Midnight in the Shebeen of Good and Hackery

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Last week was a bad one for Charles P. Pierce. Though not as bad or entertaining as Donald Trump’s bad week, it was bad nonetheless…and I take no pleasure in noting it. Up until last St. Patrick’s Day, I had been among Charlie’s most loyal readers, for more than 30 years following him around like a favorite bar band from the big Boston papers to the alternative weeklies to glossy magazines to his books to the time when his stuff was only available black market-style on Eric Alterman’s pioneering blog. In 1991 Houghton Mifflin published The Red Sox Reader, an anthology I edited to great success and satisfaction that included an essay of my choosing by Charlie. And in the early days of this blog, The Nob served as a foster home for fellow fans of Charlie, who had been orphaned during his transition from The Boston Globe to Esquire. In the life of this blog, I’ve provided many adoring links and references to Charlie’s blog. As a prelude to all the critical words I’m about to direct at him, I still find him capable of occasionally producing some awesome pieces. But today, as I say, I come to bury Charlie…or at least dust him up a little…not to praise him….
Charlie likes to refer to his blog as a shebeen, which has a nice, eccentric Irish pub feel to it. But it’s more like Cheers if Cheers were overrun by Frasier Cranes turning the air thick with self satisfaction.  That’s one of the reasons I checked out last March, but there were many others, so let me count the ways: Charlie’s penchant for tiresomely epic nicknames for his targets—Paul Ryan is always “The Zombie-eyed Granny Starver.” Scott Walker is always “The Goggle-eyed Homunculus hired by Koch Industries to Manage their Midwest Subsidiary Formerly Known as the State of Wisconsin.” Newt Gingrich is ALWAYS "Definer Of Civilization's Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces." Marco is always "Little Marco"...oops, wrong guy. They were passably humorous when introduced, but grew downright tedious after years of repetition. Tedious and mean—veteran CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer held the distinction of having Charlie make up a new--persistently ageist--nickname for him each week (“One-time Ashurbanipal The Hairy Biographer”). Even after Schieffer had retired and was no longer a disturbance on Charlie’s TeeVee machine, Pierce still went after him in what seems like the journalistic equivalent of a teenager egging the house of the old man down the street.Charlie’s penchant for beating dead horses—His readers are repeatedly told how useless are the Sunday morning talk shows, National Review, Politico, David Brooks, etc. and yet he devotes countless posts to dissecting bits and pieces of all of them, like some obsessed monk poring over the Dead Sea Scrolls trying to unsolve the mystery of existence. (And then there’s this: “HRC's e-mails is not a major national story,” or so he writes in the midst of a blog post helping to keep it so).Charlie’s penchant for shooting fish in a barrel--How many times can you get off blowing the heads off the likes of Louis Gohmert and Steve King? (And still they keep saying stupid things and getting re-elected. Don't they read Charlie's blog?) In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey describes the chicken peckin’ parties Nurse Ratched conducted with her therapy group each morning…throwing a chicken with a spot of blood on it into the flock and sitting back while the flock pecks the chicken to death. Fish…chickens…mixed metaphors, I know…but sometimes Charlie likes to let his bastids do his dirty work for him. (Full disclosure: I actually participated in one of Charlie’s peckin’ parties over at Ann Althouse’s blog spot one day. It was like Lord of the Flies, but now we add pigs to the stew.) Charlie’s penchant for promoting Idiot America. That’s Charlie brand…he wrote a book called Idiot America and his blog is almost entirely dedicated to reinforcing the belief that everybody who exists outside his shebeen is an idiot. That’s the premise of "Laboratories of Democracy," his weekly rundown of all the stupid things going on in the various state legislatures. Charlie's too busy painting it black to bother with the expansion of Voting Rights in Washington, the Right to Die in Oregon, a Connecticut legislature bravely standing up to the NRA. A few years ago, Charlie peed his pants through several blog posts over Republican initiatives to pass voter suppression bills, while over on MSNBC Chris Hayes hosted a parade of lawyers, politicians, and black activists who were already fighting back at the local level. If Laboratories of Democracy was your source for what’s going on down in the states, you would think the recent court rulings against those voter ID laws was a sheer act of deus ex machina.Charlie’s penchant for demeaning more or less benign figures--Ezra Klein who earnestly interviews, researches and crunches numbers before turning out exhaustive, comprehensive reports on big, complex issues (like his yeoman’s reporting during the ACA debate) is dismissed in Charlie’s blog like some digital age Jimmy Olson. Edward Snowden, the Daniel Ellsberg of the 21stcentury, is diminished as “The International Man of Luggage.” George Stephanopoulos is belittled as “The Clinton Guy Shocked by Blow Jobs”. Jonathan Chait must get a nervous twitch every time he reads how Charlie likes his writing, knowing by now that it’s a set-up for Charlie to rip him a new one for once again daring to challenge liberal orthodoxy. Oh, and then there’s what Catholics call sin of omission…his baffling failure to rarely if ever boost Chris Hayes for either of their mutual benefit. Hayes frequently has Pierce as a guest on his MSNBC  All-inshow, even though Charlie hardly ever brings anything to it except some warmed over snark from one of his past posts. Yet CP never promotes these appearances or throws any bouquets Hayes’s way for some of the great work he does, like his coverage of the Rev. William Barber’s efforts to combat voter suppression in North Carolina. Why is that? Perhaps because it conflicts with CP’s mocking impression of MSNBC’s “so-called liberalism"….or perhaps just because it undercuts the idiot brand.    Charlie’s penchant for perverting the meaning of John Lewis's life —Charlie will invoke the sacrifice and bravery of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis a number of times in the course of any year…always with the aim of humiliating one of Charlie’s targets. Lewis is as close to a living Jesus as we've got. He's dedicated his life to reconciliation, a quality openly disdained by Charlie and many of his readers, who have an uncanny, unforgiving recall for the sins of others. Turning John Lewis into another weapon in your partisan arsenal is no better than those who use Jesus to bludgeon gays. If you're not holding John Lewis up as a model for overcoming long-standing grievances and forgiving old grudges, you're really missing the point of his life.Although all these contributed to my personally taking leave of Charlie’s shebeen, they are only peripherally involved in the making of his just bad week. It began when he wrote a post warning Hillary Clinton not to accept an endorsement from Henry Kissinger or else He, Pierce, was going to take his vote in November and give it to William Weld…well, Gary Johnson actually...but The Commonwealth, God damn it. (The Nob has already stated its view on vainglorious lines in the sand). For pulling that particular litmus test out of his Masshole, Charlie was given a "Sully Award" by the Balloon Juice blog. That had to hurt because the award was named for long-time Charlie punching bag Andrew Sullivan, so recognized by Balloon Juice for his penchant for seeing the sky falling on any given bad news day. Charlie then came in for a good deal of comment fire both on Balloon Juice and the growing number of dissidents on his own blog. He answered that by doubling down and wagging a stern finger at HRC for accepting an endorsement from John Negroponte. Then topped it all off by telling his hometown critics, mostly female: “And if anyone thinks I'm going to drop this because Donald Trump is a crazy person, by all means, find another shebeen!” In other words, Get off my lawn! In his final post before going on vacation, he made a point of refusing the Balloon Juice award in print. Why not just ignore it? My guess is that Charlie was looking to start a peckin’ party over at an offending blog.
The irony of this blog post of mine is that it’s forced me to go back and catch up on what Charlie’s been up to since I left the shebeen all these months ago...with special attention to his treatment of Hillary Clinton, which was reliably passive-aggressive before I left. Since March, I’ve found it has become less passive, more aggressive, condescending, and headmasterly. He spends a lot of time warning “that woman” about what she should and shouldn’t do, how she should behave and present herself, and who she should and should not be seen with. Most recently warning her campaign that Rev. Barber should get to do the invocation at her inaugural or someone should be fired. (What’s with this appropriation of transcendent black men dedicated to redemption and reconciliation as a cudgel?) If I were more of a woman, I’d take offense, but since I’m not I’ll take it as permission to proceed with this post. After all, if Charles Pierce can critique Hillary Clinton, surely I can critique Charles Pierce. 
Though he has not come up with a nickname for her, he routinely describes Hillary as a plodder, which in more generous eyes would be a grinder, a gamer, a baller. Here’s a passage he wrote about her that he used both before and after she announced her run for the 2016 nomination. “And she spent two years getting beaten to the punch and utterly wrong-footed by the renegade staff of a junior senator from Illinois that had a better handle on the prevailing zeitgeist and a far superior knowledge of the new communication technology and how best to put it to political use.” He’s certainly not alone in scoring HRC down for style points and in assessing her (way-closer-than-Bernie) loss to Barack Obama the way he does. But in light of the recent Democratic primary it might be time to reassess her loss without the demeaning sports metaphors. Given the determinative role of the black vote in her primary win, perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of wrong footedness that cost her in ‘08 but wrong skin color…perhaps if Barack Obama had been a whiter shade of Bernie Sanders there’s no way he would’ve taken the black vote away from her (as Charlie repeatedly says with tongue in cheek, it’s never about race).   I wouldn't think of calling Charlie sexist (too many throw that word around too often and too easily). I will say, however, that in addition to being a loyal reader of Charlie’s, I share significant portions of his background with him—both being Boomer-age Irish-Catholics, steeped in New England sports, journalism and politics. As such I’m familiar with how those baptismal waters can doctor your eyes to see women as either virgins or whores. I think I know what it’s like to be a pre-teen boy on the mean streets of, say, Worcester where all the girls seem to have cooties. I can imagine being in a newsroom in the 1970s and encountering your first emerging feminist, who calls you out for "not getting it" and you don’t even know what “it” is. I can see where long hours at the bar with the boys from the political beat or sports beat can breed a bit of disdain for that peculiar gender that doesn’t seem to know how to deliver a precinct or turn a double-play. I can understand how all that can subtly seep into your mind (like a leak from our friend the Keystone Pipeline) so you don’t even know it’s polluting the aquifer of your conscience…especially when confronted with a woman who seems to embody all those various uncomfortable stages in your life, including the woman as whore.  
Another thing Charlie and I share is our comparable esteem for Bob Dylan. Yet even with that, I'm sure that if either of us had owned a blog back in the day when The Master was veering too damn close to hackery for his own good we both would’ve thought it was well worth 2,000 words to warn him. So, Charlie, this verse is for you:
When you’re lost in the rain in JuarezAnd it’s Eastertime tooAnd your gravity failsAnd negativity don’t pull you throughDon’t put on any airsWhen you’re down on Rue Morgue AvenueThey got some hungry women thereAnd they really make a mess outta you



This photo accompanied a recent Charles Pierce post in which he praises Barack Obama for taking ownership of US international misdeeds. As you can see in the photo, the President is rubbing elbows with alleged war criminal Henry Kissinger and other architects of those foreign policy missteps. Yet, unlike Hillary, the President gets no wag of the Pierce finger for the company he keeps...no idle threats about maybe refusing future White House dinner invitations. Outside the shebeen there are the Clinton Rules; inside just the Hillary Clinton Rules.