Taibbi has finished reviewing Tom Friedman's new book

Always good for a laugh.

To me, Friedman has always been Exhibit A in a version of the "Banality of evil" argument. Yes, he is trite and stupid. But the trite, stupid things he writes have defended and justified horrors the world over.  He's a monster.

More importantly he's not alone.  He's emblematic of thousands of similar monsters who proliferate in media throughout the country. There's always good money to be made rationalizing the atrocities of the powerful with dimestore aphoristic nonsense if you can fake it well enough. Look around.  There's at least one Friedman opining from a high platform in your town right now.

End of the day link dump

Must read Matt Taibbi piece on the foreclosure crisis.

For most people, the former bit about homeowners not paying their damn bills is the important part, while the latter, about the sudden and strange inability of the world's biggest and wealthiest banks to keep proper records, is incidental. Just a little office sloppiness, and who cares? Those deadbeat homeowners still owe the money, right? "They had it coming to them," is how a bartender at the Jacksonville airport put it to me.

But in reality, it's the unpaid bills that are incidental and the lost paperwork that matters. It turns out that underneath that little iceberg tip of exposed evidence lies a fraud so gigantic that it literally cannot be contemplated by our leaders, for fear of admitting that our entire financial system is corrupted to its core — with our great banks and even our government coffers backed not by real wealth but by vast landfills of deceptively generated and essentially worthless mortgage-backed assets.

You've heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can't admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn't be, but often are, closed.

See also: Debtors' prisons!

The Lens: Even with plenty of subsidized housing, most still clustered in poorest areas

Despite the demolition of the city’s four largest public housing developments, New Orleans has more subsidized housing for its poorest residents now than it had five years ago. But even after spending billions to tear down the old projects and issue vouchers to encourage low-income renters to settle in better neighborhoods, the Housing Authority of New Orleans continues to see these clients concentrated in the city’s poorest areas.

I've always been dubious on the very concept of alleviating poverty by scattering people. Some of these "discoveries", for instance, seem like they should have been fairly obvious from the start.

“People who are poor don’t depend on incomes to get by,” she said. “They depend on social networks: the person that is taking them to grocery store, the auntie who is watching their child. If that is how you are surviving, you are going to move to be close to that community.

“When we started this, we expected the choice to be constrained,” Reid added. “But we expected the constraints to be structural. What we’ve found is that the situation is far more nuanced.”

Reid said that the experiences and desires of low-income people must be figured into the policymaking process in a deeper way, if cities want do more than simply relocate poverty.

“We need to be talking to the people that are affected by policy,” she said.

Some of us remember back when these housing policies were being debated rushed through in the wake of the federal flood, "talking to the people that are affected" basically meant gawking at the size of their televisions. Oh and also blowing kisses at them too, which was nice. But those were simple simple times.

CNN: Pilots urged to avoid body scanning

Pilots' unions for US Airways and American Airlines are urging their members to avoid full-body scanning at airport security checkpoints, citing health risks and concerns about intrusiveness and security officer behavior.

It's good to read about these "health risks" just before the Holiday traveling season. Saints fans who are used to their "welcome hug" each time they enter the Superdome may not be as averse to opting for the pat-down as other passengers.

Obama deficit reduction commission recommendations worse than previously thought.

1. Raises the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare to 69.

2. Cuts Social Security benefits.

3. Ends the mortgage tax deduction.

4. Ends the tax deduction for workers' health benefits.

5. Freezes salaries for federal workers for 3 years.

6. Establishes co-pays for veterans at VA health services.

7. Raises fees to visit the national parks and the Smithsonian.

8. Merges the Small Business Administration into an agency (Commerce) that has always prioritized helping bigger businesses, and cuts their budget.

9. Eliminates the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.

See also: Many deficit commission staffers paid by outside groups

Instead, about one in four commission staffers is paid by outside entities, many of which have strong ideological points of view about how to tackle the deficit.

For example, the salaries of two senior staffers, Marc Goldwein and Ed Lorenzen, are paid by private groups that have previously advocated cuts to entitlement programs. Lorenzen is paid by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, while Goldwein is paid by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is also partly funded by the Peterson group.

Finally, on a happier note, New Orleans East doesn't have to say goodbye to its beloved zombie apocalypse hell-scape quite so soon after all.

Six Flags razing rumors denied

Although a video making the rounds on the Internet says the theme park is scheduled for demolition next year, New Orleans officials say there are no plans to demolish the Six Flags amusement park and that an offer to redevelop the site is still pending.

Detritus photographers everywhere rejoice.

You can keep your David Simon

I am still a Matt Taibbi fan boy myself. Via Oyster, here's his NFL Draft preview.

Before the draft, teams spend far too much time worrying about the “character” issue, when the real question to ask is much narrower: “Can this player make it through his four- or five-year rookie contract without missing actual games due to incarceration?” Guys with drinking problems or who throw cell phones at their girlfriends’ heads or get pulled over driving 110 with loaded unregistered pistols in their glove boxes are bad bets. Guys who just stay home and smoke weed while giggling at Manswers are not. Thus: Always draft the guy who falls in draft position due to a positive weed test. In fact, if a guy is regularly smoking buttloads of weed and he’s still kicking ass in Division I football, grab that motherfucker quick.

That's fun writing. Or at least better than, "Red beans? It ain't even Monday!"

Clowns vs Evil People

Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson are clowns. David Brooks is an evil person.

Got it?

Please do something to help the people of Haiti. Whatever you can. Whatever you think is appropriate.

Slow painful death

Via Oyster we find Matt Taibbi complaining about the NFL's ever-tightening rules governing the use of hands by defensive backs and hitting upon one of the best descriptions of good football I've ever come across:

Add in the fact that offensive tackles are allowed to hold on virtually every play, and you have a game that’s more and more like basketball every year. Football should be like watching a slow, painful death, and not in the “I’ve had to watch 500 Subway five-dollar footlong commercials in three hours” sense of slow, painful death, but real, terrifying, on-field death.

It says something about either the patience of the average sports fan or, more accurately, what is expected of it, that it's no longer assumed that some of us are actually watching for nuance and substance rather than for the sake of seeing things light up.

It's one of the reasons I'm not such a big fan of Coach Soupy. Sometimes I think he'd rather be playing X-box than coaching actual football. Certainly he's not the "slow painful death" sort. He tends to go for swiftly killing Grandma instead.

The textbook committee decided to leave it all out

Taibbi on the gutted mass of goo that should have been health care reform

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Max Baucus, Bill Nelson, or anyone else. If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (ie the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds.

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.

In case you didn't know

Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on Goldman Sachs is can't-miss stuff.

...any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

WSJ nominates Hank Paulson for a Bernardo

Or do we call this a Goldman?

The good-king fantasy

As we've known for some time, I could pretty much just link to Taibbi every day and consider the thing well-said.

Everywhere I go I keep hearing people say, “How come Obama is letting X happen or Y happen, how come he’s letting his underlings do Z? It seems so unlike him!” It reminds me of the way people view leaders in Russia. Going back centuries, Russian peasants wrote impassioned letters to the Tsar, sure he was completely unaware that his Grand Dukes were all thieves and his okhranka agents were rapists and torturers. Now that Obama’s on the scene a lot of Americans are demonstrating a similar public desire to believe in the good king. Obama seems so decent and intelligent, it’s hard to imagine that his act is just a big sales job, that he’s really just a smooth-talking shill for a bunch of Wall Street bankers and Pentagon generals. So people tend to scramble for the exculpatory explanation: he’s being tricked, he’s unaware, his hands are tied, and so on.

You can sort of see that, maybe, with the economic policies. If you were bent on clinging to the good-king fantasy, you could hold your nose and imagine that Summers/Rubin cast a spell on poor Barack. But this Gitmo thing is different. It’s not like Barack Obama doesn’t know what habeas corpus is. The guy was a freaking constitutional law professor (or “senior lecturer,” if that controversy over his academic title still rankles you). And yet Obama seems to be determined to preserve the whole concept of preventive detention, which is every bit as jarring and upsetting as the preemptive invasion concept Bush introduced. In fact this whole Gitmo episode should serve as a reminder that the upper crust of the current Democratic leadership has not, for the most part, even publicly renounced preemption.

But then I've always said Obama would give us a more-or-less Clinton II administration. The fact that Obama shows little or no enthusiasm for shaking off the darkest aspects of the Bush foreign policy only makes matters worse.

The unfortunate key is that many so-called liberals are just fine with this. As long as the good king demonstrates an ability to "feel pain" and "empathize" or whatever, most middle-class white voters are just fine with private health insurance (as long as they're employed... and not too sick) and an economy directed by a kleptocratic financial class (as long as they're employed and their mortgage isn't in default).

The only real reason that alternatives to those policies are even on the table is that fewer people than normal are employed (or at least reasonably assured of continued employment). But even then, the discussion involves enough muddled talk and scapegoating that we can all remain confident that, at the end of the day, our good-king won't really overturn the apple cart.

Quote of the Day

Okay well quote of a few days ago... I'm still gettin caught up.

Taibbi:

The recent haggling over Guantanamo Bay is such classic Democratic Party politics, it almost makes you want to laugh. Almost, except that it’s, you know, revolting. Eight years of Clintonian squirming was bad enough, but now we have Barack Obama, smoking Habeas Corpus and not inhaling it.

Quote of the Day II

Taibbi:

First of all, why is that no professor alive can make it ten feet from his front door without sticking an a priori into a sentence? Is there some kind of subterranean lair where academics are beaten with whips and clubs until they learn to write alliterative book titles (”Pus, Primates, and Pessimism: Jane Goodall’s Descent into Septic Shock”) and lard up perfectly good sentences with epistemological catch-phrases? Weird.

Bribery

It's actually one of the impeachable offenses explicitly named in the constitution.

So I guess that $45,000 speaking fee from Merrill Lynch wasn’t technically a bribe because Summers wasn’t named to Obama’s Economic Transition Team until November 24 — a full twelve days later. I’m sure Summers had absolutely no inkling whatsoever that he was going to be one of the key advisers to the new administration back on November 12.

Update: Obama sez: "We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand,"

Except, that's exactly what we're doing.

Tom Friedman

What a dweeb.

How much change do you believe in?

Taibbi:

Over the summer, the Obama camp has relentlessly pushed the notion that its record fundraising is mainly the result of small online donations. The first presidential candidate to raise so much money that he could afford to eschew the spending limits that would be imposed if he accepted federal matching funds, Obama claims that he opted out of public funding so that he could have a campaign "truly funded by the American people." And indeed, he has a record number of small donors, with some 45 percent of his campaign cash coming from contributions smaller than $200.

Which is a great percentage — but it's only eight points better than John Kerry in 2004 and only 14 points better than George Bush that same year. In truth, Obama is still raising tons of money from big corporate donors. In June alone, as Obama was raking in more than $30 million from small donors, he also bagged $6 million in a single fundraiser at Ethel Kennedy's home in Virginia and another $5 million at an event in Hollywood. But time and time again, you see Obama aides boasting about how the day of the big-dollar donor is over. "More people are involved, and I think that necessarily dilutes the impact of any individual — which is probably a good thing," one prominent Obama supporter recently declared. This staunch champion of the small donor happened to be none other than James Rubin, son of former Goldman Sachs co-chairman Bob Rubin.

Obama's decision to embrace Clinton's moneymen coincided with his decision to attend a public forum on economic policy with an A list of Clinton-era economic advisors, including Rubin and Corzine. "The message is that he's going to be a friend to Wall Street, just as Bill Clinton was a friend to Wall Street," says Pollin. "Wall Street will want to be at the head of the table."

What can we say but,...yep

Taibbi:

The Obama camp, playing with a big halftime lead as the cliché goes, is going to play this one close to the vest, sticking to a strategy of using larger and larger fonts every week for their "CHANGE" placards, and getting the candidates' various aides and spokesgoons to use the term "McCain-Bush policies" as many times as possible on political talk shows. Obama will also use this pre-convention period to do what every general election candidate does after a tough primary-season fight, i.e. ditch all the positions he took en route to securing the nomination and replace them with opinions subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) reconfigured to fit the latest polling information coming out of certain key swing states. Both sides as well as the pundit class will describe this early positioning for combat over swing-state electoral votes as a "race for the center" (AP, July 3: "Candidates Courting the Center"), as if the "political center" in America were a place where huge chunks of the population tirelessly obsessed over semi-relevant media-driven wedge issues like stem-cell research and gay marriage, even as they lacked money to buy food and make rent every month.

Oh thank Christ

Taibbi is back. This means I don't have to write anything about today's continuing Democratic Primary nightmare since it's pretty much all here.

This race has already seen such juvenilia as one would previously have considered inconceivable in a contest between two ostensibly cerebral Democratic presidential candidates, including a surprisingly serious argument over which camp had the right to invoke Rocky references in their Pennsylvania campaign rhetoric — an argument settled, amazingly, when Gov. Ed Rendell declared "by executive order" that the right was Hillary's alone. The problem has been exacerbated by the relatively minor policy differences between the two candidates, although one suspects that even if those differences were major, they would take a back seat to the emerging tribal schism now cleaving the Democratic Party — a wholesale regression to clashing teenage emotions that turns these supposedly profound electoral battles into feverish squalls of car-honking and sarcastic sloganeering.

How long before one side kidnaps the other side's mascot? Will we wake up some morning in the near future and find Obama's campaign bus taken apart and reassembled on the roof of the Indiana Statehouse? Will Obama hooligans steal Hillary's Botox kit and gleefully paint the word "suck!" at the end of every yes she can sign in Guam?

More important, when will this thing end? Is there any relief in sight?

No no no ... of course not.

I need to talk to Chris Rose's pharmacist

The last few months have been a grueling depression for me. I've been trying to ignore it, laugh at it, fake it away. But I just can't get out from under this ever-persistent, ever-strengthening dread. The news is the same every day; the same assholes running the same game, the same utter lack of change or hope.

Ordinarily I find this state of affairs perversely amusing but lately it's not even that. The unmitigated disintegration of post-Flood New Orleans, the senseless war in Iraq, the pointless stupidity of the Presidential campaign, all of the horrible things that typically keep me entertained throughout the day are suddenly worse than simply horrible. They have become... boring.

I'm sure I'll get over it sooner or later, but until I stop worrying and learn to love the soul-crushing predictability of everything, at least there's still Taibbi to write pretty about exactly why the situation is as detestable as it is.

That's just the way we are, and maybe it's time to wonder why that is. In Russia they have a word, sovok, which described the craven, chickenshit mindset that over the course of decades became hard-wired into the increasingly silly brains of Soviet subjects. It's a hard word to define, but once you get it — and all Russians get it — it's like riding a bicycle, you've got it. Sovok is the word that described a society where for decades silence and a thoughtful demeanor might be construed as evidence of a dangerous dissidence lurking underneath; the sovok therefore protected himself from suspicion by babbling meaningless nonsense at all times, so that no one would accuse him of harboring smart ideas. A sovok talked tough, and cheered Khruschev for banging a shoe at America, but at the same time a sovok would have sold his own children for a pair of American jeans. The sovok talked like a romantic and lavished women with compliments, but preferred long fishing trips and nights spent in the garage tinkering with his shitty car to actual sex. It's hard to explain, but over there, they know what the word means. More than anything, sovok described a society that spent seventy years in mortal terror of new ideas, and tended to drape itself in a paper-thin patriotism whenever it felt threatened, and worshipped mediocrities as a matter of course, elevating to positions of responsibility only those who showed an utter absence not only of objectionable qualities, but any qualities at all.

We're getting to be the same kind of people. We can't focus for more than ten seconds on anything at all and we're constantly exercised about stupid media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense — while at the same time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the national budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars or so in campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a small mountain of favors for the next four years. And we... shit, I don't even know what I'm saying anymore. I'm just tired of this tone that's always out there when these scandals break, like we can't fucking stand the existence of this Wright fellow for even a minute longer, not a minute longer! — when we all know that come Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, Jeremiah Wright will be forgotten and we'll be jumping en masse in a panic away from the next media-offered shadow to fall across our bow. What a bunch of turds we all are, seriously. God help us if we ever had to deal with a real problem.

In New Orleans we know all about the sovok thing.


Update: Now with more links!

Because I couldn't write it this well

I give you Matt Taibbi on the remaining Democrats now that Edwards has dropped out.

In Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton, we've basically got Kennedy-Nixon redux, and I mean that in the most negative possible sense for both of them -- a pair of superficial, posturing conservatives selling highly similar political packages using different emotional strategies. Obama is selling free trade and employer-based health care and an unclear Iraqi exit strategy using looks, charisma and optimism, while Hillary is selling much the same using hard, cold reality, "prose not poetry," managerial competence over "vision."

As the Obama cultists like to say, I am inspired.

Stupid

Since the Democratic primary drama has gone from stupid to stupider, now is as good a time as any to link to Matt Taibbi's latest complaint (a rather tame one, by the way) about the stupid stupidity of the stupid process.

How did one of the most genuinely interesting primary contests in American history devolve into a Grade-D smack-down that even Vince McMahon would be ashamed to promote? The real story of the campaign has been its unprecedented unpredictability — and therein lies the problem. On both tickets, the abject failure of media-anointed front-runners to hold their ground was due at least in part to voters having grown weary of being told by the press who was "electable" and who wasn't. Both the Huckabee and Ron Paul candidacies represent angry grass-roots challenges to the entrenched Republican party apparatus, while the Edwards candidacy is a frank and open attack on his own party's too-cozy relationship with corporate America. These developments signaled a meaningful political phenomenon — widespread voter disgust, not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national political press that smugly enforced the party insiders' stranglehold on the process with its incessant bullying of dissident candidates.

But there was no way this genuinely interesting theme was going to make it into mainstream coverage of the campaign heading into the primary season. It was inevitable that different, far stupider story lines would be found to dominate the headlines once the real bullets started flying in Iowa and New Hampshire. And find them we did.

Hack Like Me

I admit I've been a bit on the cranky side as of late. Maybe I've got the holiday blues. Or maybe I'm just irritable from suffering the dull nausea and lethargy of my increasingly nasty and frequent hangovers. It could also be that I'm jittery over the fast approaching crescendoing of the political silly season with the Iowa Caucus nearly upon us.

I've been preparing myself for the coming onslaught of campaign bullshit and cliched celebrity journalism by reading Matt Taibbi's Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season. It's more or less a collection of Taibbi's columns from the 2004 campaign many of which I've read before. But they are well worth revisiting as the new election cycle kicks in if only to temper the inevitable outrage with a reassuring dose of "Yeah, well it's still just the same shit that always happens."

This collection is a ringing indictment of the utter stupidity and insulting phoniness of the American electoral system and the idiotic press coverage that fuels it. One highlight finds Taibbi attempting to edit all of the "bullshit" out of John Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention to see if there is anything of reliable substance being communicated. The results are telling.

It's not fair to expect brilliance from politicians. It's not fair to expect them to be charismatic, or to electrify the hall with their speaking skills. It's not even realistic to expect them to tell you what they actually think about things.

But it is fair to demand that they at least make an honest attempt to tell us something about something. Give us some kind of plan; explain something to us. John Kerry has had a front-row seat to the inner workings of the highest levels of the U.S. government for nearly 20 years. He knows more about how the world actually works than all but a handful of people in this country. He has something to tell us.

But what does he do? He climbs up a mountain of cliches, shouts "Think Positive!" from the summit and then calmly skies down into a sea of champagne and confetti with a toy M-16 draped over his shoulder. That is a gross insult, both to our intelligence and to our natural human desire to have some kind of active role in the management of our own affairs—and we all ought to be mighty pissed about it.

Don't get me wrong. Kerry said nothing in this speech, but nothing is still a vast improvement over the other guy. Maybe that's what he was thinking. Just don't tell me this is a great speech. It isn't. It's crap and an affront to human thought. This incredibly cynical politics of mechanized pandering and condescension poisons all of us. And the worst thing is, John Kerry is smart enough to know this—and he doesn't care. Not as long as he's still in this thing, anyway.

When I was done cutting, there were only two lines left.

I was born in Colorado.

America can do better.

Amen.

Read the whole column. It's a fine example of Taibbi at his best.

Taibbi's major contribution to the record of 2004 was his unrelenting assault on campaign coverage and the ways in which it dumbs down our already hopelessly stupid politics. The problem isn't so much that presidential campaigns consist mainly of candidates wandering the countryside spitting meaningless wads of focus-group tested buzzwords at the crowds. The problem is that the journalism emanating from these contrivances regularly pretends that something significant has happened.

If you want this to change, if you want politicians to stop condescending to you and feeding you bullshit, if you want the press to stop treating campaigns coverage like they would a celebrity gossip column, then the first necessary step is to stop lapping it up. The only way to convince them that you are not a child is to keep throwing their crap back in their faces until they have to either deal with you honestly or just go the fuck away. No one did this better than Taibbi in 2004.

And this is why it's so disappointing this week to find Taibbi happily swallowing a pile of the same crap that he rejected from the Kerry campaign now that it is being shoveled out (a little more artfully, perhaps) by the Obama people. Taibbi's latest column in Rolling Stone is exactly the kind of beauty pageant journalism we find him constantly railing against in Spanking the Donkey. The difference is that, unlike the journalists he made his reputation attacking, we can be reasonably certain that Taibbi knows better which makes this kind of thing all the more dismaying.

The column, instead of focusing on what kind of a President Obama might be or who he represents, concerns itself primarily with Obama's challenge in the campaign which is, in Taibbi's words, to "sell himself sell himself not just as a candidate but as an icon, a symbol of the best possible future for twenty-first-century multicultural America." One already wonders if we are choosing a President or a breath mint.

But, as we have said already, Taibbi knows better than to be this blatantly stupid so instead he tries to justify this tired narrative by hiding behind a series of "crowd reaction" quotes from Obama supporters about whom he concludes

Normally the sight of prospective voters muttering platitudes about "hope" and "change" would make any reporter erupt with derisive laughter, but at Obama events one hears outbursts of optimism so desperate and artless that I can't help but check my cynical instinct. Grown men and women look up at you with puppy-dog eyes and all but beg you not to shit on their dreams. It's odd to say, but it's actually moving.

See, the "puppy dog eyes" of these voters are just so gosh darn cute that we can certainly check our "cynical instincts" and just let them say whatever stupid shit they want to. It's a clever way for the author to simultaneously remind us all of his superior intellect while passively allowing his puppy dogs to take the fall for the load of crap he's about to endorse. I'm sorry but, no, you don't get to do this.

What follows, in short order, is Taibbi endorsing a load of crap. First there's this,

But mostly, Obama is selling himself. When he talks about "showing a new face to the world," it's not exactly a mystery that he's talking about his face. In person, Obama is a dynamic, handsome, virile presence, a stark contrast to the bloated hairy shitbags we usually elect to positions of power in this country.

I submit to you that the only thing that distinguishes this paragraph from the vapid personality-driven crap we read from Maureen Dowd on a regular basis is the presence of the word, "shitbags".

And now read this,

But once Obama showed up, the sarcasm evaporated. There was nothing remarkable about Obama's speech and subsequent Q&A session, except that he delivered every line with the force and confidence of someone who's already been president for years. Obama's shtick is to sell his future presidency as one that would recast America as the good guy of the world, one that would be guided by the principles of basic decency ("This isn't just about drawing contrasts. It's about doing what's right"), openness ("Not talking [to other countries] doesn't make us look tough. It makes us look arrogant") and a vision that embraces the challenges of this century ("The task of the next president is to convince the American people that global interdependence is here to stay. Global trade is not going away. The Internet is not going away").

And now go back and re-read the Kerry piece I linked above and you'll find Taibbi mercilessly cutting the same sorts of phrases out of Kerry's speech on the quite correct grounds that they are "bullshit."

If Taibbi wants to engage in the kind of hackery he built his reputation knocking, the least he could do is provide us with some slightly less transparent hackery. But Taibbi hasn't quite mastered the form yet. For some reason he still feels obligated to provide us with some facts about the candidate such as the following.

1) Obama has raised $80 million for his campaign primarily from the same lobbys and interests that are backing Hillary.

2) Obama's (short) voting record in the Senate indicates that he will be every bit as responsive to these interests as would any Clinton... or Bush for that matter.

After reading an article in which author acknowledges these facts and yet goes on to write that the candidate has a "whiff of destiny" about him and that he is a "symbol of the idea that not everything in our politics is rigged" one's only logical response has to be, "Are you fucking stupid, or what?"

Therefore, while his game certainly could use a little polishing, I think we can say that the first player to advance in Wimblehack 2008 is Matt Taibbi.