Charlie Pierce - Quotes

Quotes

• "The Democrats are a timorous collection of trimmers and hedgers, one more bad beat away from whimpering themselves into a gelatinous goo just liquid enough to ooze under the door of some lobbying shop. They couldn't get laid in a whorehouse if they drove up in a Brink's truck. They spent a flat year trying to get one vote out of Olympia Snowe...And the Republicans are simply insane. Poor old John McCain is being primaried by J.D. Hayworth, once the dumbest man in Congress, at the behest of what might be called the lunatic fringe, if it wasn't the very mainstream of the party now. The energy of the party is wholly directed from the ancient, dark heart of American conspiracy theories, where it is not directed at simply standing athwart anything this president wants to do."

Pierce is noted for his 2003 Globe Magazine profile of Ted Kennedy in which he stated: "If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age". The passage was widely misinterpreted as laudatory of Kennedy; the full context makes clear that it was intended as irony. James Taranto, an online columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote, "Charles Pierce must really hate Ted Kennedy," and described the excerpt as a "paragraph of pure poison." In an e-mail interview with Dan Kennedy (not related to the senator) of the Boston Phoenix, Pierce confirmed that he considered his reference to Kopechne as being a harsh observation about Ted Kennedy. Pierce criticized several commentators who had cited the passage as an example of liberal media bias and added, "My respect for Mr. Taranto grows by the hour." Nevertheless, the Media Research Center made it its "Quote of the Year" in its, given to "the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2003."