Charlie Pierce

“'We, The People' is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other.”

“Gradually, football has seen its appeal slip at the most basic levels. Pediatricians are advising parents not to let young children play organized football too early in life.”

“We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amen...”

“For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us...”

“According to the people who dearly would love to throw him out of office, Barack Obama was elected to be 'above politics.' He wasn't elected to be president, after all. He was elected as an...”

“The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its pow...”

“If you offer athletes stipends, then you're into pay-for-play, and that's the ballgame. People should realize that, and they should realize that amateurism never has been a sustainable model...”

“There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.”

“The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank's marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the c...”

“There are few colonial nations anymore. Instead, we are colonized by financial institutions beyond our political control. We are colonized with pens and papers and millions of little digital...”

“This has been the new normal since September 11. Everyone knows, but nobody says, that if something happens again, the elite consensus in this country, and the overwhelming consensus of the...”

“In the fall of 1989, I was writing 600-word columns at the 'Herald.' My heart always was in long-form narrative writing, though. It's what I cut my teeth on at the 'Boston Phoenix.'”

“It is now an article of absolute faith among Republicans that 'the government' is an entity separate from 'the American people,' which they say the same way that the old Jesuits talked about...”

“The creative project of self-government - hard and frustrating but necessary - is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if c...”

“It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical pow...”

“There is a reason why conservatives talk about 'government' and not 'self-government,' because to refer to the latter is to concede that 'the government' is really the most basic product of...”

“Barack Obama is not a man of The Gut, and it is driving official Washington crazy. This is a good thing, because resisting The Gut is what the Constitution is all about, especially in its wa...”

“The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entert...”

“The entire existence of the NFL - and of football at any level, for all of that - rests on whether or not the game can keep fooling itself, and its paying fan base, that it is somehow superi...”

“If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the...”