meeting house in Boston where nearly two and a half centuries ago American patriots organized the original Tea Party. I had to wonder what they would make of corporations that seem to have absolutely no loyalty to the country that gave them so much. What would they say about student loan companies that overcharge young people, struggling to get out of debt, even young men and women serving our country in the military or corporations that shift their headquarters overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Like Johnson Controls and Auto Parts from Wisconsin, that we taxpayers helped to bail out with the auto rescue back in 2008, now they're turning their back on America. I'm interested this making things right. Let there be no doubt, if you cheat your employees, exploit consumers, pollute our environment or rip off the taxpayers, we're going to hold you accountable.

I do not believe for a moment that she would have said anything of the sort if she hadn't been pressed by the Sanders campaign, and as long as that campaign goes on, the less tenable any pivot toward "the center" by HRC will be.

And, last week, Matt Taibbi on The Donald:

"He might have this thing sewn up before the others even figure out in what order they should quit. It's hard to recall a dumber situation in American presidential politics."

How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

He's no ordinary con man. He's way above average — and the American political system is his easiest mark ever.

Taibbi's assessment of the Trump phenomenon is center of the target, but his greatest achievement may be his characterization of Ted Cruz.

... Psychology Today even ran an article by a neurology professor named Dr. Richard Cytowic about the peculiarly off-putting qualities of Cruz's face. He used a German term, backpfeifengesicht, literally "a face in need of a good punch," to describe Cruz.

This may be overstating things a little. Cruz certainly has an odd face – it looks like someone sewed pieces of a waterlogged Reagan mask together at gunpoint – but it's his tone more than anything that gets you. He speaks slowly and loudly and in the most histrionic language possible, as if he's certain you're too stupid to grasp that he is for freedom.

Social media crickets chirp, pins drop as Planned Parenthood scores some justice.

Now, about that Hillary Clinton endorsement ...

A Little Justice for Planned Parenthood, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

A remarkable thing happened late Monday afternoon in a courthouse in Houston. It was a victory of sorts for ACORN, and for Shirley Sherrod, and for Mary Landrieu, and for the Kerry for President campaign, for that matter. Criminal ratfcking was treated as, well, a crime.

Prosecutors in Harris County said one of the leaders of the Center for Medical Progress—an anti-abortion group that made secretly recorded videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue—had been indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs. That leader, David R. Daleiden, 27, the director of the center, had posed as a biotechnology representative to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and surreptitiously record his efforts to procure tissue for research. Another center employee, Sandra S. Merritt, 62, was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record. The record-tampering charges accused Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt of making and presenting fake California driver's licenses, with the intent to defraud, for their April meeting at Planned Parenthood in Houston.

This is an altogether remarkable event, even more so because of where it occurred. A Texas grand jury did this.

Charlie Pierce on Donald Trump's "raging nihilism."

Raging nihilism?

Like when self-identified "craft" beer fans pay AB-InBev to drink Trojan Goose?

Charlie Pierce leads off with a quote that summarizes Donald Trump's candidacy, as well as our own collective experience in New Gahania.

"There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember what the second one is." — Mark Hanna

I've had little to say about the Trump phenomenon, and intend to keep it that way. Up here in the Sierra Maestre with Che and Camilo, there are too many other things on my mind.

However, it must be said that Trump's litmus candidacy is one of the most entertaining pieces of political performance art I've ever witnessed in L'America.

Trump has no chance of winning, but already he's amply illustrated how stupid we can be as a nation. Let's just hope the end comes before he renders The Onion completely obsolete -- although destroying the Republican Party would be a nice bonus.

Donald Trump's Rampaging Nihilism Has Destroyed the GOP's Delicate Balance, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

... Trump has no such compunctions. He'll blow up the campaign for laughs because that kind of thing is his brand. He doesn't care if the United States comes out of this campaign with its political system in sticks and splinters all over the highway. He has no political future to protect, no pretend "revolution" to maintain. Frankly, there's no threat that Priebus can bring to bear on him that he can't laugh off. He is fully capable of whipping up his followers into the kind of froth that demolishes the convention and then walking away from the wreckage. What does he care? He still has a golf course in Scotland.

Three progressive thoughts on the death of Mario Cuomo.

The essayist Schlesinger describes Mario Cuomo's first campaign for governor of New York.

(Cuomo) stood out as the authentic liberal in the contest—a “pragmatic progressive” as he called himself.

Indeed. Following are three remembrances of Mario Cuomo, beginning with a former aide's thoughts.

Mario Cuomo: A Tribute to the Man, the Governor, the Writer, by Stephen Schlesinger (New York Observer)

... He will long be remembered for his eloquence, his San Francisco address, his electric presence, his humor and his warmth, his progressive ideals, his intellectual heft, his concerns for the disenfranchised, his toughness, his pride in his Italian heritage. His legacy includes his opposition to the death penalty and his willingness to take on the Catholic Church over the issue of abortion–and, as well, a future governor. He left his state in a better place than it had been. He was the man who should have been president, the man who might have been on the Supreme Court, but all he ever truly wanted to be was the governor of New York State.

Consider the present dearth of "public thinking," a deficiency not restricted to one side of the two-party aisle.

Mario Cuomo, A Thinker in Public, by James Fallows (Atlantic)

... Among politicians of the past generation-plus seen as national-level contenders, he was the most accomplished and engrossing public thinker. (This is also Obama's strength, and presumably he will overtake Cuomo through the scale of the issues he has been involved in.) Most public officials know, or fear, that they need to buff away the complicated or challenging parts of their views before presenting them in public. That's assuming they ever had, or kept, such thoughts. Mario Cuomo was notable in trying always to talk up to his audience, not down. You see that especially in his Notre Dame speech. It's an example worth reflecting upon.

Finally, Charlie Pierce brings it full circle.

Mario Cuomo, RIP, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

... Now Mario Cuomo is dead, and his absence from our national discussion is being used in some quarters as a cautionary tale to the rising progressive movement within the Democratic party. The same forces that worked to marginalize him will be brought to bear at some point against Elizabeth Warren.

Bankers on trial in Ireland, so why not in America?

We haven't looked in on Charlie Pierce in a while. He's still truth-telling at Esquire, this time previewing a forthcoming trial at which bankers responsible for the crash won't be getting bonuses and promotions, but quality time in a court of law. Let's hope they burn -- figuratively, of course.

Ireland Gets It Right

Again, the Irish seem willing to do their homework.

This is taken as an unmistakeable sign that since the crash many voters continue to hold much of the political and financial establishment in low regard. Such sentiment has been if anything sharpened in recent times by a series of revelations which have led many to complain that the pain of austerity has not been shared equally throughout society. There has been anger at disclosures that some in the higher reaches of public life, including official bodies, have been receiving very substantial salaries, pensions and benefits. There has been particular public indignation that some such money was apparently originally intended for charity.

Creationism, its museum, and Idiot America.

You may have heard the news.

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” will debate founder of Creation Museum in Kentucky, by Irving DeJohn (New York Daily News)

Nye will argue merits of evolution with Ken Ham, museum’s founder. Ham argued once in a YouTube video that Nye ‘really doesn’t understand science.’

Coincidentally, many thanks to my pen pal DE, who has chimed in at precisely the right moment with a link to a snippet from the righteous and inimitable Charles P. Pierce's book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

I've discovered a book which purports to define the American mind (there's only one?) or mindset, whatever.

In this excerpt, a visit to the Creation Museum is described.

These were impolite questions. Nobody asked them here by the cool pond tucked into the gentle hillside. Increasingly, amazingly, nobody asked them outside the gates, either. It was impolite to wonder why our parents had sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants had sweated and bled so that their children could be educated, if not so that one day we would feel confident enough to look at a museum full of dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Aqueduct and make the not unreasonable point that it was batshit crazy, and that anyone who believed this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and their own money. Instead, people go to court over this kind of thing.

Pierce: "And, of course, this was not about race because nothing is ever about race."

Pierce says it well, as usual. This is what this case means. That is precisely why so many seem happy about it. They are as paranoid and as fatalistic and as likely to be armed as Zimmerman. Their imaginations do not extend beyond the boundaries of their own fear and there is nothing they fear more than a disruption or recalibration of those boundaries. They have been validated by the system that created them, again. They are the system.

What George Zimmerman Can Do Now, Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

Calm is prevailing. For now. At least, that's something.

However, in theory, at least, here is what is now possible. Some night very soon, if he so chooses, George Zimmerman can load his piece, tuck it into the back of his pants, climb into his SUV, and drive around Sanford, Florida looking for assholes and fucking punks who are walking through neighborhoods where he, George Zimmerman, defender of law and order, doesn't think they belong. He can drive around Sanford, Florida and check out anyone who is dressed in such a manner as might frighten the average citizen who has been fed a daily diet of "Scary Black Kids" by their local news and by their favorite radio personalities, and who is dressed in such a manner as might seem inappropriate to their surroundings as determined by George Zimmerman, crimebuster. He can drive around Sanford, Florida until he spots an asshole or a fucking punk and then he can get out of his SUV, his piece tucked into the back of his pants, and he can stalk the asshole or the fucking punk, the one who is in the wrong neighborhood, or who is dressed inappropriately, at least according to George Zimmerman, protector of peace. If the asshole, or the fucking punk, turns around and objects to being stalked -- or, worse, if the asshole, or the fucking punk, decides physically to confront the person stalking him -- then George Zimmerman can whip out the piece from the back of his pants and shoot the asshole, or the fucking punk, dead right there on the spot. This can happen tonight. That is now possible. Hunting licenses are now available and it's open season on assholes, fucking punks, and kids who wear hoodies at night in neighborhoods where they do not belong, at least according to George Zimmerman, defender of law and order, crimebuster, and protector of the peace, because that is what American society has told George Zimmerman, and all the rest of us, is the just outcome of what happened on one dark and rainy night in February of 2012.

Pierce: "Tell Me What Is Being Done In My Name."

Classic rant, spot on.

Tell Me What Is Being Done In My Name, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

OK, let us persist in the notion that I am an American citizen. Let us persist in the notion that I am the citizen of a self-governing political commonwealth. Let us persist in the notion that I have a say -- and important and equal say -- in the operation of my government here and out in the world. Let us persist in the notion that, in America, the people rule. If we persist in these notions -- and, if we don't, what's the fking point, really? -- then there is only one question that I humbly ask of my government this week.

Please, if it's not too damn much trouble, can you tell me what's being done in my name?

Mitch McConnell is corrected by Charles P. Pierce.

The culminating disappointment of Indiana's political drift toward quasi-Neanderthal Mussolini cult is that it prevents proper, civilized guffaws at Kentucky's senior tool.

In Which I Help Mitch McConnell, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

... Hold on a second there, terrapin head. I consider one of the curators of that most precious of all political pejoratives — "Nixonian" ... (and) Nixon would laugh at your outrage.

Inauguration 3: "Obama's Inauguration Speech: A Primer."

When even a conservative commentator like David Brooks is compelled to concede that Barack Obama’s second inaugural speech "surely has to rank among the best of the past half-century," one making a strong "argument for a pragmatic and patriotic progressivism," then it's been a fairly good day. As usual, Charlie Pierce gets pride of place in summarizing Barack Obama's speech.

Obama's Inauguration Speech: A Primer, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

... The president's second inaugural address was as clear a statement of progressive principles as a president has given since LBJ got up there and shoved the Voting Rights Act and the words "We shall overcome" right up old Richard Russell's ass in 1965 ...

... The speech was a bold refutation of almost everything the Republican party has stood for over the past 40 years. It was a loud — and, for this president, damned near derisive — denouncement of all the mindless, reactionary bunkum that the Republicans have come to stand for in 2013; you could hear the sound of the punch he landed on the subject of global warming halfway to Annapolis. But the meat of the speech was a brave assertion of the power of government, not as an alien entity, but as an instrument of the collective will and desires of a self-governing people.