Barack Obama is not a man of The Gut, and it is driving official Washington crazy. This is a good thing, because resisting The Gut is what the Constitution is all about, especially in its war powers, which this president is conspicuously contemplative about exercising, at least in every context except launching drones. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
Obama ran as sane and decent, as though we were electing a mood, and not necessarily a set of policies. Unfortunately, Obama has governed the same way – and misread the mood, which is all there is, really, because being crazy and stupid is all we’re really good at politically any more. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
At the time of his death, John Kennedy had a national security establishment that was a writhing ball of snakes. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
The creative project of self-government – hard and frustrating but necessary – is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
I judge the jobs I’ve had in this business by the places they took me, and by that standard, there simply has been nothing to match ‘The National Sports Daily.’ Charlie Pierce Read Quote
In the fall of 1989, I was writing 600-word columns at the ‘Herald.’ My heart always was in long-form narrative writing, though. It’s what I cut my teeth on at the ‘Boston Phoenix.’ Charlie Pierce Read Quote
Launching a newspaper without a coherent idea of how you’re going to promote it, or get it to people who might want to read it, is like launching a boat without a rudder or an engine… or a hull, now that I think about it. Charlie Pierce Read Quote
