Whether or not Chattanooga shooter Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was a jihadist, opined Esquire’s Pierce in a Friday blog post, the key to Thursday’s murders is that he had a quintessentially American trait: he was gun-crazy.

“He had a grudge. The basis of that grudge, whether it was rooted in a bloody-minded version of religion or an anger at the country's policies across the seas, is beside the point,” wrote Pierce. “Abdulazeez was angry at someone or something. He had a problem he could not solve and, being an American, he reached for that most American of solutions. He reached for a gun.”

Tuesday’s New York Times piece on how the problematic phrase “established by the state” got into and stayed in the Affordable Care Act provoked a great many blasts from lefty bloggers at the plaintiffs’ case in King v. Burwell. Two especially heated posts came from MSNBC’s Steve Benen and Esquire’s Charles Pierce.

Benen, a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the show’s blog, claimed that almost no one believes there’s any merit to the plaintiffs’ case: “There are effectively two competing factions: those who acknowledge that the litigation is hopelessly insane, and those who know the case is hopelessly insane but pretend otherwise for the sake of appearances...The case [conservatives are] pushing…is based entirely on a lie.” Meanwhile, Pierce charged that the "preposterous" case emerged from a conservative “alternate universe” sustained by “wingnut welfare."

Is the Republican party a political organization or “a terrarium of retrograde fauna”? Both, suggests Esquire’s Pierce, and if too few of the American people understand that, it’s in large part a result of, in his words, “the worst episode of journalistic malpractice that I can recall.”

What set Pierce off was a remark from a former Democratic congressional staffer, quoted in the newspaper The Hill, that "Elizabeth Warren is the mirror image of Ted Cruz, and if we aren't careful, she'll drive the Democrats into the same ditch Cruz is trying to drive the Republicans." Pierce says even though the Warren-Cruz comparison is “stupid and wrong...it is quintessential Washington political journalism.”

Esquire’s Pierce claims that Republicans’ subversive efforts are fueled by a mixture of avarice (“they want the country to come apart so they can sell off the pieces to the people who run their campaigns”) and racism: “This heresy, which should have died at Gettysburg, is part and parcel of the modern conservative movement, which was born out of the flotsam left behind by the (partial) fall of American apartheid.”

Esquire’s Pierce doesn’t exactly minimize the State Department e-mail story, but he’s much more upset about Hillary’s failure to fully understand that she’s a wacko magnet: “For going on 30 years, she has been the target of every strange conspiracy theory…Just in the past six years, she's watched the Benghazi, Benghazi! BENGHAZI! dreamscape blossom lushly with the wilder flora planted in the public mind by the seedpod that is the brain of Darrell Issa...She had to know what [the e-mail story] would mean because she's lived her whole life under The Clinton Rules, by which every glitch is a crime, and every blunder is a conspiracy.”