That sound you hear is the joyful noise of Charlie Pierce’s rhetorical 4-wood going upside the head of the insufferably smug and obtuse Tom Brokaw.
Here is a snippet that is the prototypical “if it wasn’t so sad it would be hysterical”. But since he is so on point, and he is able to land clean shots that make you cringe and laugh and then sit back in amazement, he demands to be read. Check it out:
And, actually, I can help them with that last thing: Why that doesn’t happen in Washington? It doesn’t happen in Washington because people in the country never got angry enough at the people doing the stalling to tell them to knock it off and get back to the business of running the country and because, whenever it looked like it might be happening, as it is happening in the Occupy moment right now, people like Tom Brokaw show up with their bedtime stories and their soothing invocations of a simpler time when everybody’s intentions were pure, and the natural democratic impulse to throw the bums out is flattened and softened and we all go to sleep again, blissfully unaware that our country is being stolen out from under our sleeping heads.
God save the Republic from the anesthetized fairy tales of reasonable men.
Read more here. And then go into the archives (at his Esquire site here) and check out some recent posts (read them all if you have time; if you don’t have time, make time). I don’t think anyone else right now is going this deep, this often, this satisfactorily.
