09.07.11
Taibbi as lamer
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi is great when he’s on the Wall Street as economic gangsters beat.
He’s lame as someone now attempting to cover extremism. In the last couple of posts at his blog — it’s not really that — he updates about once or twice a week max, he’s been finally seized by the idea that GOP extremism poses a real threat.
Doing that, he’s very late to the story. And the only thing that gets to him are the pieces everyone else has already passed around a million times, like Mike Lofgren’s TruthOut confession about the psychopaths he used to work with as a Congressional staffer.
I mocked this earlier in the day because it hews to the cowardly slime modern American tradition of publishing the tell-all, not when it might do some good early on, but after you’ve been run off or retired. At which point it serves as momentary candy for the professional left and, cynically, the demo first chapter for the inevitable big book contract.
Taibbi seems to think calling GOP extremism was formerly uncool. It was, he opines, too easy to beat up on the party
This is how he puts it:
I’ve always been queasy about piling on against the Republicans because it’s intellectually too easy; I also worry a lot that the habit pundits have of choosing sides and simply beating on the other party contributes to the extremist tone of the culture war.
That’s an ignorant rationalization being used as salve for his troubled brow.
Taibbi is too big a star journalist now to have been down in the weeds being washed and corroded by what’s been commonplace from the party for the last two to three years. Taibbi’s last piece on Michele Bachmann, which he conceded he did mostly by copying from others, showed he’s someone who prone to floating by and, if the fancy strikes him, taking a swipe at the news, adding his own sprinkling of stylistically unique slurs.
And now he’s changed his mind about GOP extremism. It’s really dangerous, he says:
But the time is coming when we are all going to be forced to literally take sides in a political conflict far more serious and extreme than we’re used to imagining. The situation is such a tinderbox now that all it will take is some prominent politician to openly acknowledge the fact of a cultural/civil war for the real craziness to begin …
Most people aren’t thinking about this because we’re so accustomed to thinking of America as a stable, conservative place where politics is not a life-or-death affair but more something that people like to argue about over dinner, as entertainment almost. But it’s headed in another, more twisted direction …
America might be a politically unstable country? He just found the courage to write that?!
Insightful.
The entire piece, at his blog, is here.