From Matt Taibbi’s blog:
“I think we ought to get it over with once and for all and ask all the people who are interested in banning words to get together and form their inevitable committee on word propriety. I think it would be a great thing if we could just get the list together ahead of time, along with what the committee feels the appropriate sanction is for each word. “Ho” we know is a fireable word, as is “niggardly,” but what about “snapper”? How about “curry muncher”? What is the appropriate punishment for a “What’s wrong, do you have sand in your vagina?” joke? I mean there are so many unknowns right now, nobody knows where he or she stands.”
Excuse me, but I have to go look up “curry muncher.”
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Matt Tiabbi
[Alert: McCainiacs and Palinistas can skip this post. You won't appreciate Matt Taibbi's biting wit or pithy rage. Go watch a Sean Hannity re-run. And I've had some email reminding me I had said I wasn't going to write about politics anymore. I believe what I said was, I would no longer 'discuss' politics.]
My favorite political writer, Matt Taibbi has outdone himself with his column on Sarah Palin. When interstellar archeologists dig through the rubble of what was once the U.S.A. and wonder what the fuck happened, I hope they stumble across Mr. Taibbi’s column. Every line is a gem but I’ll share just a few of my favorites:
"Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates (of the GOP convention) in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other "wild" drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the "unbelievable time" they will inevitably report to their pals back home.
Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they’re at a party.
Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.
But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules."
And we love Sarah.
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Bush,
John McCain,
Matt Tiabbi
I’ve said on more than one occasion that Matt Taibbi is my favorite political reporter. I tend to believe the things he writes. And his latest piece in Rolling Stone makes my stomach hurt. Here’s the short version:
"For all the excitement that Barack Obama has garnered, and all the talk about a new day in Washington, it would be tragic if the real legacy of his election victory was to finally expose the essentially unchanging, oligarchic nature of our political system. It’s the same old story: Money talks, and bullshit walks. And don’t be surprised if we’re the ones still walking after November."
I’m not ready to flush my hope for Obama yet, but I promised I’d own my support for the guy. And do it here.
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Matt Tiabbi
My favorite political pundit, Matt Taibbi, penned a cheerful article about politics, media and class in America. Since nobody is going to click on a link to an article thus described, here’s the final paragraph:
"These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it."
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Matt Tiabbi
Writing in the March 20th issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi explores "The tragic self-martyrdom of a groundbreaking politician."
"The Clintons always represented the notion that the old Democratic Party of unions and LBJ liberals was a thing of the past and that the way forward involved making nice with big business and the military. Her husband passed NAFTA, deregulated Wall Street, rammed through welfare "reform," bombed Kosovo, chided Sister Soulja, opened the Lincoln bedroom to any foreign nation with spare cash and won two elections.
Winning convinced both of them that they were saviors of everything right and decent in the world. They’d discovered the winning formula, and we were welcome to kiss their asses for finding it. And so what if the formula involved selling out the unions on a series of draconian and insane trade deals, or cozying up to one of the most regressive employers in the world in Wal-Mart, or hiring an evil lobbyist stooge like Mark Penn to be your chief campaign strategist, or voting to give George Bush the authority to launch an illegal invasion of Iraq?"
Matt Taibbi is far and away my favorite political reporter (right after Kay Henderson!) and I buy a copy of Rolling Stone just for his pieces.
His latest leaves the reader with the impression that Hillary is kaput. I’m not so sure. He calls her "one of the most awesomely complex and fascinating public figures in the history of our country." But not in a good way.
I couldn’t find the article online but will update this post if I do.
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Matt Tiabbi,
Military
In the January issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi asks why the media insists "on reducing one of the most exciting presidential primary seasons in American history to a simple horse race." I’ve highlighted my favorite (?) points.
"Every reporter who spends any real time on the campaign trail gets wrapped up in the horse race. It’s inevitable. You tell me how you can spend nearly two years watching the dullest speeches known to man and not spend most of your time wondering about the one surefire interesting moment the whole thing has to offer: the ending.
Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign journalism is essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly noble one at that. On the trail, we reporters aren’t watching politics in action: The real stuff happens behind closed doors, where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are glad-handing equally faceless members of the political donor class, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off in very specific favors over the course of the next four years. That’s the real high-stakes poker game in this business, and we don’t get to sit at that table.
Instead, we get to be herded day after day into one completely controlled environment after another, where we listen to an array of ideologically similar politicians deliver professionally crafted advertising messages that we, in turn, have the privilege of delivering to the public free of charge. We rarely get to ask the candidates real questions, and even when we do, they almost never answer."
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Matt Tiabbi
Picked up a copy of Rolling Stone while roaming around Barnes & Noble this morning to see what Matt Taibbi was up to. In a piece written a few weeks before the Iowa Caucuses, he explains Barack Obama’s appeal ("Obama on the Rise"). An excerpt:
"While Obama glows like the chosen one, taking Kennedy-esque flight on the wings of destiny, next to him Hillary sometimes comes off like an angry drag queen, enraged that some other tramp has been allowed to "Danke Schoen" in her Las Vegas. Obama sees this and isn’t above pointing at her Adam’s apple. "I’m not running for president because I think this is somehow owed to me," Obama says. And people believe it. … "There’s just something about him," says one middle-aged gentleman. When I suggest that his comment was vague, he shrugs. "Yeah, but it’s good vague." "
You’ll find the full article at The Smirking Chimp.
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Matt Tiabbi
:: The Landlord (funny or die – it’s that easy… you decide) via Dave’s Window. Update: 7 million views in 24 hours!
:: 21st century advertising – Dave Winer says: “In the future, advertising will be so entertaining that it will create its own pull. No need to intrude, to hitch a ride on other more compelling content.”
:: Matt Taibbi on Imus, rap and network execs – “The idea that NBC — the company that proudly produced 241 episodes of Baywatch, a show whose two main characters for nearly a decade were Pamela Anderson’s tits — the idea that that network was “offended” by the use of the word “ho” is beyond preposterous.”
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Matt Tiabbi,
posterous
Matt Taibbi is more frightened by Bush’s budget than Britney’s shaved head:
“Here’s the thing about the system of news coverage we have today. If the Walton family, or Lee Raymond, or the heirs to the Mars fortune actually needed the news media to work better than it does now, believe me, it would work better. But they have no such need, because the system is working just fine for them as is. The people it’s failing are the rest of us, and most of the rest of us, apparently, would rather sniff Anna Nicole Smith’s corpse or watch Britney Spears hump a fire hydrant than find out what our tax dollars are actually paying for. Shit, when you think about it that way, why not steal from us? People that dumb don’t deserve to have money.”
This excellent column is a painful reminder of times I argued (with news directors) that we should give people the news they want, not the news they “need.” I was more of a ratings pimp than ratings whore, but I was wrong.
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Matt Tiabbi
Matt Taibbi responds to the accustation that liberals are “rooting” for failure in Iraq. Warning: Strong lanuage.
“I’m sorry, but the next pundit who whips that one out should have his balls stuffed down his throat. You cocksuckers beat the drum to send these kids to war, and then you turn around and accuse us of rooting for them to die? Fuck you for even thinking that. We’re Americans just like you. You don’t have the right to get us into this mess and then turn around and call us traitors. Your credibility is long gone on this issue; shut up about us. This is a catastrophe, not a baseball game. “Rooting” is a kid’s word; grow the fuck up.”
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Matt Tiabbi