Because, like me, James Carville and Paul Begala are Catholics -- And I know this because they mention it on every other page of their newest book, Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future. Compared to this tome, The Shoes of the Fisherman reads like The 18th Brumaire -- I will put my thesis in terms that they are sure to understand.
Do you renounce Clinton?
I do renounce him.
And all his works?
I do renounce him.
And all his pomps?
Oh, Lord, yes, do I renounce them. Especially his pomps. We all heard far too much about his pomps, thank you very much.
It's really time to leave the stage, boys. Stand in the wings.
Recognize that, for the foreseeable future, you're both far more a part of the problem than of the solution.
It starts with the book's cover. The two of them are standing there in the photo, very seriously, attempting to look like a couple of gunmen and succeeding only at looking like the two toughest guys in Human Resources. (And I write that knowing that these two guys might be packing. In fact, they talk almost as much about carrying guns as they do about being Catholic. The last people made such a big deal out of both Holy Mother Church and their personal weaponry wound up having terrible trouble withSaracens.)
It is very hard to carry off this pose, however, when you've spent nearly 14 years wallowing in the intellectual opium dens of what passes for the Washington political media.
C&B have some very good policy recommendations, as well as some very bad ones, including pitching the privacy rights of 51 percent of the population overboard piecemeal. However, you will be interested to know, for example, that, "Many liberals share the conceit that they are intellectually superior." Really? Who? Name one. That the paragraph goes on to cite Mary Matalin as partial proof of conservatism's intellectual heft can be attributed to Carville's desire to keep the cookware from flying at home. But, as an unsupported assertion, this argument is taken straight off the wall of the Gents at the Heritage Foundation.
And it will surprise nobody that, once again, we hear the sad saga of Bob Casey, The Father of Pennsylvania, to whom people once said mean things because, despite some impressive progressive credentials on other issues, he wanted to pitch the privacy rights of 51 percent of the population overboard all at once, and some of those mean things had to do with Casey's religion, and did I mention that both Carville and Begala are Catholics?
No, really, they are. Of course, Bob Casey The Son is about to rid the political world of Rick Santorum, which may be service enough to atone for the fact that BCTL gave a big old wet one to Sam Alito, who has nothing to say at all about the privacy rights of 51 percent of the population, probably because Sam doesn't believe those rights exist in the first place.
And they're all Catholics!
Did I mention that I was?
Good.
This entertaining exercise in public wankery is caught between being outraged at the current administration and weepy nostalgia for the golden age of the Pericles of the Ozarks. Make no mistake: These boys can still triangulate. Gaze in awe at a work that bubbles with outrage at the depredations of C-Plus Augustus and the Avignon Presidency but fails to mention the great debt the current administration owed to the previous one.When Tom Daschle couldn't hold his own caucus on the first round of tax cuts, he was paying for years of tolerating the likes of John Breaux, and it was hard not to hear the echoes of "The era of big government is over."
A great deal of the law-enforcement wish list that was enacted willy-nilly with The Patriot Act came from Bill Clinton's Department of Justice, which also gifted the Bush folks with a whole passel of new federal death-penalty offenses. The Democrats lack a message, boys? Well, maybe it's partly because, for two years, they had to fight a guerrilla war in support of a president who couldn't keep his zipper up long enough to do the job.
Then, of course, there's the problem that sinks the whole project.
These are two guys with permanent seats at the Beltway Cool Kids table, but they can publish an entire chapter -- and cite my friend Eric Alterman in doing so -- on how conservatives "work the refs."
This is in a book in which Tucker Carlson is "a good guy." And Gary Bauer is "a good guy."
And Tim Russert is "indefatigable" in his pursuit of Republican miscreants. And Mark Halprin of The Note is "one of the smartest people we know in the media."
And Don Imus impresses Bill Clinton with "his grasp of the issues and his uncanny ability to sum up a situation or a person with a single, cutting phrase." This example is cited as a measure of how Bill Clinton brilliantly used the media in "a populist way," and as a cautionary tale for Democrats who "don't want to do farm radio or be in the local paper."
Glorioski, Don Imus. Populist media. I mean, there's triangulation and there's triangulation, and then there's Pythagoras on crystal meth.
Boys, here's a tip: On television, Tucker Carlson once glibly dismissed the personal-injury case that made John Edwards rich as a "jacuzzi case." In that case, a little girl's intestines were pulled out through her anus. Tucker Carlson is not a good guy. Gary Bauer's political positions, if enacted, would drag this country back to a much crueler time. Gary Bauer is not a good guy.
Tim Russert spent the entire year pretending not to know the details of a critical national security story -- See pages 137-141 of your own damn book -- in which he was intimately involved. I don't care if one of you is hosting a sports-talk show with Little Russ Jr. Little Russ Sr. is indefatigable only in his pursuit of his own perceived eminence. Halprin's The Note is a daily transmission belt of all the phony talking-points you rail against over 11 chapters -- ask Eric, if you don't believe me -- and that he is one of the "smartest people you know in the media" sadly doesn't surprise me a bit.
Crossfire is -- or, rather, was -- the problem. Remember that Begala was as gobsmacked as Carlson was when Jon Stewart declined to play his assigned role. Being the opposing meat puppet to Bob Novak, a truly evil presence in American journalism, isn't engaging the issues. It's being an accessory. In fact, the strangest anecdote in the book comes when, while interviewing Begala and Novak, Wolf Blitzer clumsily insults Begala's Catholicism.
Begala righteously -- and rightfully -- goes up the wall citing, among other things, the fact that his eldest son is named John Paul, after the late pope. (Good thing for the kid, too, that he was born recently. In another era, he might be named Urban Gelasius Begala.) Unanswered is the question of why Begala ever would appear on television again, not only with an evil homunculus like Novak, but with a host who so casually spit on his religious faith. It's the same question John McCain can't answer: Why would he embrace a president who slandered McCain's child for political advantage?
When, in God's name, is enough simply enough?
Get out of Washington, boys. Get off television. Stay away from Imus.
This isn't the marketplace of ideas. It's the brothel. Forget Mother Clinton's golden dream. Get out into the country that you say all those Democratic elitists don't understand and elect some state legislators who can become congresscritters. Take a stand that might actually cost you a dinner reservation. Do your real jobs.
Ite, missa est.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer at The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also is heard regularly on National Public Radio.
