Matt Taibbi

ON TRUMP:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224

Long article, worth reading if you like feeling a creeping horror and bile rising in your throat.

there are some good grafs in there but was it edited? by anyone? it reads at times like someone cut all the grafs out and shook them up in a hat and started laying them down one after the other at random.

I had to skim it. Tracer OTM, it gets close to free association at points. Possibly from listening to too much Trump.

The number of predictable "he's got a real shot at this you guys" pieces between now and September is going to get really mind-numbing

gonzo writing sort of falls down when everyone already gets how nutty everything is.

on how the NYT gutted their 'positive' Sanders profile online

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-new-york-times-sandbagged-bernie-sanders-20160315?page=2

interesting

it's about time someone with (successful parents) a voice spelled it out ~

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/trump-isnt-the-campaign-medias-first-mistake-20160519?page=3

i think he gives the media too much credit. it's not like they were tricking americans into voting for these plutocrats. america elected reagan twice and liked it so much they elected his vp too. donald trump is a strange aberration and taibbi's "you should've seen it all along" is v self-congratulatory. now it makes sense to me that ppl should vote in their self-interest, but they didn't do that for so long that thomas frank wrote an entire book on the topic. taibbi understands the self-interest part but he has no explanation for why now.

whenever i read this guy's name all i can think of is how fucked up and misogynistic the eXile was

i don't think he's giving the media credit so much as admitting their class bias is so steep few up top can see what's going on down below where the majority of america (without successful parents) scrambles to survive: "The tone of American political coverage for some time hasn't matched the reality of what voters have been going through. Even as America lost its manufacturing base and tens of millions of people were put out of good jobs, the campaign story for years remained the same weirdly celebratory soap opera." it's not the media who sets reagan, bush, bush, romney, and trump up to run; the (increasingly privileged) media is too class-blind to point out the plutocratic BS is his thesis i think

xpost

whenever i read this guy's name all i can think of is how fucked up and misogynistic the eXile was

I think the dude grew up, it happens sometimes.

i'm not saying it should be held against him, really. i just have a hard time looking past it personally. it's not like he was sixteen years old in those days he was like, the age i am now.

i also realize mark ames was worse than taibbi

It's almost like he's a lurker

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609

except regular posters here don't want to hear that i'd bet

or know it already

hi matt!

taibbi is mostly right, but i suspect most of us would agree with him. but i don't think that what taibbi predicts is a foregone conclusion.

it seems like morbs is wearing some kind of weird anamorphic lenses when he reads ILX that cause him to make sweeping generalizations about our opinions that aren't remotely true. of his many odious traits, that's the most confounding and frustrating. i don't have any real explanation for it other than he must get off on feeling superior, so it serves his interests to project straw men onto those he's talking (or "talking") with.

and FWIW i do worry that trump's obvious odiousness, and the likely fact that hillary will win this thing in a (relative) rout, means that people will be a celebratory mood and won't hold her feet to the fire before or after the election. she'll interpret her major victory not just as the defeat of fascism but as a endorsement of her kind of corporatist incrementalism.

now, let's watch as morbs continues to condemn the lot of us as sniveling hillarybots.

feel like the lesson the democratic party hasn't learnt yet is how to get all yr constituents to go out to town halls over the summer and threaten to primary / vote out their congressmen if they refuse to pass the legislation that they want, or how to get them to come out in midterms to show that there's teeth behind that threat.

taibbi's point seems to be smugness above inhibits the rank and file. how to "ameliorate" that is a burning question

now, let's watch as morbs continues to condemn the lot of us as sniveling hillarybots.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Friday, June 10, 2016 5:46 PM (17 minutes ago)

you know, you could do better not to bait him with every other post of yours

maybe he could, maybe he couldn't. hard to say.

yeah, i should just ignore it. it's hard when every third post in these political threads is him baiting the lot of us.

i shouldn't 'speak' for him but i think he's calling bullshit on self-styled enlightened egalitarians, not baiting people for the hell of it. sorry dr-m if i am misrepresenting you

i'm not speaking, so go ahead.

OTMx1000:

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

yep

no morbs but... they appoint Wall Street criminals to cabinet posts.. so not gonna happen

(sorry morbs)

no, because those interests bankroll the really fuckin' weird tv ads that speak to identity politics that motivate a fair number of voters

If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world

It's probably apocryphal, but there is a 'quote' out there along these lines: "I don't care who votes, so long as I choose the candidates." -- Boss Tweed --

The quote may be phony as a $3 bill, but the sentiment is correct enough and the rich and powerful endorse it through their actions in every election.

drag out the evil lesserism

The Democratic Party leaders have trained their followers to perceive everything in terms of one single end-game equation: If you don't support us, you're supporting Bush/Rove/Cheney/Palin/Insert Evil Republican Here.

That the monster of the moment, Donald Trump, is a lot more monstrous than usual will likely make this argument an even bigger part of the Democratic Party platform going forward....

Dissenting voices like this year's version of Nader, Bernie Sanders, are inevitably pitched as quixotic egotists who don't have the guts to do what it takes to win. They're described as just out for 15 minutes of fame, and maybe a few plaudits from teenagers and hippies who'll gush over their far-out idealism.

But that characterization isn't accurate. The primary difference between the Nader/Sanders platform and the Gore/Clinton platform isn't rooted in ideology at all, but money.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ralph-nader-bernie-sanders-lesser-evilism-20160620

It's a sound formula for making ballot-box decisions, but the people who push it never seem content to just use it to win elections. They're continually trying to make an ethical argument out of it, to prove people who defy The Equation are, whether they know it or not, morally wrong and in league with the other side. Beltway Democrats seem increasingly to believe that all people who fall within a certain broad range of liberal-ish beliefs owe their votes and their loyalty to the Democratic Party. That's why, as a socially liberal person who probably likes trees and wouldn't want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, Nader's decision to take votes from the party-blessed candidate Gore is viewed not as dissent, but as a kind of treason.

insane the amount of strawmanning here. no one is immoral or evil for voting for nader / jill stein. they're just dumb and make poor strategic decisions. and no one thinks they're treasonous. just dumb.

Once you get to the point where there is a general election for president your options for effective action for positive change have narrowed to whoever is on the ballot and has enough organization and support to win. Voting for someone who has no chance to win will not be an effective action for positive change.

If progressives are serious about changing the system, they must begin by organizing, raising money, identifying a candidate and what their winning issues are long before the first primary is held. It's pretty late in the day to do anything more than vote for a candidate who is on the ballot, preferably one who can win.

i don't disagree

and i stopped believing the Dems can be "changed from within" a long time ago

reminder from that great recent lemeiux post:

It is also worth noting that this is not an ideological dispute; it is not about FAILING TO RECOGNIZE THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE TO YOUR LEFT. Noam Chomsky believes that swing-state voters should support the leftmost viable candidate in general elections; Tom Friedman, conversely, shares Freddie’s view that there really needs to be a third-party candidate that agrees with him in every detail because coalition-building should be obsolete for today’s consumer.

has nothing to do w/ evil, or dissent, or the left. it has to do w/ childish atomistic consumerism replacing pragmatism. "lesser evilism" is the telling phrase. the so-called democratic liberals don't use the idiom when making their argument bc they aren't making an argument based in morality. it's the priority of a stunted morality that sees voting as an expression of their personal purity and views compromise as somehow contaminating said purity. don't vote for the lesser evil. vote for the option that best fits your issues. if one candidate fits 20% and the other fits 10%, vote for the 20% one. if both fit 0% (like let's say you're a one issue capitalism voter and the options this year are fascism and communism, or more practically if you're a one issue hardcore anti-imperialism voter and your options are interventionism and belligerence, and neither seem superior to the other) then don't vote. no one is asking anyone to vote for a candidate who they don't agree with on any issue. they're just saying that if you agree with one politician more than another, the only intelligent decision is to vote for the one you agree with more. the whole purity in politics thing is bizarre.

re treason, Taibbi is talking about the snotty, punchable attitude of DLC types, funny i can't think of an example just now.

taibbi feels bad about himself and he's projecting all kinds of /attitudes/ to DLC types that aren't being made. no one said anyone /owes/ Hillary their votes. what they said was that only stupid people don't vote for the best of the two candidates. it's the left-wing political fluoride hysterics (and their related versions throughout the political spectrum including tom friedman self-obsessed voters) who believe anyone is making a case about treason or evil or whatever. he admits himself that voting for the better candidate is a good way to make a decision at the ballot box. he can't quite bring himself to admit that it's the only logical way to make a decision but even he realizes that he's complaining about the demons in his head and not actually people.

MaxSpeak had a pretty great run on LGM front page the other day. One of about eight posts of his - http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/confessions-of-a-bernie-bro

Some on the left seem to make it their mission to invite the contempt of others. I’m always reminded of an appearance by the late Harvey Pekar on David Letterman’s show, decades ago. Pekar’s message could be boiled down to, I’m the left, and you all suck. Ah, politics. Winning friends and influencing people! His hatred was pure! Some on the left fall prey to this, if only occasionally.

lots of good responses in the comments imo - he does come off as smug and repetitive (like someone points out - it's as if he thinks no one has heard the case for bernie yet, maybe bc he still can't believe that someone heard the case and didn't sign on), but i thought this was a gracious way to end the run:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/kumbaya

Absolutely. Also I can't imagine how he wrote all of those in one day but for all I know he did, which is pretty amazing.

he said somewhere in the comments that he started prepping them a week ago

someone else who doesn't understand Harvey Pekar

anyway, Debs was right, I do not want what i do not want (Or was that Morrissey?)

the weird thing about you isn't that you don't have a strong grasp of how our political system works (most americans don't) but that you think anyone cares to hear yr personal preference stated over and over again. you'd make a good fit on the nyt op-ed pages next to maureen dowd.

btw every winning presidential candidate has been elected mostly by stupid people, it's just how the math works

i don't give a flying fucking shit what anyone cares to hear

it's a messageboard, your time can be wasted any which way

incrementalism is good imo