-By Warner Todd Huston
Charles P. Pierce of Esquire once wrote a book titled Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, but after his latest blog post it seems clear that he first learned of those idiots in America a little closer to home: himself.
The dyspeptic Mr. Pierce who is so concerned with fingering those stupid Americans thought he found another example of the same to highlight in his May 28 blog post at Esquire.
Pierce discovered a blog post on Examiner.com mentioning a “conservative gay political analyst” who thought that Barack Obama was out of sight during the attacks at Benghazi, Libya because the president had slipped away to indulge a cocaine binge.
That is likely a pretty stupid conspiracy theory granted. But what got Pierce was less the theory than where he thought it was coming from. Here is what he said about that:
The Washington Examiner is a minor satellite in the wing-nut universe, but they saw fit to seek out this delusional fellow and give him a platform, as well as giving oxygen to various “IRS stole the election” fantasies, as you can see from the links below this story. This universe is self-contained, and it is made up of voices loud and soft, and more people than you know get all their news there. I expect, very soon, a less dingy source will be sticking up for his “colleagues” at the Examiner because, you know, Free Press and all.
Well, Pierce told that wing-nut newspaper The Washington Examiner, didn’t he? He put that evil conservative newspaper firmly in it’s place, to be sure.
Only the newspaper The Washington Examiner and the website Examiner.com have nothing to do with each other. One is a newspaper. The other is a website that sprang up offering a cash payment system for blog posts to anyone that wanted to blog. They aren’t connected to each other in any way other than sharing a similar name.
The two are owned by the same company, but they are not interconnected in any way. The newspaper folks do not have any input or control of the website.
If Pierce had done even five seconds of actual research into his subject he’d have realized that his central criticism has no basis in fact.
But maybe that would have been too idiotic for Charles P. Pierce?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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