Why I Love Charles Pierce (long-ish)

(Crap, Ish is posting again...)

Following is from Eric Alterman's blog on Media Matters. Pierce used to be a regular correspondent there, and from the looks of things, he's back. I hope you will take a moment to at least skim the attached, and understand why I love reading Mr. Pierce.

I have spent more than a year wandering in the trackless steppes of Outer Blogistan, living by my wits, surviving as best I could. (Strong men wept when we had to eat the lead camel.) I once even found myself in strange lands without humor. Then, in my last extreme, stumbling in the unforgiving wilderness, off in the distance, and not where it used to be, I spied a familiar light in a different window.

And yes, I will have more fatted calf, thank you.

Jeebus Christmas, he said, in keeping with the season, have I grown tired of the MacGyver Theory Of Washington Politics -- the notion that, if we just pluck out of David Broder's moth-eaten Rolodex the people with the most gray mold on their careers, they will all get together and build a solution out of two coconut shells and a handful of magic beans. I first formulated the MacGyver Theory during the Iran-Contra scandal, when we had first the Tower Commission and the utterly pointless joint congressional committee, which worked in tandem to help the criminals escape as surely as if old Ed Muskie had baked them a cake with a file in it. (For the record, Lee Hamilton was in the middle of this mess, too.) The MacGyver Theory speaks only in the passive voice -- "Mistakes were made" -- and only in the sterile syntax of the bureaucrat. No individual is ever guilty, only the system is, because it "has broken down," and where did I leave that baling wire and chewing gum anyway? Nobody ever goes to jail because we're looking forward, not back. The MacGyver Theory's devotees believe quite strongly that the messy business of actual self-government will discomfit The American People, who are sweet little children asleep upstairs. That's how the MacGyver Theory protected jovial old Dutch Reagan. (We cannot have "another failed presidency," not even one that's already, well, failed.) It's also how it was trotted out during the extended 2000 presidential election. "The American People" needed "closure" more than anything else, and who better than Antonin Scalia to build an airplane out of palm fronds to get us all out of the "constitutional crisis" that was so visible from the Green Rooms in D.C.? And now, the Iraq Study Group, the MacGyver Theory applied to people's lives.

I rise again to present, by way of a relevant comparison, my argument that my colleagues in the sportswriting business do their jobs better than most members of the elite political media. Last year, Bud Selig appointed former senator George Mitchell to run the in-house investigation of what is perceived to be the problem with performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Almost immediately, the choice came under criticism that centered on the fact that Mitchell's probe would not have any real power to compel testimony or documents, and that Mitchell himself had been tied into several major-league baseball franchises -- most notably, the Boston Red Sox -- and, finally, on the very simple grounds that any in-house investigation started out in Credibility Gap given major-league baseball's inability to police itself.

I don't agree with a lot of these criticisms, but they have some merit, and the fact that they were mustered so widely and so quickly stands in stark contrast to the reverential coverage of the Iraq Study Group and its hunt for the pony in the pile. For example where was the instant and withering contempt from our courtier political press over the presence on the ISG of a useless old vampire like Edwin Meese, who started his career calling for detention camps to be set up to house student demonstrators at Berkeley, and ended it, two steps ahead of the law, by giving the Iran-Contra crowd just enough time to shred what they needed to shred? And, anyway, what in the name of Christ's sweet strawberry preserves does Edwin Meese know about Iraq? Why not just hire him to re-wire the space shuttle and design the new levees in Louisiana while he's at it? County commissioners go to jail for putting their idiot nephews on county road crews, But, on the bloodiest question of the past 30 years, supposedly educated people wait with their tongues hanging out for a viable solution to emerge from what appears to be the Petrified Forest, and nobody points out the absurdity that's sitting right there, listening to its arteries harden.

And, yes, I will have some more fatted calf, thank you.