There are rants and then there are Rants by Charlie Pierce at Esquire. Charlie has a regular feature, "Things in Politico that Make me Want to Mainline (or Guzzle) Antifreeze, Part the Infinity." Charlie hates Politico with the deserved hatred of a thousand suns. His not-affectionate-at-all nickname for it is "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" (TBOTP) because of its fawning boy band coverage of the worst of the Beltway Hacks and Crooks. There is a constant flow of fodder to feed Charlie's ferocious takedowns.
The Politico Event featuring the Cheneys (Dick, Lynne, Liz, but not Mary) nearly pushed Charlie over the edge. Instead, he began his rant like this:
[Politico's] puerilty has finally crossed over into indecency. Its triviality has finally crossed over into obscenity. The comical political starfcking that is its primary raison d'erp has finally crossed over into $10 meth-whoring on the Singapore docks. Once a mere surface irritation, Tiger Beat On The Potomac has finally crossed over into being a thickly pustulating chancre on the craft of journalism. It has demonstrated its essential worthlessness. It has demonstrated that it has the moral character of a sea-slug and the professional conscience of the Treponema pallidum spirochete. Trust me. Stephen Glass never sunk this low. Mike (Payola) Allen has accomplished the impossible. He's made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.
Pierce goes after every insipid, fawning part of Mike Allen's sycophantic article about the family that should just go away -- Allen comments on the "awkwardness" of sister Mary's absence (Dick, Lynne and the unforgivable Liz were there) ostensibly because she's pissed at Liz's refusal to endorse gay marriage in her disastrous WY campaign. Charlie writes, "
That's the problem? The problem was not that the alleged journalists running your place decided to give a platform to a man whose only public appearances in the near future should be unsponsored events at the Hague?"
Allen asks: "How do you break the tensions with the Cheneys?"
Charlie answers: "Shackles? Thumbscrews?"
Charlie concludes:
You cheap fraud. Of course you don't want Congress to do anything—like hold hearings into which of your friends stole the national economy, or into which of your aides is leaking the names of covert CIA operatives for the purposes of political revenge, or into the negligence before the 9/11 attacks and/or the profiteering that followed them, or into barbered intelligence. When you were in Congress, you didn't think it should look into illegal arms sales to the Iranian mullahs. Even with our current Congress, there is something uncomfortably democratic about the legislature for someone whose entire worldview is bounded by the boardroom, and whose conscience has been in an undisclosed location for three decades.
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Whole Thing.