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It’s not just that Fox totally (and intentionally, of course) misread Cusack’s thing – there’s a difference between calling for the opening of a “satanic death cult center” at Fox News and calling for the “satanic death” of Dick Armey. It’s that a parade of bozo talking heads, even tenth-rate, cardboard-PhD talking-heads of the sort Fox tends to patronize, could be prevailed upon to take this nonsense seriously, and that masses of real human beings who are probably licensed to drive automobiles and may even have procreated instantly bought this as a real call to violence. Exactly how absurd do you have to be before this crowd can perceive that you’re kidding about something? If Cusack had called for every registered Republican in Arkansas to be forced to wear hot asphalt underpants, would Carole Lieberman be telling people in Little Rock to lock their doors? I get that some of these folks are dying to find an example of a “liberal” inciting people to violence in the manner of oft-criticized right-wing heroes like Glenn Beck, but even taking that anxiousness into consideration, you’d have to be in virtual brain-death to take something like this seriously. Anyway, not the biggest story in the world, but funny nonetheless. I still shudder for humanity this midterm season, but leaving the depressing real consequences of all this madness out of the equation, the humor factor of this political season promises to be extremely high. Matt Taibbi ☀

The Fox/Rush/Savage crowd in the last 18 months has taken the anti-Muslim fervor that launched a phony war in Iraq, carried George Bush to re-election, and pushed through the Patriot Act, and re-directed that anger at a domestic nonwhite enemy. In doing so they’ve achieved a perfect storm of political cross-purposes: they’ve almost completely succeeded in distracting the public from the real causes of their economic misfortune (i.e. Wall Street corruption), they’ve re-energized a Republican party that was devastated by eight years of Bush-era corruption and incompetence, and, as usual, they’ve made Rupert Murdoch a shitload of money. I’m convinced that none of the key actors here – the Wall Street banks shrieking about government takeovers and advertising on Rick Santelli’s CNBC, the Republican Party’s career hacks who have been scheming for a new horse to ride ever since Bush imploded, and the right-wing TV and radio networks – none of these actors is pushing this crazy movement out of any real desire to stoke a race war. For these institutional leaders and patrons of the Tea Party movement, this is all about material expediency: overcoming the real threat of new financial regulations after the crash, winning elections, and making TV profits. It’s just our bad luck that driving frustrated/broke white suburbanites into a race-hatred frenzy happens to be good business for these folks. And all of this is race-baiting-for-cash is borne out of the same short-term, indifferent-to-consequence thinking that we saw from the Wall Street guys in recent years — who created mountains of deadly leverage capable of destroying the global financial system for the sake of a few one-year bonuses. Matt Taibbi ☀

The mania for elegiac slobbering is one of the most disgusting things about this country, but you’ll never see a clearer example of America’s unique capacity for this sort of activity than this Steinbrenner business. When Bruce Springsteen dies, it won’t be appropriate to make jokes about millions of Americans fawning over a dead Boss. But in George “The Boss” Steinbrenner’s case, it fits perfectly, because Steinbrenner was in every conceivable way the prototypical office tyrant and the fact that he’s being uninterruptedly worshipped after his death by a nation of cubicle slaves tells you almost everything you need to know about the modern American psyche. In no other country do people genuinely love their bosses the way Americans do. They’ll go home after 12 hard hours of capricious superiors peeing in their faces, and the very first thing they’ll do is call up some talk radio show and denounce the graduated income tax that gives them a break at their bosses’ expense. In other countries bosses need to constantly fend off revolts and strikes; in America people tune in by the millions to cheer on an impetuous, bloated asshole like Donald Trump as he ritualistically fires a succession of sheepish sacrificial stand-ins who are clearly chosen for their resemblance to the target demographic. And The Apprentice was just one of many reality shows where people literally jack off to their own job insecurity! Matt Taibbi ☀

Let me just say one thing quickly: I don’t know Michael Hastings. I’ve never met him and he’s not a friend of mine. If he cut me off in a line in an airport, I’d probably claw his eyes out like I would with anyone else. And if you think I’m being loyal to him because he works for Rolling Stone, well – let’s just say my co-workers at the Stone would laugh pretty hard at that idea. But when I read this diatribe from Logan, I felt like I’d known Hastings my whole life. Because brother, I have been there, when some would-be “reputable” journalist who’s just been severely ass-whipped by a relative no-name freelancer on an enormous story fights back by going on television and, without any evidence at all, accusing the guy who beat him of cheating. That’s happened to me so often, I’ve come to expect it. If there’s a lower form of life on the planet earth than a “reputable” journalist protecting his territory, I haven’t seen it. As to this whole “unspoken agreement” business: the reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she’s like pretty much every other “reputable” journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she’s supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you’re covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard? On the campaign trail, I watch reporters nod solemnly as they hear about the hundreds of millions of dollars candidates X and Y and Z collect from the likes of Citigroup and Raytheon and Archer Daniels Midland, and it blows my mind that they never seem to connect the dots and grasp where all that money is going. The answer, you idiots, is that it’s buying advertising! People like George Bush, John McCain, Barack Obama, and General McChrystal for that matter, they can afford to buy their own P.R. — and they do, in ways both honest and dishonest, visible and invisible. They don’t need your help, and you’re giving it to them anyway, because you just want to be part of the club so so badly. Matt Taibbi ☀

I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some single mother somewhere who’s pulling two shitty minimum-wage jobs just to be able to afford a pair of $19 Mossimo sneakers at Target for her kid, and have him tell her, with a straight face, that her main problem is that she doesn’t work as hard as Jamie Dimon. Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door. 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. Matt Taibbi ☀

The electoral-politics aspect of what just happened with health care is a bit strange. It seems to me that the Republicans capitulated entirely to Tea Party sentiment, a move that sets them up for a Sarah Palin candidacy in 2012, which in turn is a move that sets them up for a crushing general-election defeat. Meanwhile the Democrats spent the health care debate fleeing from their own base, a move that… well, I don’t know what it means, exactly, but it does make me a little ill. The whole picture is strange: Democrats running as Republicans, Republicans running as Turner-Diaries conspiracy theorists. I don’t get what the Republicans have to gain by painting themselves as hysterical survivalist Ruby-Ridge loonies (Kentucky congressman Geoff Davis pulling out the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag was a move more larded with mawkish over-drama than your average drag-queen tribute to Edith Piaf). It feels to me like they played this one wrong. Matt Taibbi ☀

It’s weird enough living in a country where a man can legally own an arsenal of machine guns, but his neighbor growing a pot plant will send a team of DEA agents kicking his door in with a no-knock warrant. But this goes even beyond that. If I go online today to HaveNoLifeAndBetOnSports.com and bet fifty dollars on the Bucks against the Celtics tonight, I’m a criminal. But some gazillionaire firm in New York can legally bet against the United States of America in unlimited amounts in a trade that has nothing to do with anything, but a guess about how many other people will make the same bet. Matt Taibbi (via peterwknox) ☀

It’s not so much that Rush [Limbaugh] made a racist joke. Nor does it even bother me that the whole premise of the discussion was incorrect (Paterson doesn’t get to appoint a replacement). We’re used to Rush being both racist and factually indifferent. It’s more that Rush is such an intellectually lazy piece of shit who’s been on dumbly racist autopilot for so long that he literally can’t avoid making a dumb, unfunny black-baiting joke when the opportunity is shoved in front of his face. You could see this joke coming from thirty miles away, and Rush is so intellectually obese, he still couldn’t get out of the way in time. I mean, the minute the conversation switched to a discussion of the black governor Paterson and a guy named “Massa,” who among us didn’t think that Rush was going to go there? Matt Taibbi ☀

Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedman’s stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot,Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days:“I will still take advantage of it—but I no longer think of it as something I got for free”), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a “nightmarish neon blur” of KFC, BK and McDonald’s signs in Texas, he realizes: “We’re on a fool’s errand”), and reads bumper stickers (the “Osama Loves your SUV” sticker he read turns into the thesis of his “Fill ‘er up with Dictators” chapter). This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs. Matt Taibbi ☀

…that is why the Tea Party “movement” is not a movement but a top-down manipulation, a misdirection. These are people who’ve been gouged for years by the deregulated banking, mortgage lending, and commodities trading business, and when Obama sends down very weak, watered-down regulations to deal with those problems, they howl that he’s against “private enterprise” because that’s what they’ve been told to think by the Glenn Becks of the world. Matt Taibbi ☀

[David] Brooks is a perfect example of the kind of spineless Beltway geek we always see beating the war drum at times like these. It’s because nebbishly little dorks like Brooks and Paul Wolfowitz and David Frum got their books dumped in high school that we end up dropping daisy cutters on Afghan sheep herds and shipping working class American kids halfway around the world to get their nuts blown off. That sounds like a simplistic explanation, but anyone who doesn’t have a keen ear for the pencil-pusher’s eternal quest for macho cred is going to have a hard time understanding Washington politics. Brooks’s columns have always been the easiest way to take the pulse of that particular dynamic, and it sure seems now that bureaucratic momentum for intervention and more intervention is re-inflating the chests of these Beltway generals. Matt Taibbi ☀

So the old system of inefficient bureaucracies and artificially high prices has basically been completely protected. What we’re left figuring out is exactly how to pay for a hugely expensive new program without taking significant money out of the pockets of these industries. The other challenge for the Obama administration is how to unite Congress enough to pass this gigantic new venture that really doesn’t achieve much, and the strategy there is turning out to be just what you’d expect: rather than pushing a single cohesive plan that makes sense in the long term, party leaders are putting forward a confused mish-mash of non-plans and trying to buy off the various segments of the Congress with pork and other forms of bribery as a means of solving the extremely short-term problem of how to pass this bill in time for the 2010 elections. Matt Taibbi ☀

What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it’s not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin. For those of you who can’t connect the dots, I’ll tell you what it means. It means she’s been cut loose. It means that all five of the families have given the okay to this hit job, including even the mainstream Republican leaders. You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s “winnability.” And do you know what that means? That means that just as the antiwar crowd spent years being painted by the national press as weepy, unpatriotic pussies whose enthusiastic support is toxic to any serious presidential aspirant, so too will all of you afternoon-radio ignoramuses who seem bent on spending the next three years kicking and screaming your way up the eternal asshole of white resentment now find yourself and your political champions painted as knee-jerk loonies whose rabid irrationality is undeserving of the political center. And yes, that’s me saying that, but I’ve always been saying that, not just about Palin but about George Bush and all your other moron-heroes. Matt Taibbi (via thesmarttart, southpol, apsies) ☀

Sarah Palin is on an endless crusade against assholes. It’s all she thinks about. She doesn’t really have any political ideas, in the classic sense of the word — in fact the only thing resembling real political convictions in Going Rogue revolve around the Trans-Alaska pipeline and how awesome she thinks it is. Most of the rest of the book just catalogs her Gump-esque rise to national stardom (not having enough self-awareness to detect the monstrous narcissistic ambition that in reality was impelling her forward all along, she labors in the book to describe her various career leaps as lucky accidents or mystical acts of Providence) and the seemingly endless parade of meanies bent on tripping her up along the way. The book is really about her battles with these people, how much they did and do suck, and how difficult and inherently unfair life is for a decent hardworking American gal who just wants to live life, serve God, and try to be president without being bothered all the time. Matt Taibbi (via thesmarttart) ☀

He didn’t close Guantanamo Bay, and not only didn’t reject the idea of pre-emptive detention but added spice to his own new version of pre-crime prosecution, “prolonged detention.” He promised health care reform and campaigned on a public option, and we all know how that is going to turn out. But most importantly, he came into office amidst sweeping crises in the financial sector and did not do what needed to be done, and what had been done the last time the U.S. was sent careening into a depression because of Wall Street: he failed to push for tough financial reforms. Barack Obama needed to be the FDR figure who remade the American capital markets and made them fair again, and he barely laid a finger on the whole scene. Instead, he put the people who created the problem in charge of fixing the mess, and ended up bailing them out instead of the rest of the country, at huge current and (presumably) future cost.The total bill for the Bush-Obama bailout is certainly above ten trillion at this point — Inspector General Neil Barofsky thinks it might hit nearly $24 trillion ultimately — and this went through without much fanfare. Meanwhile, the congress is stuck in the mud, panicked at the thought of paying three or four trillion over a decade or so for a health care program. Matt Taibbi (via recro) ☀