Esquire: This is a Gut Check for our Nation

By: Charles Pierce

BOSTON—It struck me as I was negotiating eastbound flow along the packed, narrow sidewalks of Newbury Street in Boston's Back Bay on Sunday that the last time I was surfing a crowd in this place and in this direction was on the horrible afternoon of April 15, 2013 in the aftermath of the death and destruction wrought on this city by the Tsarnaev brothers, two terrorists who would not have been detained by the executive order that swept up children and 83-year-old Iranian grandmothers on Friday night. I turned up Exeter Street toward Copley Square, and I remembered that it was right around here on that afternoon that you began to smell the smoke and that awful coppery smell of blood that goes right to the back of your throat and stays there.

Today, you smelled incense from a group of Buddhists gathered on Boylston Street, and the call of the sirens was replaced by the brassy swing of an impromptu second-line band playing in the middle of Dartmouth Street in front of the old entrance to the Boston Public Library.

...

Elsewhere, Congressman Seth Moulton, an Iraq war vet and someone whose national profile is beginning to explode, got on the electric Twitter machine and minced not a word.

(This got Moulton props from, of all people, Bill Kristol. Run away, congressman! Run far away! Don't look back! I'm all for bipartisanship but this guy's been wrong about everything for 30 years. He's a human juju rattle. Run away!)

Full article here.