In a contribution to the Boston Globe Magazine published nine days
before the January 19 Senate election won by Republican Scott Brown,
veteran Globe Magazine writer Charles Pierce ridiculed the idea Brown
could win, in a piece formulated as a letter to Brown:
Well, we're almost here, aren't we? The end of a long, arduous, four-month campaign for a Senate seat that you have approximately the same chance of filling as you did the pilot's chair of the Starship Enterprise.
The cocky Pierce wasn't done, writing in his weekly "Pierced" column toward the front of the January 10 magazine:
The notion that Massachusetts would elect a Republican to fill the seat left vacant by Edward Kennedy was the property of people who buy interesting mushrooms in interesting places. You might as well expect the House of Windsor to be succeeded on the British throne by the Kardashian sisters.
Pierce is infamous for his 2003 Globe Magazine tribute to Ted Kennedy in which he ludicrously postulated: "If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age."
The quote, from a January 5, 2003 profile, "Kennedy Unbound: After 40 years in the US Senate, Edward M. Kennedy has transcended the family mythology and become his own man [1]," was recognized as the worst of the year at the MRC's DisHonors Awards in 2004 [2]. For a longer excerpt, check this BiasAlert [3] from the time of last year's Chappaquiddick 40th anniversary.
Last year Pierce wrote a book [4]
denigrating Sarah Palin, amongst others, 'Idiot America: How Stupidity
Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.' (Screen shot is from a June
of 2009 MSNBC appearance to promote it.)
In this January's column, titled "The longest shot: Call it a Senate race if you want, but it's not [5]," Pierce suggested the sure-loser Brown become the perennial losing candidate for the Senate seat:
But you've got a career now. In fact, I'd like to make you an offer. You may not have noticed, but your party doesn't have much of what the sportswriters call a bench around these parts. I would like to make you the permanent Republican candidate for US senator.
From the top of the article, to which I was alerted by a Boston-area friend who wishes to remain anonymous:
Dear Scott Brown: Well, we're almost here, aren't we? The end of a long, arduous, four-month campaign for a Senate seat that you have approximately the same chance of filling as you did the pilot's chair of the Starship Enterprise. Things might not be looking too terrific for our Democratic president - or, for that matter, for his good pal, our Democratic governor - but the notion that Massachusetts would elect a Republican to fill the seat left vacant by Edward Kennedy was the property of people who buy interesting mushrooms in interesting places. You might as well expect the House of Windsor to be succeeded on the British throne by the Kardashian sisters.
(And, by the way, if Teddy gets wind of how you claimed in your commercials to be the true heir to the tax-cutting legacy of his brother, the president, he's going to come back from the dead and beat you severely over the head with a yachting cap.)...
- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center