OK, so Matt Tiabbi might actually be God. Read this twice...

This guy is an ace:

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/64109/?page=entire

Political Absurdity Hits the Iowa Primaries
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com

(snip)

This is why I hate showing up at functions like this Thompson thing and seeing everyone, from campaign staff to press reps to audience members, looking so content of disposition and cheered of conscience, like they're joining up with a neighborhood can drive. Like there isn't something totally fucked up and insane about the whole thing. In the filing room after the event, the reporters sleepily puttered around the buffet table in between sessions at their computers sending the nothing details of Thompson's nothing speech out into the world; there were chuckles as CBS radio reporter Peter King screamed his way through 15 or 20 takes of a four-sentence remote report on Thompson's debut, while a pair of TV guys in the back joked about the culinary shortcomings of this campaign. "I hope it isn't warm cheese cubes again tonight," one cracked, as he stared at a sad little plastic miniplate of warmed jalapeno jack. "I hate warm cheese cubes."

An hour or so after the speech, we all filed onto the bus to head for Council Bluffs, and the press members cozied up to Thompson's campaign guys, some of whom they recognized from previous tours at previous campaigns. Behind me I overheard Thompson's press flack Harris rhapsodizing to a newspaper scribe about a phone conversation he'd recently had with that great bard of bullshit campaign journalism, Howard Fineman of Newsweek. "Howard called me after he saw Fred on TV," Harris was saying. "And he was like, 'Todd, I tell you, he didn't say a single thing I disagreed with!'"

"Wow," said the reporter, genuinely impressed.

(snip)

Last but not least, there are parallel irritant figures on both sides in Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, whose jobs it will be to be roundly pilloried for wasting valuable air time (especially in debates) via their embarrassingly dead-on, pain-in-the-ass candidacies. Since neither candidate is a worn-out whore, and neither candidate has cast a single vote for any of the numerous completely avoidable political catastrophes that befell the country in the last four-plus years, both will be described as "fringe" and "unserious" figures who should rightfully be assigned to the "second tier" of presidential hopefuls. Meanwhile, the press will line up to laud as exciting breaths of political fresh air a one-note B-list character actor, a southern governor who believes the earth is 6,000 years old, and a hack plagiarist from Delaware with a head full of hair plugs who offers a "statesmanlike presence" and "raises the level of discourse" as he campaigns shamelessly for the secretary of state's job.

There is a dark irony waiting to announce itself as a factor in this campaign -- a trap that our press corps was almost certain to fall into from the moment the Bush presidency exploded in a nightmare of incompetence and horrifying corruption. Having observed all the awful missteps of the last seven years, missteps that came as a result of having indulged and enabled a preposterous figure like George W. Bush, the national press ought naturally to have learned a whole host of painful lessons.

Questioning the logic of viciously attacking too-intellectual fringe candidates while simultaneously lionizing a baldly incurious flag-waving moron like Bush is only the most obvious; there is also the matter of mistaking meanness for substance and falling under the spell of candidate access, and routinely blaming a dearth of issue politics on voter preference, when in fact it's the news organizations themselves that more love (and, more to the point, need) the mudslinging and the horse race.

The press should have looked at the rise of blogs and the angry momentum of blog-powered insurgent candidacies like that of Paul and Ned Lamont and recognized that the mainstream political press has become, in some circles, as much of a villain as the establishment candidates themselves. It should have seen this and made changes, if only out of pure self-interest, in an effort to retain both its political power and its market share. But it didn't. Instead, the big press seems to have mainly concluded that voter discontent toward the media is based upon its having been too friendly to George Bush in particular.

There is a vibe that can already be detected in campaign coverage that suggests that the media thinks that if it disavows Bush and in particular Bush's war, all will be forgiven. We journalists seem to be in a state of half-apology for having overstepped our traditional role as ideologically promiscuous ass-kissers and briefly gone over, after 9/11, into a dark side of frank and open cheerleading for Extreme Measures and Total War.

We're apologizing for that, but only that; the attitude is not much different from a high schooler from the OC who thinks that if he just promises to never again get into daddy's Porsche at 3 in the morning, it's still okay if he goes to keggers on school nights.

(snip)

When I found out that I was going to be sent out on the campaign trail for another election season, I found myself struggling once again with the question of how to cover in a substantive way a story that is essentially uncoverable on its own terms. In my last book, Spanking the Donkey, I spent nearly 300 miserable pages groping around for an angle from within the self-contained, stage-managed pseudoreality of the campaign trail, settling eventually for the not-exactly-brilliant insight that the campaign is basically a rolling bourgeois television entertainment that has as one of its chief purposes the projection of a weirdly fictional vision of American political reality -- clean, healthy, positively engaged, and so bereft of real problems that it can afford to choose leaders on the strength of such questions as who looks better in a duck-hunting costume, or who can more charmingly engage an MSNBC morning anchor in a discussion about "traditional values" while squeezing a cow's teat in Wisconsin via a 5 a.m. satellite feed.

...more...

MONSTER. This dude can write.

"rolling bourgeois television entertainment that has as one of its chief purposes the projection of a weirdly fictional vision of American political reality"

'competitions' for the worst journalist in the world. It is shriekingly hysterical. He's one of the best writers out there. His dad is Mike Tiabbi, who just looks like he could barf when he has to cover stuff like Michael Jackson and the like.

as Will said, "that man can write"... or something to that effect. Ditto on the Hunter S comparison. Check this out for descriptive powers:

"Nonetheless, Novak advances. He advances because of that dreary purse-lipped sadist's face of his. (You've seen that face before: the prison warden meets high school vice-principal of your nightmares, shitting on your wife's back.) He advances because his outing of Valerie Plame is suddenly being upheld as a free-press issue. He advances because he recently told an audience of Penn State students that he is only able to stand James Carville because "CNN pays me a lot of money."

Part of the "first round" from your link!

:)

Rolling Stone is the best.

Just sayin'. :P

He earned that praise. I thought the very same thing.

:thumbsup:

a paranoid gun nut nut who wrote a self-indulgent book detailing his vegas drug use while took advantage of a teen girl
i have no idea why people act like he was some hero

slow people don't

But hey, keep on keepin' on.

Occasionally I delude myself that I come up with a few well structured arguments in a couple of pithy paragraphs...then I read something like THIS.

It's not bad enough that my day is filled with the lies and stretching of Corporate Fiction Writing. NOoo. Will has to show me how a REAL WORDSMITH can write.

Great Article. By the way Will, Thanks again. Asshole.

;)

....My chances of a nervous breakdown are in the negative.

How's the coast these days? Got Waders yet?

Of course, there's no swear words, missed deadlines, or Steadman graphics...but the spirit of Thompson's keen insight on current national political campaigns has found a worthy journalist to continue the tradition at RS.

and tell him to find his own damn writing style. :evilgrin:

"All of this vacuous bullshit" indeed.

It's you and Matt, Will :hi: Then everyone else.
Don't go away no more!

We journalists seem to be in a state of half-apology for having overstepped our traditional role as ideologically promiscuous ass-kissers and briefly gone over, after 9/11, into a dark side of frank and open cheerleading for Extreme Measures and Total War.

As far as I can tell, they aren't really apologetic for that, either, since they are doing their best to gin up popular enthusiasm for an illegal war with Iran, based on exactly the same BS BushCo offered to justify invading Iraq.

*shrug*

"the projection of a weirdly fictional vision of American political reality -- clean, healthy, positively engaged, and so bereft of real problems that it can afford to choose leaders on the strength of such questions as who looks better in a duck-hunting costume, or who can more charmingly engage an MSNBC morning anchor in a discussion about "traditional values" while squeezing a cow's teat in Wisconsin via a 5 a.m. satellite feed."

*cackle*

a joy to read such insightful original journalism.

thanks!

A novelist, maybe. A journalist, blechhh. He makes shit up. He thinks he's Hunter Thompson, which he's not.

I will never forget during the 2003/4 primaries when he decided to write about the Clark campaign by infiltrating a Clark Meet-Up group (a meet-up group!) in Boston, posing as a producer of adult porn films, and then writing a scathing article about how clueless and inexperienced Clark's "campaign" was because some 23-year-old volunteers (at a Meet-Up!) didn't know what to make of him. His take on Clark: "His eyes are blank. Like a turtle resting on a rock in the middle of a pond, he simply seems never to move, no matter how long you stare. But then, just as you're about to pack up your picnic basket and go home, you catch him: His head pops out, and he slides off into the water..."

I take it back, he'd never make it as a novelist.

who fills copy hurling half-witted insults. A dumbed down HST.

At least we can comfort ourselves knowing that the end stages of what was once the United States is being chronicled by truly gifted writers.

“To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental… Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.”
Christopher Hitchens, Slate.com, on Michael Moore

Well, that's rich, isn't it? Christopher Hitchens crawling out of a bottle long enough to denounce Michael Moore as a coward. I can't imagine anything more uplifting, except maybe a zoo baboon humping the foot of a medical school cadaver.

All journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know it, everybody in this business knows it. If there were any justice at all, every last goddamn one of us would be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over Arizona. Shoot a nice red mist over the whole state, make it arable for a year or two. A year's worth of fava beans and endive for the children of Bangladesh: I dare anyone in our business to say that that wouldn't represent a better use of our rotting bodies than the actual fruits of our labor.

No one among us is going to throw that first stone, though. Not even Chris Hitchens, a man who makes a neat living completing advanced Highlights for Children exercises like the following: “Denounce a like-minded colleague, using the words 'Lugubrious' and 'Semienvious.'” Such is the pretense of modern journalism, that we are to be lectured on courage by a man who has had his intellectual face lifted so many times, he can't close his eyes without opening his mouth. By a man who, if the Soviets had won the Cold War, would be writing breathless features on Eduard Shevardnadze for three bucks a word in Komsomolskaya Vanity Fair (”Georgia on His Mind: Edik Speaks Out.” Photos by Annie Liebowitz…).

...

http://www.williambowles.info/media/hitchens_moore.html

Youch.

I'll be looking for more by him.

Thanks for posting this, he nails it and then some.

I visited my 11 mile away Borders to hunt for the October Playboy and to pick up a copy of Kristina Vanden Heuvel's magazine (neither of which I found. Is Playboy even sold in public anymore?) and instead found a Matt Taibi (sic) article on Hunter S. Thompson. Haven't read it yet but it seems important to point it out in this thread.

I also picked up the issue of American Conservative with the Petraus article.

FYI

85% Jimmy

because he ostensibly doesn't want it . . .

actually, it's not that he doens't want it . . . it's that he doesn't want to participate in the absurdity that is political campaigning in 2007 . . . the absurdity that Taibbi captures so well in this article . . .

as soon as you announce your candidacy, you become a prostitute . . . your entire life is devoted not to solving the myriad of critical problems facing the nation and the planet, but to getting elected . . . your job is to do and say whatever will get you the most votes -- and the most money . . . you'll worry about actually doing the job after you're sworn in . . .

except it never works out that way . . . because in the process of prostituting yourself for votes and for campaign dollars, you lose all of your independence and become a slave to the system that elected you . . . including, inevitably, the mega-corporations that funded your campaign . . .

I believe that Al Gore would love to be president . . . I also believe that he really doesn't want to engage in the kind of political prostitution necessary to get him there . . . that's why we, the American people, need to draft him into service, and elect him without demanding that he kiss our asses, or those of corporate America . . . then he'll be able to be himself -- and have half a chance of becoming a truly great president . . .

And, you're right: This dude can write!

:kick:

Mike Taibbi is his father. I think Mike went on to a network news gig. But he taught his son well.

.....and I'm quite partial to you too o'course! :hi:

why oh why does the US have to put up with disgusting mediawhores like the howies fineman & kurtz?

So fineman is a fred fan? Not surprised at the depths of his breathtaking inanity.

Funny that Rolling Stone is one of the few mags to have real reporting ..the rest are corporatemediawhore marinated and phone it in.

Comparing him to Hunter?

This person's writing lacks the wit and the strange elegance.

enjoyed Taibbi's book, too. I recommend it.

a truly appalling attack on Wesley Clark. :thumbsdown:

He denied that there was any ethnic cleansing in either Bosnia or Kosovo. Lived in Moscow in the mid-90's. Petty little creep. Really had an agenda to smear Wes Clark.

Taibbi is in love with the cuteness and cleverness of his own writing.

not that I wasn't impressed with Matt Taibbi before. But I was struck by his take on the schism between the media-ready fake reality "inside the walls" vs. the gritty reality outside, and how this split has become physically manifest in Iraq:

The campaign, therefore, becomes mainly a story about the interplay, or noninterplay as it were, between two worlds: the absurd fake world inside the campaign bubble, in which 250 million adults are depicted as gravely caring about such concepts as "likeability," and the much weirder real world outside the bubble where the rest of us actually live. This schizophrenic national self-image has become an even bigger issue in the years since the last campaign, especially since the country is now engaged in an overseas war where the schism is physically visible; in Iraq we actually built a vast archipelago of walled-off Americana in which one media-ready reality is visible inside the base walls while another, far less palatable reality rages out of control outside the gates of those bases.

Yes, we all know how brilliant Matt Taibbi's writing style is, but that's also real insight. "A vast archipelago of walled-off Americana..." Indeed. Well, it's the next logical step after embedded reporters, right?

That was great, thanks.

and Dr.Paul...

"Last but not least, there are parallel irritant figures on both sides in Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, whose jobs it will be to be roundly pilloried for wasting valuable air time (especially in debates) via their embarrassingly dead-on, pain-in-the-ass candidacies. Since neither candidate is a worn-out whore, and neither candidate has cast a single vote for any of the numerous completely avoidable political catastrophes that befell the country in the last four-plus years, both will be described as "fringe" and "unserious" figures who should rightfully be assigned to the "second tier" of presidential hopefuls. Meanwhile, the press will line up to laud as exciting breaths of political fresh air a one-note B-list character actor, a southern governor who believes the earth is 6,000 years old, and a hack plagiarist from Delaware with a head full of hair plugs who offers a "statesmanlike presence" and "raises the level of discourse" as he campaigns shamelessly for the secretary of state's job."

take it where ya find it, i guess.
dp

he'd be brilliant. He needs an editor.

Many other positive adjectives, but that one is at the top of the list, since it is so sorely lacking elsewhere.

He's just another jaded hipster "journalist", a third-rate purveyor of snark who fails mightily at imitating the inimitable Hunter S. Thompson. In fact, this little snot doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as HST. HST was a graduate of the school of hard knocks, and his incisive but hilarious cynicism was hard earned through genuine life experiences. He was unremittingly, brutally honest and never pretentious. Taibbi, on the other hand, reeks of pretention - an upper middle class spoiled brat who watches a lot of Tarantino and fashions himself a witty commentator on our modern life and times. He looks at politics and politicians the way a smart-aleck high school kid looks at his hopelessly clueless teachers - as objects of derision and entertainment. I don't think he really *cares* about any of the issues he addresses so much as he views our current predicament as his own personal "adventure" that he chronicles in accounts slathered in heavy-handed snark - sort of like HST's "fear and loathing" for the Gen Y suburban crowd who will never know what it's actually like to live on the edge.

His style undeniably begs comparisons to HST, but his journalism is generally solid, and a lot of the stuff he writes is based on first-hand experience. And his writing isn't nearly as self-centered as HST's, where HST is always the star of the show.

http://www.amazon.com/Spanking-Donkey-Dispatches-Dumb-Season/dp/1565848918 strongly recommend it

Truer words were never written. Sigh.

a sentence together, he could also keep it shorter.

Reminds me of a more long-winded Fitzgerald.

I.E., the first sentence:

"This is why I hate showing up at functions like this Thompson thing and seeing *everyone, from campaign staff to press reps to audience members,* looking so content of disposition and cheered of conscience, like they're joining up with a neighborhood can drive."

Find the one word that perfectly describes the people mentioned in between the asterisks and you've got an awesome sentence.

One thing he could have done is to break it down into two sentences like this:

This is why I hate showing up at functions like this Thompson thing and seeing everyone looking so content of disposition and cheered of conscience, like they're joining up with a neighborhood can drive. "Everyone" includes campaign staff, press reps and audience members.

Or

...That includes campaign staff, press reps and audience members.

Of course I'd have to fit it back into the original context to see if it actually works that way, and I'm too lazy to do that now.

It's not just that he can write, or that he's as vicious a wordsmith as Gonzo in his day, though he is.

Taibbi has done his research. He's always insightful, never tells you a bunch of useless bullshit you already know that anyone could have thrown together from a dozen AP articles. Article after article...his eulogy of Boris Yeltsin belied a deep understanding of post-Soviet Russia, his contempt for the Democratic Party establishment is only outdone by his outright hatred of the Republican establishment, and his reasons are generally things that most people have forgotten or had never properly put into context in the first place.

He's like if the top twenty DU'ers got crammed into one angry package and got gifted with a platform at Rolling Stone.

RS has also done the best political reporting of any magazine I know of the past two years...from RFK (edit: Jr) on Ohio '04 and the Green Economy to the recent Iraq military contracting story and the current article on the Missile Defense Shield, and even H.R. Haldeman's deathbed confessions on the JFK assassination, no one has provided more potent, substantial, or consequential journalism.

Because that one made me cry real tears.

And for those who mock his Gonzo journalism, he probably knows he can't be Hunter S., but also knows you can't write about these fools without expressing a copious amount of contempt and scorn.