JerboaKolinowski: I think Richard Rorty would certainly agree with you that analytic philosophy can be, and is, quite useful. One example is Robert Brandom's Making it Explicit which, to be sure, Rorty has problems with, but on the whole he finds it a very useful work (he better: the book is an extension of Brandom's Ph.D. Thesis written under Rorty). Rorty's praise of analytic philosophy, in fact, often dissapoints his more postmodern readership. However, the utility of a particular analysis or theory of language does not imply that analytic philosophy in toto is useful, or more useful than not. While Rorty praises the work of individual analytics, I think he more often criticizes what might be called analytic methodology and the spirit in which analytic philosophy is written, because it is these that presuppose A Way Things Really Are and all other sorts of notions that the pragmatist can't find a way to cash out.
This is also why the pragmatist insists on using the terms of the tradition: truth, good, better, happy. There is alot at stake in those words and it wouldn't be very pragmatic to abandon them, to give them up, to analytic methodology. Philosophy is a battle for these words.
Zirtix: Of course it wouldn't be a fault of pragmatism if it wasn't as well-suited for the academic journal as a typical analytic philosophy paper is, the format, style, rhetoric, and publishing of these journals as they are conceived by the contemporary philosopher is mostly a result of the success of a few journals in the early days of analytic philosophy, Mind being the most obvious. Aside from that, it just doesn't stand that pragmatism isn't succesfully advanced piecemeal. Aside from his 1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty has never written a book (his very recent Achieving Our Country is a transcription of lectures). The volumes that bear his name are, in fact, collections of essays and responses published in the analytic journals and elsewhere. The same is true of the pragmatist writings of C.S. Pierce and William James. The latter, in fact, never wrote a book on pragmatism. Instead he only published his piecemeal responses to his critics in academic journals, popular journals, and then later collected these into book editions. His popular exposition of pragmatism, Pragmatism, a new name for some old ways of thinking, is a collection of eight lectures delivered to a large audience, conceived of as a book only later (and it shows).
In responose to the two points that pragmatism oddly embraces pluralism and that taking an ironic stance is pragmatically useless, one need only look at the application of pragmatism to ethics and political philosophy. In fact, pragmatism can here help us to see the uselessness of old forms of theorizing and the necessity of revising our political and ethical philosophies -- and, of course, such a revision should involve diverse viewpoints and take a pluralistic stance about the way(s) the universe is (are). That the twentieth century has been the bloodiest, and that the United States and Britain have been involved in this every step of the way, and that analytic philosophy with its dry value-less calculating logic has been the dominant philosophical methodology in these two countries since at least 1910, leads me to sincerely doubt your claim that the irony-free extant philosophical framework doesn't deserve some questioning. That analytic philosophy has failed so miserably to articulate a moral and political vocabulary is certainly more than just a shortcoming. Not only are book-length works on emotivism and meta-ethics dry, but even a single lecture on these topics induces in most of the population a feeling that something has got to be wrong with philosophy today (which, by the way, most people will tell you whether they've stomached such a lecture or not). That analytic philosophy fails ethics so rigorously is no surprise, given that it models itself after science and its value-free methods of inquiry.
Objective notions about The Way Things Really Are that encourage the sort of political certainty that is prerequisite for totalitarian logics like Nazism. Hence, the pragmatist's irony and derision of this family of concepts.