Author Matt Taibbi: Tea Party 'Breaks Your Heart'

GQ:

In his new book about "the long con that is breaking America," the Rolling Stone reporter chronicles the bizarre sight of a nation about to reward--lavishly--the very same Wall Street titans, DC politicians, and shady power brokers who brought us low

Read the whole story: GQ

Comments

[GCV1]

03:07 PM on 11/09/2010

Right now there are two type of people that vote Republican. First there are the rich and powerful set that are plundering our economy. Secondly there are the ignorant and gullible masses that don't understand that they are being manipulated and will lose out in the end. Fox News and the "Tea Party" movements (it's so misdirected it can't be referred to as a single movement) are the vehicle being used to achieve this. It is a crime!!!

[Birdman72]

12:24 PM on 11/01/2010

Taibbi 2012!!! Hard worker, extremely knowledgeable, doesn't need a speechwriter ...and I'd like to have a beer with him. I'll start working on the signs.

[syntheticreality]

01:35 AM on 11/01/2010

Can't wait for the book to come out. I read Taibbi's last book and it was excellent. First day buy for me.

[heyguysitsme]

01:15 AM on 11/01/2010

Taibbi is a genius. Anything he writes is must-read for me.

[SmolderingRuin]

02:39 AM on 11/01/2010

Me too, heyguysitsme. Taibbi is the best. By the way, this is my second reply to your comment. Maud, the church lady, disappeared my first one in which I exclaimed about the huge number of fans you have acquired, using the phrase "Holy C**p", which apparently is now verboten on the new less-improved hp. Well, at least you deserve them. Carry on the good work. Can't wait to see if this is deleted. What a boring place huffie has turned into.

[SmolderingRuin]

02:54 AM on 11/02/2010

Isn't that funny. Not really. Your reply appears in my reply notifications, but I don't see it here on the thread. Well, here is a fast reply before we all vanish into the akasha.

[Olaf Aalop]

11:44 PM on 10/31/2010

Wow.
Sounds like the thinking of my friends.
Get it out and make it loud Matt

[Lollie Com]

10:40 PM on 10/31/2010

During a time in our history when most of our best journalists are comedians and most of our journalists ought to be comedians.... Matt Taibbi is a real journalist. Young people, watch and listen to him closely. Before the 24/7 news cycle, most journalists were a lot more like Matt and I lot less like the rest.

By the way Matt, you're way too cute to be one of the top three real journalists in the country. You should be in movies. But DON'T switch. We need you right where you're at. :)&-=

[David Durham]

09:21 PM on 10/31/2010

Why can't Progressive/Liberals get it together like those folks on the Right? Why can't they form a cohesive whole, a tight-knit group or a reliable base? It's because they have this pesky little habit that makes such things difficult. They think for themselves. You can't just issue marching orders from on high and expect them to be followed. Progressive/Liberals refuse to just believe. They're apt to ask questions, weigh arguments and dispute the claims of their leaders if they smell something fishy. You can't send people like this their talking points in a daily e-mail. They already have talking points of their own. I think this is a great strength, though others claim it is a weakness.

[lwalkit]

10:22 AM on 11/01/2010

Excellent! My thoughts exactly although you expressed them more eloquently than I could.

[muhair]

08:27 PM on 10/31/2010

Matt Taibbi.... American Hitchens?
The fact is, there's no shortage of brilliant folk who are happy to explain and condemn the rot at the center. Is there anything we who care to know don't know at this point? Has it made a jot of difference? Not that I can see. So what to do about that..... Exposure and ventilation relieve rage, and that seems about it.

[RedDogBear]

11:25 AM on 11/01/2010

I think Taibbi is a lot closer to Hunter Thompson than Hitchens. BTW, that doesn't mean I don't think he's a serious journalist. Some people have an image of Thompson as just some out of control gonzo writer, he was that but his analysis of the political scene could be very compelling. Like Taibi Thompson could cut through the BS of the "accepted wisdom". Also like Thompson Taibi can take surprising stands that cross conventional boundaries between the left and the right and criticize the dems as strongly as the repubs.

[muhair]

04:57 PM on 11/02/2010

Interesting perception but I can't entirely agree. Thompson's signature was wild flights of fancy into brutal and improbable absurdity. Taibbi is firmly rooted in reality, though his metaphors -- the giant squid, e.g. -- place him w/in shouting distance of HT. That said, he IS writing for Rolling Stone... thus the Thompson influence cannot be denied.

[MossyOak]

05:00 PM on 10/31/2010

Taibbi has my vote... in the form of pre-ordering his book. It's about time we got some real, live journalism for a change. I won't even mind a little hyperbole if some leaks out. It would be impossible to research the truth of what has happened to America and remain bland and neutral. Spit it out Matt. Some of us are ready for a heaping pile of truth.

[SolarPowerGuy]

03:58 PM on 10/31/2010

"The Republicans are going to win now and retake at least one house. What few reforms have been enacted, there's going to be an effort to role [sic] those back. Nothing serious is going to get done now for at least two years. Obama's going to win re-election in 2012. The Tea Party thing is now so big that there's no way that the Republicans can nominate someone who's not friendly to the Tea Party. But whomever they nominate is going to be nuts, so that person is not going to win the swing vote. Democrats will sweep through to victory and DO NOTHING AGAIN FOR FOUR YEARS."

Emphasis mine. But that sounds pretty accurate to me.

Meanwhile, if we're stuck at the status quo: hey, Wall Street got theirs, didn't they?

[playsindirt]

08:55 AM on 10/31/2010

Love this guy. And it breaks my heart too. I fear we are really becoming the fat, stupid Americans that people around the world openly mock and abhor.

[Potato Potato]

12:12 PM on 11/22/2010

I fear we are just "not trying" for real change...Is that the same as fat and stupid ?

[McGuffin18]

01:58 AM on 10/31/2010

"In an age of universal deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act," or something like that.

[msjimmied]

10:55 PM on 10/30/2010

Need a signed first edition? Here's his tour schedule...I'll have to ask my son who lives near Pasadena! Would be well worth it.

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/display.pperl?isbn=9780385529952&view=isbn_events

[SmolderingRuin]

05:43 PM on 10/31/2010

I wonder if any of my old friends in the Bay Area would be willing. Must start begging now!

[msjimmied]

10:46 PM on 10/30/2010

I can't get enough of his "scorching, contemptuous style that gives the best of his work a cast of fire-breathing grandeur." That scorching contempt is justified as more and more fraud gets uncovered almost everyday. Goldman Sachs has never recovered from "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity". All of Van Praag's florid wordy prose cannot cover the stench.

The alarm bells starts going off for me when we talk about the see saw of power between the D's and the R's. We don't have freakin 6 years of this back and forth. We are in crisis NOW! This foreclosure fraud mess cannot be swept under the rug, right now it's like an elephant under a postage stamp already. Like Damon Silvers says,

“We are faced with a choice here,” Silvers closed. “We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We can’t do both.”

http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/10/28/damon-silvers-blasts-treasury-tries-to-get-them-to-wake-up-on-mortgage-fraud/

It is eating away like a cancer, and all we can do is watch the antics of the teabagging clowns. What will the dems do? Upend our system of laws to facilitate the banks heist? We are so scrooooed....

[Tee McDonald]

01:50 PM on 10/31/2010

I've faved you before, now you are f&f. We only have a few reporters out there who are willing to dig and present the facts, unspun and de-partisanized...so to speak. He says this about the mortgage crisis--

"The problem with the mortgage crisis is that: you hear the word 'mortgage' and you don't even want to listen. The Republicans were the only ones who were really loud about this: they said the reason everybody got a mortgage is because the government was forcing banks to lend to people. That wasn't the real explanation. The real explanation was that the banks had figured out a way to take these subprime mortgages, chop them up into little bits, and then repackage them as AAA-rated investments and sell them to people who didn't know what they were. It's basically like selling oregano as weed. What's the first thing you do when you find out you can get away with that? You go out and buy or grow more oregano."

Read More http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201010/griftopia-matt-taibbi-breaking-america#ixzz13xZ9xWbf

[BlueZoo]

09:54 PM on 10/30/2010

I love reading Matt Taibbi. He's the Jon Stewart of journalism and just tells it like it is without worrying about what people think of him. I actually renewed my subscription to Rolling Stone because of Taibbi! Yes, he can go over the top at times but he is an equal opportunity skewer and he lets you know it. I do disagree with him on the Tea Party, however. I don't believe it is so big that the GOP can't field a candidate without it. They just need to field the right candidate knowing that the opponent will be President Obama who is very formidable, particularly in debates!