It’s too bad I was enjoying the string comments about Christian witness, and then a friend with my sense of the absurd had to highlight how Charles Pierce (yes, that Charles Pierce, Mr. “Quote of the Year” for Kennedy Damage Control) celebrated Christmas Eve with a heaping Baggie of bile on the angst-ridden Alterman blog, as he fussed at David Brooks for suggesting Lieberman take on Dean on the values questions:
“How about we have an election that has nothing to do with ‘values.’ It’s a word that is so overused that it’s devoid any more of political meaning. It’s a way to gussy up your policy positions with quasi-religious filigree in order to argue that your opponents are not merely wrong, but immoral.<BR
“I think we’d all be better off. Otherwise, we’d have to point out that the Republican First Family is a seething multi-generational conglomerate mass of the Seven Deadly Sins; that several prominent conservative voices have recently been revealed as being courtesans of a crooked media baron; that another one is a pill-popping baby who’s using a Kennedy family mouthpiece to sell out the maid he’d used to score his dope; that a prominent conservative philosopher/compiler squandered several times the federal poverty level acting out the famous Aesop fable of The Three Cherries; that the political genius of the Republican Revolution raised wife-dumping to such a high parliamentary art that the lubricious posse he led into Congress followed his lead, and is now so sorely afflicted by Comely Aide Syndrome that their collective matrimonial butcher’s bill makes Henry Hyde look like Pius XII, and Hyde had his own problems, as we know.
“Yes, I think the country could do with a rest from “values” for a spell, especially if you’re going to campaign against an administration that believes the country should be lied into a war. Merry Christmas.”