A Visit to an Increasingly Smaller Planet

Where are they now?

Andrew Sullivan is currently skulking around behind a Substack paywall griping about all the usual, fearmongering about trans people.  Half his blog is now apparently spent posting pictures of the views from the windows of various people.

Matthew Dowd is making the rounds complaining how unfair it was that he was fired.  A) Yep, and B)  Welcome to the American workforce!

MSNBC pundit ousted over Kirk talk says network agreed comments were misconstrued

Matthew Dowd tells Katie Couric ex-employer concurred but ‘it didn’t matter’ and they dismissed him anyway. 

The political analyst fired by MSNBC over his Charlie Kirk commentary says his former employer agreed with him that his remarks were being misconstrued as “insensitive” – but said “it didn’t matter” to the network, and they dismissed him anyway.

“I said: ‘I think you guys are making a huge mistake,’” Matthew Dowd said on Katie Couric’s podcast. “I said: ‘You know and I know that’s not anything what I meant. You know it’s been misconstrued’ – and they agreed with that.

“They agreed it had been misconstrued. But they said it didn’t matter. The decision’s been made.”

Mr. Dowd is also trying to claw his way back into the circus by explaining why the media is Teh Sux0r, which, if you know Mr. Dowd's history, is the stuff absurdist comedies are made of:

Political pundit and consultant Matthew Dowd said the media’s “herd mentality” is promoting the feeling that President Donald Trump’s tactics of distraction and disruption are working to fool the public into putting Trump in a better light than he deserves.

Despite Steve Schmidt's repeated, heroic efforts to burn his career to the ground, the grifter in him just keeps trying to resurrect himself from the ashes.    This week he scored that coveted 32nd paragraph mention in a New York Times column of which no one made it past the 3rd paragraph.  

 Would it surprise you to learn that Schmidt is lashing out at [checks notes] Both Sides?

"The ad comes from a new group, the Save America Movement, whose leaders say they want to fight Trump with what they call “counter-propaganda.” Two of its leaders — Mary Corcoran, a former public relations executive and Steve Schmidt, a former top aide to John McCain who co-founded (and later left) the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project — are not currently impressed with either party.

They view Trump’s Republican Party with utter contempt, and fault Democrats for failing to push back effectively..."

But didn't he and his pals already save us all back in [checks notes] 2020 (File This Under Selling Your Birthright for a Mess of Pottage)?

That was the setup.  

Here's the punch line.

So far, the group has raised $4 million for their venture, though they hope to use location-targeting technology to spend efficiently...

By now the Alert Reader has noticed that every two bit grifter and refugee from their sinful Republican past has pitched up their own individual revival tents hung with their own, individual "movements" and "causes" banners, each one promising to save Murrican Democracy for the low-low introductory membership price of just $9.95 per month.  

But wait!  There's more!  

If you choose to upgrade to our Platinum Membership level ($250/month or a one-time "Hero of Democracy" donation of $10,000) you will receive early access to their podcasts, access to their Discord and an "I Paid A Shit Ton Of Money To Save Democracy And All I Got Was This Lousy Tee Shirt" tee-shirt.

If I told you that Mark "Helicopter Boy" Halperin had shaved his head, gotten some Iron Cross and Skull tats and had gone undercover with the Proud Boys, for a second would you wonder if maybe it was true?   Because the oleaginous Halperin, who was once a ubiquitous presence on the Sunday shows and cable news, has vanished from sight.  Where is he now?  Lemme throw a couple of headlines at you, then you can guess.

First:

Mark Halperin Tells Megyn Kelly How Charlie Kirk’s Assassination...

And then:

Journalist calls it ‘incredible’ that ABC pulled Kimmel after years of anti-Trump programming

Panelists Mark Halperin (editor and chief of Two Way?) and Byron York (Fox News contributor) join ‘The Ingraham Angle’ to discuss fallout from Charlie Kirk’s assassination and ABC’s decision to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

Hilarious that Halps is still demanding to be called a "journalist".  And wuzzit Two Way?  A YouTube thingie which he co-hosts with Sean "Puffy" Spicer and someone from the Shadow Realm called Daniel Calhoon Turrentine  -- a name obviously stolen from the unpublished works of Mark Twain.  

The blurb for morning edition of this drivel... well ... the word "grandiose" hardly covers it (for the full effect, this should be read in your head in the voice of the late Ted Knight doing his Super Friends  voiceover.)

Every weekday morning, the executives who run America’s television news networks chair a key gathering of their anchors, correspondents and producers to look ahead at the day’s forthcoming events. The meeting offers – for those lucky enough to attend – a fascinating, forward-looking snapshot of the news cycle ahead. 

Each weekday morning on 2WAY, the home of conversations like no other, “The Morning Meeting” offers the chance to attend – and participate in – one such meeting...

And since I am a merciful blog host, I shall reprint only the first little bit of the blurb for the evening edition of this drivel:

Join Mark Halperin and some of the leading minds in politics...

But the best headline of all?  From an outfit called "ABD Post":

MARK HALPERIN brilliantly breaks down why Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel...

The "ABD Post" is a pro-Erdoğan Turkish-American website about which you have never heard, and from which you will never hear again.  

And finally, a two-fer.  In case you were worried that you might have to hold a bake-sale to support Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, you can stop worrying.  They are both are residing comfortably in the reactionary libertarian free-speech terrariums their tech oligarch sugar daddies built for them and their ilk.

From The New Republic:

Tech billionaires and iconoclast journalists suddenly see eye to eye.

...

"Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left", a new book by the journalist Eoin Higgins, is an attempt to understand how a collection of unimaginably wealthy, increasingly angry titans of technology and finance were able to acquire loud allies among journalists who had, until relatively recently, been largely associated with the political left. Higgins previously covered this beat in his work for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and for his own newsletter, The Flashpoint. Some of that work is repurposed here, but the book expands on it, taking a broader look at the sociocultural and political currents that have brought new alignments of writers, audiences, and funders.

His two main subjects are the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, although a number of other new-media all-stars and hangers-on make appearances...

And that is the end of the news.

 

I Am The Liberal Media

How It Started: Matt Taibbi Edition

 

How It's Going

What I predicted the future of Fox News would look like a few years ago.

That future is almost here.  Ironically, it will arrive without Tucker Carlson.  

This is why we...

Burn The Lifeboats

Looking Forward to Matt Taibbi’s 72-Part Twitter Files II: Egocentric Boogaloo...

...in which he dives deeeeep into Free Speech Absolutist Elmo Mush caving to the political demands for censorship by Turkish authoritarian monster Recep Tayyip Erdogan just days before Turkish elections.

From The Daily Beast:

Elon Musk Gets Roasted After Twitter Bends to Turkish Censorship Request

Which I assume will then become a 144-part graduate seminar at Bari Weiss'  Substack University of Advanced Phrenological Studies.  There to be team-taught by Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald and, if I had to guess, their soon-to-be Fascist-in-Residence, Tucker Carlson.

I Am The Liberal Media

Times Change

Taibbi’s been breaking out all the wingnut classics from the 1990s. Really behind the times. pic.twitter.com/0Es74IlWLy

— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) June 4, 2021

"[David Brooks] strikes me as the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a Leona Helmsley lookalike a thousand dollars to take a shit on his back." 

-- Matt Taibbi, April 2010

 

"Matt Taibbi strikes me as the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a David Brooks lookalike a thousand dollars to take a shit in front of him while reading Glenn Greenwald Tweets aloud." 

-- driftglass, June, 2021

This is right up there with Charlie Sykes blaming the Liberals for making the GOP racist.

Clearly people like me are to blame for driving Glenn Greenwald into the arms of Tucker Carlson and driving Matt Taibbi mad.

So, y'know, sorry about all that.

No Half Measures

Fox News 2021

I have seen the future.  

No Half Measures

In Which Matt Taibbi Becomes David Brooks

This is the cover of Mr. Taibbi's new book.

This Mr. Taibbi from 2010, back when he was in high cotton --

Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.

Brooks is right that most of the people in that 5% bracket log heavy hours, but where he's wrong is in failing to recognize that most of us have enough shame to know that what we do for a living isn't really working. I pull absolutely insane hours in my current profession, to the point of having almost no social life at all, but I know better than to call what I do for a living work...

This was from back in the days when Mr. Taibbi would drop by the MSNBC chuck-wagon to from time to time to promote a book and amiably chew the fat with Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow.

Back before Pete Omidyar and Glenn Greenwald took him up to a high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said unto him, "All this will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt come work for me, all shall be thine."

First Look Media hires Matt Taibbi

Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media has hired Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, the company announced Wednesday.

Taibbi, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone with an eponymous blog on its site, will head up a new publication focused on financial and political corruption. The still unnamed publication will be separate from The Intercept, the first publication from First Look Media, headed by former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald...

Before Pete Omidyar and Glenn Greenwald helped Mr. Taibbi find the door five minutes later:

On October 10, according to the Intercept account, Taibbi left the office claiming he had been stripped of managerial responsibilities (a claim First Look managers dispute). Taibbi maintained that the woman’s complaint was without merit. First Look, according to the article, determined that Taibbi was not legally liable for his behavior, just a bad manager. Then Omidyar told him he could not return to the organization as an employee, only as a contractor who would not be managing other employees. 

This was not acceptable, and he left the company and published an article soon after in Rolling Stone. First Look declined to comment on the complaints referenced in the Intercept piece, or to say whether it has routine procedures in place to handle complaints of this kind. The company also declined to comment on its own investigation, to say if it is complete, or to indicate whether the person who lodged the complaint against Taibbi is satisfied with the process.

Before the wheels came completely off:

First Look Media Scraps ‘Racket’ Launch, Slashes 9 Staffers Hired by Ex-Chief Matt Taibbi

Pierre Omidyar’s company scraps what would have been Taibbi’s “Racket,” lays off 9; Omidyar doesn’t show up for firings

Nine employees from First Look Media will be looking for new jobs, after CEO Pierre Omidyar laid off the entire team of what was supposed to be Matt Taibbi’s digital site “Racket” on Tuesday, an insider in the company told TheWrap. Omidyar was not present for the layoffs...

And because neither internet billionaires nor the Mortgage Fairy are gonna keep a roof over his head, it appears Mr. Taibbi has at last joined that most sacred of Beltway institutions -- the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It.

Because, rain or shine, war or peace, Trump or Obama, the "Both Sides Do It" dollar remains the easiest, quickest, most reliable dollar in the pundit business.

Which is sad.

I Don't Have A Mortgage Fairy Either

Today In Both Sides Do It: Matt Taibbi

Sigh.

So here we go...

I admire Matt's writing very much.  However, in his new article in Rolling Stone , Mr. Taibbi tells his readers that while Fox News is definitely a black hole of runamok authoritarian goons and professional hysterics that has pulverized and swallowed the Right ...

Just look at the history of Fox and its satellite organizations.

Yes, the Murdoch empire has succeeded in accruing enormous power across the globe. In the United States, its impact on political affairs has been incalculable. It's led us into war, paralyzed Democratic presidencies, helped launch movements like the Tea Party and effectively spread so much disinformation that huge majorities ofRepublicans still doubt things like the birthplace of Barack Obama.

But Fox's coverage has been so overwhelmingly one-sided that it has lost forever the ability to convince non-conservatives of anything. Rupert Murdoch has turned into the Slime Who Cried Wolf. Even when Murdoch gets hold of a real story, he usually can't reach more than an inch outside his own dumbed-down audience.

Worse still, when you shill as constantly as his outlets have, even your most enthusiastic audience members very quickly learn to see through you...

..it is also true that if you stand athwart the tsumani of raw right-wing sewage that has buried this country under a thick sludge of rage and dumb and shout "Stop", no matter how out-gunned and out-spent you may be, well then aren't you really just as bad?

In the same way that Fox used to (and probably still does) save on reporting and research costs by simply regurgitating talking points from the RNC, blue-leaning cable channels are running segments and online reports that are increasingly indistinguishable from Democratic Party messaging.

I know we're at the ass-end of bikini season, but apparently Mr. Taibbi is on that special diet, where you slim down to fighting trim by both having your cake...

It's not that stations were wrong to denounce Trump's comments. He deserves it all. 

...and eating it too.

But he's not the only stupid, lying, corrupt politician in the world, which is the impression one could easily get watching certain stations these days.

Yes, certain stations sure do suck at things these days.  Certain things.

Certainly that won't change if the "MSM" devolves completely into a McDonald's/Burger King situation where the major media splits into Trump Sucks or Hillary Sucks outlets. Forget about the fact that it's boring. From now on, how will we know if a real scandal hits?

Because a major political party degenerating to the point where they nominated an unhinged, racist con man isn't a "real scandal"?

Look, I know I'm just a 3rd rate nobody out here on the edge of nowhere, but when I go looking for "blue-leaning" anything these days, you know what I find?  I find a few hours week on MSNBC that Phil Griffin hasn't larded up with Republican Squint and his Meat Puppet --

I heard that @Morning_Joe was very nice on Friday but that little Donny D, a big failure in TV (& someone I helped), was nasty. Irrelevant!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2016

-- or former RNC chair Michael Steele, or Republican mole Mark Halperin, or Mrs. Alan Greenspan, or Shuck Todd and Mini Shuck Todd machine-gunning meaningless poll numbers at me.  I find a handful of radio stations that carry a the same four or five Liberal programs, most of them constantly fundraising on the edge of oblivion.

Elsewhere it's wall-to-wall wingnuts on the radio from sea to shining sea, and teevee programming that mostly seems to feature dead-eyed Pro Trump Conservative zombies battling with rage-spittle-flecked Anti Trump Conservative zombies over who gets to carve this country into what sort of bite-sized portions to feed which constituency.

And until this immediate and mortal threat to my country's basic ability to govern itself is addressed, any article built on the predicate that "Well sure the Confederacy seceding and firing on Fort Sumter is bad, but on the other hand..."  loses me.

Because the problem is not Trump.  The problem is that one of our two major political parties -- representing around 40 percent of the voting public -- is so irredeemably fucked-in-the-head that it nominated Donald Trump, will vote in its millions for Donald Trump and, if Donald Trump is elected, would stand by him if he promised mass crucifixions along his inauguration parade route and a nuclear first strike on Mecca in the spring.

The problem not that biased, Both Siderist reporting on this story is swamping everything else.  The problem is that the state of the Fox News Republican Party itself is a planet-wide, First Order Disaster and our broken, biased media is doing everything in its considerable power to avoid speaking this terrifying truth out loud.

For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.

The title of this post is, in its entirety, the "saddest short story ever" which Ernest Hemingway was alleged to have written on a bet.

Drunk.

In the rain.

Actually, the Hemingway part is made-up, but still, pretty good story.

It also makes a pretty apt title for the obit for the Great Thing That Never Was...

The Guerrilla Tactics of The Racket, and How It Almost Upended Journalism

BY MAT HONAN   12.15.14

In September, when it wasn’t quite autumn in New York but after the long hot summer had ended, I rode up an elevator in New York’s Flat Iron district to the offices of First Look Media to meet with the guerrilla editors of The Racket. The Racket has since folded, without ever launching. Which is a shame, not only because it had built a great team full of interesting writers, but also because it was going to be a lot of fun.

The Racket was to be a showcase for Matt Taibbi,the Rolling Stone reporter who made a name for himself running a newspaper in Russia before becoming one of the financial industry’s harshest critics. Taibbi hired great, voicey, no-bullshit editors like Alex Pareene and Edith Zimmerman. The plan was to make an Internet magazine that mixed hard-hitting reporting and in-depth features with wicked, Spy magazine-style satire. And the occasional kitten video.

But The Racket is dead now. Its parent, First Look Media, put a bullet in it and dumped the body with a short blog post. Buh-bye. First Look is financed by Pierre Omidyar, an eBay founder, who last year announced he was dropping hundreds of millions into a new media organization.

...

The Racket wanted to be prankish and fun. But all that lampooning would be in the service of satirizing what they saw as bad journalism.

Bad journalism, in The Racket’s eyes, was a publication like The New Republic. While TNR has managed to outlast The Racket by about 100 years, it’s had its own turmoil recently, after its owner (Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes) clumsily canned editor-in-chief Franklin Foer in order to replace him with an editor who once ran Gawker, then watched as two thirds of the staff and writers walked out in protest.

But way back in September, and really throughout this past summer, The Racket already was going at Foer in its own quiet, yet suitably obnoxious, way. After noticing that he had fewer than 10,000 followers on Twitter, they bought him 100,000 in chunks of a few thousand at a time—although the number was in constant flux because Twitter kept zapping the bot accounts. The point to all of it was … well … They didn’t really seem to have one? Other than that Foer represented the kind of conventional thinking and anodyne voice that was at the helm of too many old media properties. So the plan, they said, was to mess with him by buying him the kind of large following the editor of something like The New Republic deserved—and then some. “We want to make him the Justin Bieber of centrist beltway journalism,” said Taibbi.

...

Boy, it sure sounds like it woulda been fun.

Too bad they snuffed it in utero.

For Sale: New Media, Never Born.

The Valley Of Unrest

Who says there's no money in journalism? Because buried halfway through another article about the problems with the launch of Virgin Galactic First Look Media is this mention of a fierce bidding war going on among the start ups:

...

The loss of Mr. Taibbi, a journalist with an avid following, is a blow to First Look as it tries to distinguish itself in a fiercely competitive and crowded start-up digital media market. Among others, Fusion, Vox and Quartz have been hiring reporters and editors with web experience. Medium, started by two of the founders of Twitter, is something between a publisher and a platform. And BuzzFeed and Vice have recently expanded their reporting ambitions and raised millions from eager investors. Even older companies like Bloomberg Media are seeking to revamp themselves with infusions of fresh talent.

All of this is happening at such a vast social distance from me it feels like the slight shudder of some earthquake happening in a different time zone, or a wild sunset brought on by a volcano erupting far beyond the horizon.

Yes, the heaving of fault lines and spewing of lava is real, but almost everyone involved has worked so very hard to make it clear that the opinions of flyover grunts like me do not matter at all -- do not in any way factor into their decision-making -- that beyond making sure the echoes of their tectonic org-chart shimmies don't knock my copies of "Boss" and "The Loudest Voice In The Room" off the nightstand, or taking the kids out at dusk to see the trippy sky show, what the fuck is Hecuba to me or me to Hecuba?

Far away. 

Far away.

Are not all lovely things far away?

Birthday Fundraiser Day Five: The Day Matt Taibbi's Rare "First Look" Employee ID

Became the most collectible of all the early 21st Century Journalism trading cards.

Gem Mint condition.

Never swiped.

Only dropped once.

From the New York Times:

Matt Taibbi Is on Leave Only Months After Joining First Look Media

By RAVI SOMAIYAOCT. 28, 2014

Matt Taibbi, who rose to fame at Rolling Stone magazine as a fierce critic of Wall Street before joining First Look Media to start his own publication, is on a leave of absence from the company after clashing with his bosses, according to people familiar with the matter.

The news of Mr. Taibbi’s leave was first reported by New York magazine, which said that it was prompted by “disagreements with higher-ups.”

Mr. Taibbi declined to answer questions on the matter, and messages for representatives of First Look Media, the company financed by the multibillionaire founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, went unreturned Tuesday. The people who confirmed the news were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
...

First, I hate to see a good writer lose a paying gig.  Hope you land on the balls of your feet, Matt, hauling ass towards fame and fortune.

Second, having produced nothing for months but breathless press releases about all its awesome tomorrows, it is obvious that something at First Look to stinks on ice.  I'm curious to see how the organization founded by the world's leading proponent of radical transparency and leaking organization secrets will handle this mess in his own house.

I'm guessing deflectors will be set to full, shiny objects will be waved, indignation will be marshaled, enough corporate double-speak and repetition will be deployed hard to make Mike Coffman wince --

-- and irony will pack up the RV and relocate to sunnier climes for the winter.

Meanwhile, whoever is in charge of First Look's front page needs to understand the hilarious power unintended juxtaposition has to make it look like your organization has no idea what it's doing:

About Last Night

(Video has a lead-off ad.)

It is unfortunate that during all the years he spent as the IT guy for Surveillance, Inc., Mr. Snowden never picked up on the fact that Russia is an actual police state ruled by an actual tyrant: a place where journalists are actually murdered in large numbers and non-heterosexual citizens are beaten in the streets with the imprimatur of the government.  Now, as Mr. Putin's guest, Mr. Snowden is no longer in a position where he can speak out about anything except the ugly excesses of Surveillance, Inc.

Of course, First Look Media is under no such constraints.

Given their vast resources, award-winning staff, and the global attention the launch of their enterprise has garnered, if they chose to, they could certainly afford to bring the full weight of that enterprise's power and prestige to bear on Mother Russia, and continue their non-stop coverage of Surveillance, Inc.

After all, even before he had Pierre Omidyar's $250M at this command, it took Glenn Greenwald less than one day to breeze past the bare-facts-as-they-were-then-know regarding the Boston Marathon bombing and put the entire tragedy in-harness to his larger agenda:

As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge 

The widespread compassion for yesterday's victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid

So we know Mr. Greenwald moves fast.  And so far as I can tell he has never curbed his use of language-as-Molotov-cocktail  for anyone.  So given that media from all over the world are covering Vladimir Putin's overt state oppression, his rampant domestic spying, his grotesque civil rights abuses, his stomping of journalists and his bloody meddling in the affairs of other countries, it certainty seems...weird...that planet Earth's most famous brand-new media enterprise -- which has been expressly launched to cover state oppression, domestic spying, civil rights abuses, the abuse of journalists and bloody meddling in the affairs of other countries -- would be staying so conspicuously silent on the subject.

Perhaps now that they have a journalist with actual Russian-reporting chops on-staff -- 

Taibbi grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts suburbs. He attended Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1992 from Bard College located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, then spent a year abroad at Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University in Russia. His father is Mike Taibbi, an NBC television reporter.

...

Taibbi joined Mark Ames in 1997 to co-edit the controversial English-language Moscow-based, bi-weekly free newspaper, The eXile. Of Exile, Taibbi said, "We were out of the reach of American libel law, and we had a situation where we weren't really accountable to our advertisers. We had total freedom."[citation needed] In the U.S. media, Playboy magazine published pieces on Russia both by Taibbi and by Taibbi and Ames together during this time.

-- they can spare some of Mr. Taibbi's considerable talents and contacts to give Vladimir Putin's Russia the rigorous and unstinting journalistic hiding it so obviously deserves.

No One Could Have Predicted

That aggressively recruiting millions of bigots and imbeciles into your party in order to win elections would ever have any downsides.

From TPM:

Republicans Lash Tea Party Groups As Money-Hungry Cynics

It's hard to overstate the animosity that House GOP leaders feel for outside tea party groups these days.

Republicans are bashing conservative activists as a bunch of cynical, money-hungry opportunists after they attacked party leaders for surrendering on the debt limit Tuesday.

"$$$$$$$," emailed one senior Republican aide, who was granted anonymity to respond candidly to the conservative groups.

"Every once in a while," the aide said, "I see a Fire Boehner sponsored tweet, think it's the Dems, notice it's one of them, and realize they are working harder on behalf of liberals than anyone at the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]."

Within the House GOP, there was a mix of disappointment and resignation, but no overt rebellion against Speaker John Boehner. But outside tea party outfits seized on the fundraising opportunity at GOP leaders' expense. "John Boehner must be replaced as Speaker of the House," declared Matt Hoskins of the Senate Conservatives Fund in a email asking for donations moments after the news broke. The Club For Growth was outraged: "[W]e thought it was a joke. But it's not," said Andy Roth, the group's top congressional lobbyist. "Something is very wrong with House leadership, or with the Republican Party."

...

From Buzzfeed:

Someone’s Been Sending GOP Lawmakers A Bizarre Threat Over The Debt Ceiling

House Republicans have been getting a weird email in recent weeks: a threat over the debt ceiling vote that’s been sent to the lawmakers’ closely guarded personal email addresses. “It’s got to be another member. Probably one of the crazy ones,” one GOP lawmaker said.

...

From (Lawd help me) The Washington Examiner:

Senate Conservatives Fund levels harshest attack yet on Mitch McConnell

BY BYRON YORK | FEBRUARY 12, 2014 AT 4:49 PM

On Tuesday, the Senate Conservatives Fund called for the ouster of House Speaker John Boehner. Now the SCF, originally founded by Sen. Jim DeMint and run by a close DeMint associate, has launched the harshest attack yet on its No. 1 target, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In a new ad based in part on supposition, misleading reporting, questionable assertions and a single (erroneously cited) poll, the SCF likens McConnell's leadership of the Senate to Internal Revenue Service harassment of conservatives.

...

Since I am a bad, lazy Liberal blogger I will not bother to link to any of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of posts I and other bad, lazy Liberals have written over the years warning that this day was coming, because frankly, why bother?  The same people who never listened to anything we had to say about anything before will go right not listening, and will go right on being shocked!shocked! when the next, inevitable day of reckoning arrives.

No reference to a children's stories I adapted back in 2005 this time, or my clear, succinct and poetically accurate Dr. Seuss explanation of the Tea Party from back in 2010.  Not even reminder that as far back as 1964, people like Rod Serling were warning that the GOP was making pact with the Devil.

Instead I will indulge myself only slightly with this call-back to one of the many, many predictions made over the years by America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Nostradamus over the years foretelling the demise of the crazy, stupid Liberals and the rise of capable, competent Conservatives:

Competent Conservatives, Reactionary Liberals

JAN 15, 2001

We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days when Norman Lear still had hair.

...

And this now-mostly-forgotten-except-by-bad-lazy-Liberal-bloggers exchange from election night 2010 (h/t Crook and Liars) between revered Beltway statuary David Gergen and disreputable, potty-mouth Matt Taibbi on the true nature of the then-ascendent Tea Party movement (except, of course, as longtime readers know, There. Is. No. Tea Party.):

...

Every election year since 2004, Rolling Stone has David Gergen and Peter Hart dissecting the election results, and this year they add Matt Taibbi to the mix. Taibbi (shown in a recent video) says what he thinks about the teabaggers and Gergen is horrified:

Gergen: If it were not for the extra boost of enthusiasm the Tea Party provided, I imagine the Republicans would have won only 40 to 50 seats, instead of the 60-plus they gained. But the Tea Party also makes it harder in the future for Republicans to maintain a coherent party. Matt is right that they will have a large voice in the nomination process in 2012. But one cannot discount that someone could arise, as Reagan did in the past, who can bridge the differences within the party and keep people united.

Taibbi: To me, the main thing about the Tea Party is that they're just crazy. If somebody is able to bridge the gap with those voters, it seems to me they will have to be a little bit crazy too. That's part of the Tea Party's litmus test: "How far will you go?"

Gergen: I flatly reject the idea that Tea Partiers are crazy. They had some eccentric candidates, there's no question about that. But I think they represent a broad swath of the American electorate that elites dismiss to their peril.

Hart: I agree with David. When two out of five people who voted last night say they consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party, we make a huge mistake to suggest that they are some sort of small fringe group and do not represent anybody else.

Taibbi: I'm not saying that they're small or a fringe group.

Gergen: You just think they're all crazy.

Taibbi: I do.

Gergen: So you're arguing, Matt, that 40 percent of those who voted last night are crazy?

Taibbi: I interview these people. They're not basing their positions on the facts — they're completely uninterested in the facts. They're voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that's enough for them.

Gergen: The great unwashed are uneducated, so therefore their views are really beneath serious conversation?

Taibbi: I'm not saying they're beneath serious conversation. I'm saying that these people vote without acting on the evidence.

Gergen: I find it stunning that the conversation has taken this turn. I disagree with the Tea Party on a number of issues, but it misreads who they are to dismiss them as some kind of uneducated know-nothings who have somehow seized power in the American electorate. It is elitist to its core. We would all be better off if we spent more time listening to each other rather than simply writing them off.

Hart: I agree. The point here is that the Obama administration would be at their own peril to somehow misread this as a fringe, unacceptable group of people. This is a huge portion of the electorate, and they represent a core within the Republican Party...

To point and laugh is not enough.

But when pointing and laughing is what you have, it's what you do.

Jay Rosen Thinks You Should Read More Matt Taibbi

Jay's right, although I have a small problem with classifying Mr. Taibbi as "underappreciated" as he now enjoys a regular gig at "The Rolling Stone" and "The Sideboob Journal Huffington Post" feels he has wide enough name recognition that they built an entire editorial atop one of Mr. Taibbi's 140-character jabs at David Brooks from The Twitter Machine --

"I have a serious question for David Brooks, who is hailing Romney's Bain record http://nyti.ms/NyEzQ4 . Do you know how private equity works?"

-- which, within 24 hours, had been retweeted (by my count) 155 times and "favorited" 53 times.


That's recognition.

On the other hand, Mr. Taibbi is pretty clearly on what appears to be permanent, double-secret Beltway probation after making David Gergen go Number Two in his pantaloons when he suggested on live teevee that teabaggers are many, many possums short of a stew (From "Rolling Stone"):

... 

Taibbi: To me, the main thing about the Tea Party is that they're just crazy. If somebody is able to bridge the gap with those voters, it seems to me they will have to be a little bit crazy too. That's part of the Tea Party's litmus test: "How far will you go?"

Gergen: I flatly reject the idea that Tea Partiers are crazy. They had some eccentric candidates, there's no question about that. But I think they represent a broad swath of the American electorate that elites dismiss to their peril.

Hart: I agree with David. When two out of five people who voted last night say they consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party, we make a huge mistake to suggest that they are some sort of small fringe group and do not represent anybody else.

Taibbi: I'm not saying that they're small or a fringe group.

Gergen: You just think they're all crazy.

Taibbi: I do.

Gergen: So you're arguing, Matt, that 40 percent of those who voted last night are crazy?

Taibbi: I interview these people. They're not basing their positions on the facts — they're completely uninterested in the facts. They're voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that's enough for them.

Gergen: The great unwashed are uneducated, so therefore their views are really beneath serious conversation?

Taibbi: I'm not saying they're beneath serious conversation. I'm saying that these people vote without acting on the evidence.

Gergen: I find it stunning that the conversation has taken this turn. I disagree with the Tea Party on a number of issues, but it misreads who they are to dismiss them as some kind of uneducated know-nothings who have somehow seized power in the American electorate. It is elitist to its core. We would all be better off if we spent more time listening to each other rather than simply writing them off. 

...

But such an embargo suggests nothing more than run-of-the-mill Villager cowardice and fear, not a lack of appreciation.

Waiting for The Miracle

Baby, I've been waiting,
I've been waiting night and day.
I didn't see the time,
I waited half my life away...

-- Leonard Cohen

Buried deep inside his tragicomic Grand Guignol expose of Our Lady of the Holy Killbot, Matt Taibbi accomplishes something else: The discovery of America.

Not the pastel flyover-country American cartoon that Beltway professionals blur quickly past as they invoke the fiction of th'murricanpipple a thousand times a day, but the real America.

The real, ugly America.

The America that no longer has any functional understanding of this world. The deeply ignorant, deeply angry, deeply paranoid America that has been swallowed whole by Hate Radio. That remakes its own past, present and future into whatever suits today's batshit Two Minutes Hate Fox Special News Alert.

The America where the minds of millions of our fellow citizens have grown so pudding-soft and devolved from crouching in their spider holes and waiting for the Second Coming of The Imaginary Reaganator to save them from their Imaginary Enemies, that they can now effectively be lead any-damn-where by anybody with a Bible, a conspiracy that flatters their psychosis and a big, cheery, teevee smile.

Taibbi explains in autopsic detail why trying to reason with the Pig People is simply impossible, and, I would argue, why trying to hide inside a snuggle sack of Fake Centrism slung between Michele Bachmann and Barack Obama is insane.

Michele Bachmann's Holy War
...

In her runs for Congress, Bachmann discovered — or perhaps it is more accurate to say we all discovered — that a total absence of legislative accomplishment and a complete inability to tell the truth or even to identify objective reality are no longer hindrances to higher office.

Emboldened by the lack of consequences for her early freakouts, Bachmann's self-mythologizing became more and more overt. In October 2006, she stepped before a packed house at the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and told her life story. All of history's great madmen have had that one gorgeous moment where the cackling hairy hunchback that has been gestating within for years finally comes out and shows itself, strutting up and down the catwalk for the world to see. This was Michele's catwalk moment, a lengthy autobiographical speech in which she claimed "callings" from God had pushed her to every major decision in her life — from studying tax law to running for Congress. She even told the congregation that she and hubby Marcus — who by then had opened a Christian counseling center — had been united not by love but by a unique series of divine visions experienced by three people simultaneously.

Bachmann claimed that back in her college days, she was up one night praying with a female friend of hers when "the Lord gave each one of us the same, exact vision... It was a picture of me, marrying this man, in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin." Meanwhile, miles away, Marcus "was repairing a fence on the farm where he worked, and the Lord showed him in a vision that he was supposed to marry me." According to Bachmann, Marcus initially complained to God that he wanted to see the world first, and only later relented.

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
...

Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star.
...

There is an orc army on the move in America.

And they are coming for us.

Internet Tradition/Blog Link Note: For you newbies out there, since we bloggers really, really like it when people actually to come to our sites to read the stuff we write (and maybe drop a couple of bucks in our tip jars), it is widely considered a major dick move to just copy someone's entire post -- handmade graphic and all -- and paste it in toto into your own site. Since we have this thing called "hypertext, "Fair Use" is generally understood to be the clipping of a representative excerpt from the piece in question, followed by a link to the original post.

From The "Couldn't Have Said It Better" Files

Matt Taibbi:

Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street.
...

Since Brooks himself is talking about Ryan’s plan cutting $4 trillion over the next ten years (some say that number is higher), what we’re really talking about here is an ambitious program to cut taxes for people like… well, people like me and David Brooks, and paying for it by “consolidating job-training programs” and forcing old people to accept reduced Medicare benefits.

We are in the middle of a major national disagreement over budget priorities, and that debate is going to turn into a full-scale cultural shooting war once the 2012 presidential election season comes around. It is obvious that we have a debt problem in this country and that something needs to be done about it. But a huge part of the blame for the confusion and the national angst over our budget issues has to be laid at the feet of media assholes like Brooks, who continually misrepresent what is actually happening with national spending.
...

There is now simply too much money and power to be made from professionally lying to the American people (People's Exhibit #6,255,701: this Centrist stool sample taken directly from David Brook's column today) --

The country is about to be offered the same two products: one from Soviet Production Facility A (the Republicans), and the other from Soviet Production Facility B (the Democrats). It will react just as it always has.

-- for this to ever stop.

We're Famous!

Oh, but wait...

Not in a good way.

Rats.

From the "Rolling Stone" excepts of Matt Taibbi's "Griftopia":

"America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

"Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market.
..."

"When you're trying to sell a highway that was once considered one of your nation's great engineering marvels — 532 miles of hard-built road that required tons of dynamite, wood, and steel and the labor of thousands to bore seven mighty tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains — when you're offering that up to petro-despots just so you can fight off a single-year budget shortfall, just so you can keep the lights on in the state house into the next fiscal year, you've entered a new stage in your societal development.

"You know how you used to have a job, and a house, and a car, and a wife and a family, and there was food in the fridge — and now you're six months into a drug habit and you're carrying toasters and TVs out the front door every morning just to raise the cash to make it through that day? That's where we are. While a lot of this book is about how American banks used bubble schemes to strip the last meat off the bones of America's postwar golden years, the cruelest joke is that American banks now don't even have the buying power needed to finish the job of stripping the country completely clean.
..."

"Around this time, state and municipal executives began putting their infrastructure assets up to lease — essentially for sale, since the proposed leases in some cases were seventy-five years or longer. And in virtually every case that I've been able to find, the local legislature was never informed who the true owners of these leases were. Probably the best example of this is the notorious Chicago parking meter deal, a deal that would have been a hideous betrayal even without the foreign ownership angle. It was a blitzkrieg rip-off that would provide the blueprint for increasingly broke-ass America to carry lots of these prized toasters to the proverbial pawnshop.
..."

Three observations.

First, as always, Matt delivers the goods wrapped in some fine, laser-sculpted writing.

Second, although the excerpt credits "The Chicago Reader", I sincerely hope that in the book Matt singles out the mighty Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke by name. Most of basics that undergirded what I read in the excerpt, Joravsky and Dumke had in print and in detail a year and a half ago.

Third, and on a more personal note, back at the beginning of 2010 when Matt started soliciting Chicago residents for input on this story --

"Any Chicago residents out there with some strong opinions on the parking meter issue? If so, I’d like to hear from you."

-- I know that several of my readers got back to him with the intel that, if he wanted a good field guide the weirdness of Chicago and our parking meter fiasco, he would do well to contact me. And as genuinely reluctant as I am to blogwhore my work in other people's living rooms, in this case I took his open invitation...as an open invitation, and as a request for assistance from a fellow writer regarding a subject I know pretty well.

I tried to contact Mr. Taibbi -- a writer I admire and was happy to help -- more than once, even sending along some light reading that may have included some of the following:

The First Rule of Clout Club.
Of Sin Eaters and Parking Meters.
Plate Sin with Gold.
The Clout Burglars.

Never heard a word back from him, even to say "No thanks".

Which, I gotta confess, was fairly disappointing.

Of course, if Matt wants to make dis lil' misunderstandin' evaporate quicker'n a Cubs rally, per local custom all he needs to do is drop a coupla Netanyahus in da' fundraiser hat and we'll call 'er square.

C'mon Taibbi,

how you gonna say "no" to dis face?