Fed Time for Gonzo at Rolling Stone - Democratic Underground

MountainLaurel

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Tue Dec-06-05 10:48 AM
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Fed Time for Gonzo at Rolling Stone

Edited on Tue Dec-06-05 10:48 AM by MountainLaurel

Two column snippets about authors and articles we might want to read:

Hunter S. Thompson is dead and P.J. O'Rourke is writing for the Atlantic and delivering after-dinner speeches to Republican fat cats. But that's okay because Rolling Stone magazine has a new political reporter with the gonzo spirit that made Thompson and O'Rourke so much fun. His name is Matt Taibbi and here's how he describes Tom DeLay in RS's Dec. 15 issue:

"Watching DeLay wade through a crowd of his own party members during a critical vote is an awesome thing, a nature show worthy of Sir David Attenborough. DeLay moves through the aisles like some kind of balding incubus, and as he passes, Republican members instinctively turn their backs on him, not wanting to be caught in the Gorgon's gaze (or, more to the point, be threatened with the loss of a chairmanship or reelection funding)."

snip

Taibbi has been watching Congress on and off for much of this year, filing dispatches filled with acid portraits of our elected representatives:

On Jean Schmidt, the Ohio Republican freshman who called Jack Murtha a coward: "a wrinkly, witchlike woman with a penchant for dressing like a harbor buoy."

snip

Obviously, this is vicious, nasty name-calling and there's absolutely no excuse for it -- except, of course, accuracy. I've spent my share of time covering Congress, and as far as I can tell his descriptions are pretty much on the money. Of course, he does sugarcoat things a bit, but that's excusable: If a reporter tried to reveal what really goes on in Congress, he'd start howling like a banshee and the men in white coats would carry him off to the booby hatch.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/05/AR2005120502048.html

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Flubadubya

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Tue Dec-06-05 10:50 AM
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1. OMG... I spewed on the Schmidt description.

Edited on Tue Dec-06-05 10:51 AM by Flubadubya

..."a wrinkly, witchlike woman with a penchant for dressing like a harbor buoy." Bwahaha!! :rofl:

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Gabi Hayes

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Tue Dec-06-05 11:23 AM
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2. excellent! I'm reading his book about the 2004 election:

Spanking the Donkey, in which he's almost as critical of the dems as he is the pugs

his description last summer of his experience in Crawford, as quoted here by somebody, is masterly, as well

he spent 10 years in Russia, just out of college, mostly doing journalism, but did some time as an indentured servant, basically, in some monastery, or something

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MrPrax

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Tue Dec-06-05 11:30 AM
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3. He's Nasty, but...

deadly accurate and it's great to see Matt Taibbi get a wider audience

He's one of my favs...for anyone unfamiliar with his style or missed his book review of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat...

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

If you need a good morning laff...read the rest...a Masterpiece

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MountainLaurel

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Tue Dec-06-05 11:46 AM
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4. That is excellent!

Will have to read more of his work.

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