Charles Pierce on Altercation
Charles Pierce
Once, when a famously truculent ballplayer died, a wise old tabloid editor of mine refused to let anyone go soft on the deceased in his obit. "You know what you get when a pr**k dies?" he asked. "A dead pr**k." So, in that spirit, may I say for the record that Tony Snow always was insufferably smug and mendacious. He remains that today, serious illness or no. Sorry if that disrupts the Beltway Christmas card list, but that's the truth of it. He puts a revolting public face on revolting public policy and he's done so for his whole sorry career. Look at his performance on Wednesday, when the Attorney General of the United States got caught telling lies to the Senate that would shame a 4-year-old at preschool. He suggested that Congress get on with the "people's business."
Leave aside the fact that this administration has from Day One defined "the people's business" as that which placates the base while benefiting the bagmen. Leave aside as well the fact that the game plan for two years of lame-duckery seems to be legislative delay backed up with a sudden delight in the veto power. Let's concentrate mainly on the notion that what occurred in the Senate on Wednesday was somehow not "the people's business." A corrupt AG and a corrupted Department of Justice is not "the people's business"? A renegade Executive branch is not "the people's business"? An utter ongoing defacement of the constitutional order is not "the people's business"? Where'd this wretched third-rate Peronist talking-point drift in from? I'm sure that, somewhere in the White House, Tony can find a tattered document, probably in use as a placemat, that begins with the words, "We, the People." The "people's business" in this country is in governing themselves, within a constitutional framework, through their elected representatives. The brass ones it takes to say this as the mouthpiece of this particular administration must keep him awake at night with their clanging.