Matt Taibbi

sorry everyone for the violence my mom has inflicted on democracy

as I know who you are now, GG, we shan't be interacting again

damn what did gleen greenwald do now

Went on Maddow.

sorry everyone for the violence my mom has inflicted on democracy

― mr greta t. gremlin (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, April 2, 2019 10:35 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

long overdue.

sorry everyone for the violence my mom has inflicted on democracy

― mr greta t. gremlin (bizarro gazzara)

you're not responsible for the sins of your parents, it's ok

The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says ‘we’re out of ideas’ quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iowa-2020-election-democrats-taibbi-858522/

That article is literally unreadable. I cannot read it on my iPhone because the site crashes after a few seconds.

That article is literally unreadable. I cannot read it on my iPhone because the site crashes after a few seconds.

That did the trick. Thanks.

New podcast: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/taibbi-useful-idiots-podcast-873547/

Too bad he has a voice made for print.

They paired him with a comedian, apparently. I will report back!

should've revived the one with Alex P

That shit was straight Morbs catnip!

Who the hell is “straight Morbs”

a happier me

Awww :’-(

I got about 15 minutes in before realizing that the last thing I want to waste my time on is a politics podcast. Anything where I have to hear clips of Trump is not for me. Maybe I’ll go back and skip to the Gabbard interview, but the snarky rundown at the beginning is just a non-stop bummer.

Lol. of course there is a Gabbard interview

the new podcast kinda sucks. Jimmy Dore ffs.

I was just thinking earlier today about the time when he ran an alt weekly in Buffalo in the early 2000s, they ran a big ad for an upcoming Zwan concert and he edited the ad so that it said "ZWAN (sucks!)", and then in the next issue he had to write a big full-page apology to Zwan. Doesnt seem to be any traces of it on the internet, but I remember it fondly sometimes.

I think the ep with Jimmy Dore was surprisingly good, better than I expected. I liked the bit near the end where Matt talked about how journalism getting worse when “All the President’s Men” came out and all these rich kids and ivy leaguers getting involved rather than the blue collar misfit profession it had been before.

Of course, Lewis Lapham has written about how that Professionalism actually happened in the late 50s/early 60s with the Kennedy Era generational shift, but you get the idea

I wish Taibbi had asked Jimmy Dore about his 2016 theory that it doesn't matter if Trump wins because Harry Reid will just filibuster all of his Supreme Court Nominees.

oh u kids r gonna luv it

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/whistleblower-ukraine-trump-impeach-cia-spying-895529/

Gotta say his descent into whataboutism has been a bummer for me. I used to like him, but now he sounds like my whiny lefty facebook friends. He may be right that there is more turf-war type stuff going on right now than we are being told, but... good? I'm not a big fan of the CIA, but Trump is one of the few people in the world who I trust WAY less than them.

There are some good points in there. There’s some deep iront to the way certain former intelligence officials now drape themselves in the constiturion to criticize Trump’s authoritarian instincts. Things were already pretty lawless before he got there, it’s just that the different parts of the government had a tacit agreement about the things they’d quietly tolerate. If our institutions were actually strong, Trump could never have ascended to the presidency by accusing the ruling class of hypocrisy.

And yet, fuck Donald Trump. Nothing can get better as long as he is there and if career government people want to root him out I don’t blame them.

“quietly tolerate” was bad phrasing—the military and the executive were actively protected from certain kinds of scrutiny, and whistelblowers like chelsea manning stand as proof of that

I feel like it might have been relevant to mention that the whistleblower’s information appears to be an accurate description of flagrantly unethical/impeachable conduct which the Trump has essentially admitted to in public. But the important thing is clearly the whistleblower’s underlying motivations.

I'm not a big fan of the CIA, but

never a good start to a sentence

Maybe they can do one good thing, though, and get rid if the president who likes to open investigations into his opponents in the manner of dictators.

And open concentration camps along the border et al.

I’m hoping this exercise makes the entire country less trusting of executive power no matter who it is and more demanding of transparency.

I feel like it might have been relevant to mention that the whistleblower’s information appears to be an accurate description of flagrantly unethical/impeachable conduct which the Trump has essentially admitted to in public. But the important thing is clearly the whistleblower’s underlying motivations.

Two things can be true at the same time.

It is also possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons and those reasons are not germane to the outcome.

As a longstanding disbeliever of consequentialist ethics I feel obliged to argue that it is not possible to the right thing for the wrong reasons.

All the Michael Tracey retweeters who think the big story is really about how libs trust the CIA now because we’ve all caught Trump Derangement Syndrome can go shovel it in Mother Russia.

silby, Taibbi and his ilk are trying to make the point that by working for an American intelligence agency, the whistleblowers are automatically incapable of doing the right thing, by similar reasoning

Note this doesn’t apply to people who they like, such as Snowden

I knew we'd hear from the Network

Snowden? a freelancer, not a spook

fwiw I don't necessarily believe in the concept of a "right thing" either I'm just metaethics shitposting as usual

silby, I did not say that doing the right thing for the wrong reasons makes that action ethical by absolving the actor of their bad intentions, but the action can still be objectively the right thing to have done. I could cite some hypothetical correct actions done for unethical motives to make this clearer, but it shouldn't really be necessary, as most people could quickly imagine their own examples.

Snowden? a freelancer, not a spook

the badder they are, the morer I like em

Any day now it’s gonna be “9/11 was good actually”

spectacular logic, silby

liberals have always loved the CIA except for about a dozen years in the '70s and early '80s -- hell, they founded it.

i thought silby was criticizing tombot's defense of the nsa

was he? sorry I got two ballgames on

A pox on both yr houses obvi

as someone who thought obama's anti-whistleblower shit was the worst thing about his administration, i agree with a lot of where taibbi is coming from here. and tbh i still find him worth reading a lot of the time -- he's often wrong, but he's not a complete clown like tracey.

otoh, there are significant differences between the whistleblowers taibbi (rightly) defends and this story. for one thing, at least some of the cases he mentions involve leaking classified information. i don't think a trump phone call qualifies, or half the ppl bob woodward interviewed for his book would be in prison. (and yes, leaking classified info is sometimes the right thing to do, if it demonstrably serves the public interest -- i still think snowden is more or less a hero for what he did.)

and yeah, the column basically falls apart once he makes the jump from defending whistleblowers to "trump is being taken down by the deep state, folks!" based on...very little, other than something a random guy said on CNN and taibbi's own barely concealed belief that america actually kinda sorta deserves donald trump, and any attempt by mainstream politicians to take him down will just be "the elite" protecting their interests, nothing more.

Taibbi has devolved into a replacement level Glenn Greenwald parody account