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.”

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on HRC’s announcement she’s running for president:

“Had Hillary embraced head-on her undeniable role as an unwitting martyr/archetype for the modern professional woman, had she opened up her campaign by actually showing us what her private thoughts have been throughout all of these trying times, and what she might think the meaning of her journey has been or could be, she would have instantly established herself as an extraordinarily interesting and compelling story, at the very least. Instead, Hillary is clearly so spooked by the experience of not being taken seriously by the Beltway establishment that she’s gone overboard in the direction of being a typical Inside-Baseball, full-of-shit Washington hack, spraying cardboard cliches like machine-gun fire. She’s Joe Biden without the plugs.

It’s obvious that Hillary sees the pursuit of the White House by means of the tireless upchucking of hollow, computer-generated horseshit as the ultimate man’s game in Washington, and she wants to show she can play it with the big boys. So she’s slinging twice as much crap, twice as much bullshit. What she fails to see is that, while she’s playing the game right, the game is the problem, it’s a crock of shit. It would have been nice if she’d had the courage to be different, which she incidentally already is, by default. Instead, she’s choosing consciously to be just another lousy corporate politician — one who’ll deserve all the abuse she’ll get for playing by the wrong rules.”

“…the game is the problem, it’s a crock of shit.” Exactly.

From a blog post titled “Iran’s Smackdown on Dubya,” by Matt Taibbi:

“And we also now can say for sure that the famed cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Bush-Rove-Cheney crew has been proven to be a crock. Those guys are ruthless when it comes to winning American elections. But when it comes to war and diplomacy, they’re a bunch of kittens. You can’t Swift-Boat Moqtada Al-Sadr. When it comes to real enemies, our leaders are useless.”

Taibbi also writes a column (“Road Rage”) for Rolling Stone. In the December 14, 2006 issue, he writes about John Ashcroft’s recent appearance at the Department of Justice for the unveiling of a new portrait of himself.

“Ashcroft sat beneath the infamous “Spirit of Justice” statue –the great lady with the naked stone tit that the religious nutcase Ashcroft once ordered clothed. Now she was unclothed again, her big boob-cone honking at the audience of tight-assed law enforcement officials, and Ashcroft could do nothing but sit under it with a nervous smile on his face.”

If you wonder “who cares?… you’re not alone. Taibbi was the only reporter there.

In a Rolling Stone article titlled “Ohio Burning,” Matt Taibbi offers one explanation of what happened November 7th.

There were really two kinds of Republicanism in the Bush years. There was the Bush/Rove/DeLay revolution, a brilliant perpetual plan for winning elections, raising money and concentrating power. Even if they were never verbalized, everyone implicitly understood the revolution’s prime directives: support the president blindly, demonize the opposition and never break ranks. It wasn’t hard to be this kind of Republican. If you could read at a fourth-grade level, pray to Jesus and exhibit genuine terror before photos of men holding hands, you could ride the revolution all the way to Washington with a ten-point cushion. There was room for even the very dumbest in this revolution.

The other Republicanism was the old-school conservatism that supposedly provided the revolution’s ideological underpinnings. But somewhere along the line, the Bush revolutionaries broke free of those principles and sailed off into the unknown.

I really like the way Mr. Taibbi writes. Maybe it’s just seeing his words in Rolling Stone, but they reminded me of Hunter Thompson. I would give an appendage-to-be-named-later to write so well.