Matt Taibbi: Smells Like Dead Elephants

Matt Taibbi: Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches From a Rotting Empire (paperback, 2007, Grove Press)

This is a collection of previously published pieces, mostly from Rolling Stone, which in true rock crit style lets Taibbi wind up before throwing a punch. The pieces and dates are listed below, most with sample quotes.

The book came out too early to include his series on 2008's Republican presidential candidates.

Introduction (pp. xii-xiii):

But in the end I understood that there was a good reason that I never tapped into what the hidden truth of the Bush years was, and the reason for that is that there never was anything to tap into. The tragedy of the Bush era is that there was never any depth under its absurd surface -- and when the ridiculous exterior washed away, in scandal and indictment and disaster and failure and ignominy, we were left with nothing but emptiness, disorganization, and chaos. If I indulged in any conscious use of metaphor anywhere in these reports it was in the section about hurricane Katrina, where the whole country saw how tenuous our grip on civilization really is, and where those of us who happened to get a close-up look at New Orleans after the flood saw what America in these years looked like behind what turned out to be a very thin curtain.

The Bush administration burst onto the scene like a carnival, full of grand plans and crazy schemes, wars and Patriot Acts, suspensions of laws and habeas corpus and international standards -- but in the late years, the years covered in this book, all those plans blew up, and we were left to stare at the wreckage, and stare at each other, and wonder what the fuck happened.

Jacko on Trial: Inside the greatest show on Earth [April 7, 2005]. OK, I skipped over this chapter.

Four Amendments and a Funeral: A month inside the house of horrors that is Congress [August 25, 2005] (pp. 41-42):

Congress isn't the steady assembly line of consensus policy ideas it's sold as but a kind of permanent emergency in which a majority of members work day and night to burgle the national treasure and burn the Constitution. A largely castrated minority tries, Alamo-style, to slow them down -- but in the end spends most of its time beating calculated retreats and making loose plans to fight another day.

Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out. Who knows, maybe it evolved that way for a reason.

Bush vs. the Mother: On the president's doorstep -- a dead soldier, an aggrieved housewife, and the start of something big [September 8, 2005] (pp. 50-51):

In the sixties, the antiwar movement was part of a cultural revolution. If you opposed Vietnam, you were also rejecting the whole rigid worldview that said life meant going to war, fighting the Commies, then coming back to work for the man, buying two cars, and dying with plenty of insurance. That life blueprint was the inflexible expectation of the time, and so ending the war of that era required a visionary movement.

Iraq isn't like that. Iraq is an insane blunder committed by a bunch of criminal incompetents who have managed so far to avoid the lash and the rack only because the machinery for avoiding reality is so advanced in this country. We don't watch the fighting, we don't see the bodies come home, and we don't hear anyone screaming when a house in Baghdad burns down or a child steps on a mine.

The only movement we're going to need to end this fiasco is a more regular exposure to consequence. It needs to feel its own pain. Cindy Sheehan didn't bring us folk songs but she did put pain on the front pages. And along a lonely Texas road late at night, I saw it spread.

Apocalypse There: A journey into the nightmare of New Orleans [October 6, 2005] (p. 81):

America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparallel ability to look marvelous on the outside. We've long had things arranged in such a way that our public exterior is always shimmering and clean -- our airports, our food courts, our anchormen, our chain restaurants, our fleets of bombers, and our warehouses full of nick-free products in polymer-coated packaging. For most of the uglier things that are under the surface -- the bitterness, the rancor, the greed, the selfishness, the loneliness, the isolation we feel from each other, our inability to communicate and empathize -- we've found ways to keep these things out of sight. They can be heard, maybe, and read all over the Internet and elsewhere, but not seen -- and in any case they have always been subordinate to our legend of supreme competence and efficiency. We may be many things, we Americans, but we always get the job done.

But what happens when we stop getting the job done? What are we left with then?

September 11, the first great paradigm-shifting event of our new century, was a disaster that the American psyche was prepared for. As horrible as it was, it spoke directly to our most deliciously satisfying persecution fantasies: it was Independence Day, Deep Impact, War of the Worlds. Stinky Klingons attack Manhattan; America straps it on and kicks ass. We knew the playbook for that one.

No one was ready for Katrina, though. He was ridiculed for saying it, but George Bush was absolutely right -- painfully if unintentionally honest -- when he said that "i don't think anyone anticipated" this disaster. New Orleans falls into the sea; whose ass do we kick now? When that isn't an option, we're left just staring at one another. And that's what really hurts.

Ms. America: Abu Ghraib irreparably damaged America's reputation, but Lynndie England's trial proved the nation will try to sweep anything under the rug [October 20, 2005] (p. 88):

The real question buried in the Abu Ghraib mess, of course, was one that was never going to be answered in an army courtroom. No court-martial was ever going to be a referendum on the wisdom of fighting a war on the cheap, with post-invasion plans made up on the fly, placing the welfare of an entire population -- a deeply religious population -- in the hands of stupid, horny young Americans.

And no one anywhere was interested in wondering what kind of people we've become -- completely devoid of morals and empathy but armed with digital cameras, ready to give that thumbs-up and "say the cheese."

Darwinian Warfare: In a Pennsylvania courtroom, America can't get the monkey off its back [November 3, 2005]

The End of the Party: In the house, Bush is a liability, the Hammer's been indicted, and the once-united GOP juggernaut stumbles toward an ugly divorce [Demcember 15, 2005] (pp. 101-102):

But the Republicans would return to form late that same night with the passage of their controversial budget-reconciliation passage.

The victory had all the trappings of a DeLay win in a major vote. One, it was conducted in the middle of the night, so that the smarmy process could be viewed by the minimum number of people and/or reporters. Two, it was a narrow win: 217-215. The one- or two-vote victory has been a hallmark of the DeLay method: compromise as little as possible on your pork and your social cuts, fuck 'em if they don't like it, and win by one vote.

Third, the bill was an Orwellian monstrosity in the classically DeLay-ian mold. The shepherd of such hilariously named bills as the Clear Skies Act (for a bill partially repeating Clean Air) and the Healthy Forests Act (easing restrictions on commercial logging) this time had come up with the Deficit Reduction Act of 2006, a bill that added $20 billion to the deficit. Even in this desperate time for the party, and with the budget already heavily burdened by spending on the Iraq war and Katrina, the DeLay leadership team is still clinging to a plan to implement $70 billion in new tax breaks, with more than half being extended to citizens with incomes over $1 million. To pay for that $70 billion in new shortfalls, DeLay and Co. came up with this Deficit Reduction Act, which cut funding from programs for the very poorest citizens -- mainly from Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans.

(p. 104):

The party has been riding a terrific formula for political success in the past five years: don't compromise, crush your enemies, ruthlessly enforce discipline, and then keep the soldiers happy by handing out campaign money and George Bush largess at election time. While everyone was winning, the internal contradictions were kept well hidden. Even the hard-line deficit hawks and Goldwaterites didn't seem to mind racking up $3 trillion in new debt over five years, just as long as George could produce a W for them by making a few appearances before the polls opened.

Now Bush is stumbling around Washington with spears sticking out of him, and his soldiers are running for the hills looking for a fresh horse to ride. The old days of everyone in the party getting laid and paid are over. The fatal hidden paradox of Bush's political success has finally come back to bite him, exposing this damning riddle. How do you give away the entire national treasure and also keep the fiscal conservatives in your party happy? It should always have been impossible; now it really is.

The Magical Victory Tour: While Iraq burns, the president keeps playing the same old song [December 29, 2005] (p. x):

There are no T-shirts for this concert tour, but if there were the venue list on the back would make for one of the weirder souvenirs in rock 'n' roll history. U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, November 30, no advance publicity, closed audience: check. Here at the Omni, December 7, again no advance warning, handpicked audience, ten reporters max (no one else knew about it), with even the cashiers in the hotel's coffee shop unaware of the president's presence: check. Dates three and four, venues and dates unknown for security reasons: check and check.

This is how President bush takes his message to the people these days; in furtive sneak-attack addresses to closed audiences of elite friendlies at weird early-morning hours. If you want to catch Bush's act in person during this tour, you have to stalk him for days and keep both ears open for last-minute changes of plan; I actually missed the Annapolis speech when I made the mistake of briefly taking my eye off him the day before.

(p. 108):

God bless George Bush. The Middle East is in flames and how does he answer the call? He rolls up to the side entrance of a four-star Washington hotel, slips unobserved into a select gathering of the richest fatheads in his dad's Rolodex, spends a few tortured minutes exposing his half-assed policies like a campus flasher, and then ducks back into his rabbit hole while he waits for his next speech to be written by paid liars.

If that isn't leadership, what is?

(p. 110):

Up until now this president's solution to everything has been to stare into the cameras, lie, and keep on lying until such time as the political problem disappears. And now, unable to comprehend that while political crises may wilt in the face of such tactics real crises do not, he and his team are responding to this first serious feet-to-the-fire Iraq emergency in the same way they always have -- with a fusillade of silly, easily disprovable bullshit. Bush and his mouthpieces continue to try to do so not only selectively but constantly, compulsively, like mental patients who can't stop jacking off in public. They don't know the difference between a real problem and a political problem, because to them there is no difference. What could possibly be worse than bad poll numbers?

The Harder They Fall: Republicans are scrambling to clean their House -- but the dirt won't wash off [February 9, 2006] (pp. 120-121):

Barring a sudden and unforeseen flowering of affirmative values in the depraved whorehouse that is our nation's capital, money is still going to remain a hell of an effective substitute for political principle in this town, meaning all manner of frauds -- from Gingrich on down -- will be moving in not to do anything different but to take over the old dealer's territory. The Democrats, whose innocence in the crimes of the past five years to date corresponds exactly to their lack of opportunities for corruption, may now get a chance at the helm. But it won't take much exposure to cheap stunts like a beaming Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi signing a "Declaration of Honest Leadership" before people begin to remember how much the other guys can suck, too.

Generation Enron: In George Bush's America, the only crime is being poor [February 23, 2006] (pp. 127-128):

"Failure," he said, "is not a crime."

He paused. It was a big deal, psychologically, for high-rolling lifetime winners like Lay and Skilling to admit to being failures. But that was all they were willing to admit, and they certainly wouldn't admit to doing anything wrong. Moreover, Ramsey sabotaged his own line about failure with a "joke" that was clearly designed to show he didn't really mean what he'd just said.

"Failure is not a crime," he repeated. "If it was, we'd have to turn all of Oklahoma back into a penal colony -- heh, heh."

The courtroom didn't laugh with him, not a peep from anywhere in the room. This is how Ken Lay asks for forgiveness -- by calling all of Oklahoma a bunch of losers?

How to Be a Lobbyist Without Trying: A personal journey into Washington's culture of greed [April 6, 2006]

Meet Mr. Republican: The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington [April 6, 2006] (pp. 135-136):

To most Americans, Jack Abramoff is the bloodsucking bogeyman with a wad of bills in his teeth who came through the window in the middle of the night and stole their voice in government. But he was much more than that. Abramoff was as much a symbol of his generation's Republican Party as Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater were of theirs.

He was an amazingly ubiquitous figure, a sort of Zelig of the political right -- you could find him somewhere, in the foreground or the background, in almost every Republican political scandal of the past twenty-five years. He carried water for the racist government of Pretoria during the apartheid days and whispered in the ear of those Republican who infamously voted against antiapartheid resolutions. He organized rallies in support of the Grenada invasion, showed up in Ollie North's offices during Iran-Contra, palled around with Mobutu Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi, and the Afghan mujahedin.

All along, Abramoff was buying journalists, creating tax-exempt organizations to fund campaign activities, and using charities to fund foreign conflicts. He spent the past twenty years doing business with everyone from James Dobson to the Gambino family, from Ralph Reed to Grover Norquist to Karl Rove to White House procurements chief David Safavian. He is even lurking int he background of the 2004 Ohio voting irregularities scandal, having worked with the Diebold voting-machine company to defeat requirements for a paper trail in elections.

He is a living museum of corruption, and in a way it is altogether too bad that he is about to disappear from public scrutiny. In a hilariously tardy attempt to attend to his moral self-image, he lately has been repackaging himself as a fallen prophet, a humbled super-Jew who was guilty only of going too far to serve God. He was the "softest touch in town," he has said, a sucker for causes who "incorrectly didn't follow the mitzvah of giving away at most twenty percent." They he shows up a few weeks before sentencing with his cock wedged in the mouth of an adoring Vanity Fair reporter, claiming with a straight face that his problems came from trying to "save the world."

(p. 144):

One of the ugliest developments in American culture sine Abramoff's obscure Cold Warrior days in the eighties has been the raging but highly temporary success of various "smart guys" who upon closer examination aren't all that smart. There was BALCO steroid scum Victor Conte ("The smartest son of a bitch I ever met in my life," said one Olympian client), Enron's "smartest guys in the room" Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, and, finally, "ingenious dealmaker" Jack Abramoff. Somewhere along the line, in the years since the Cold War, Americans as a whole became such craven, bum-licking, self-absorbed fat cats that they were willing to listen to these fifth-rate prophets who pretended that the idea that rules could be broken was some kind of earth-shattering revelation -- as though they had fucking invented fraud and cheating. To a man, however, they all turned out to be dumb, incompetent fuckups, destined to bring us all down with them -- not even good at being criminals.

How to Steal a Coastline: The Gulf is still in ruins -- but Bush has opened the door for the casinos and carpetbaggers, and now there's a cutthroat race to the high ground [April 20, 2006] (pp. 152-153):

The wreckage on the ground is, pointedly, the only thing about New Orleans that hasn't changed since the storm. Without actually fixing much, everyone seems to have done a lot of moving on. On a national level, the city's official return to normalcy has been preposterously celebrated with the triumphant return of the NBA's Hornets. Even Mike Brown, the disgraced ex-FEMA chief, is enjoying an improbable Leslie Nielsen-esque career recycling, recnetly making a revoltingly self-flagellating appearance on The Cobert Report. Only in America can you destroy a major city and within six months be using your own incompetence to launch a second career in self-parody.

Thank You, Tom DeLay: You were the Hammer -- the most brutal and feared of all Republican leaders -- but only your rank incompetence saved us from your revolution [May 4, 2006] (pp. 164-165):

Tom DeLay was never handsome, never eloquent, never profound, never engaging, and certainly never funny. Chicks did not dig DeLay. There is no secondary career as an adored, turtlenecked, coed-oggling poli-sci professor awaiting him. No bar back home full of tough guys is waiting to serve him up a congratulatory cold one, nobody at NASA will name the next comet after him, and he will not be a candidate for the next commissioner of the NFL. The only people left to honor his name will be a bunch of dingbat Christian dispensationalists with big ears and sky-blue suits eager to reward him for his undeniable role in speeding humanity toward the Apocalypse.

No, without his hands on the levers of power, DeLay is a total zero, a loser, two-hundred-odd pounds of the world's purest pussy repellent, and with his resignation many out there will be tempted to revel in that fact without considering the larger picture.

And the larger picture is this: Tom DeLay was the Stalin of the Republican revolution. The difference is we caught him in time.

The right-wing revolution started out as all revolutions start out: as a piece of upper-class political theater that used the unwashed masses as a stage prop, a pair of crossed pistols on the wal. It was always absurd, this idea of a savage campaign against "elites" being led by a poofy wordsmith like Rush Limbaugh, a Harvard fatty like Grover Norquist, a dickless academic like Newt Gingrich, and a diaper-dumping oligarch like George W. Bush. They were just another band of mischievous aristocrats who played at being the voice of the common man -- these new wingers sold themselves as the champions of the fucked-over little guy, in this case the terminally frustrated boobus Americanus, who for decades had been made to sit idly by while ethnics stole his job, evil liberals mocked his religion and his simple way of life, and media "elitists" shut out his views and sent porn and married queers into his living room via the television set.

What made Tom DeLay different is that Tom DeLay was a little guy. He had more in common with Bill Clinton (whom not surprisingly he despised, probably precisely for this reason) than with Gingrich or Norquist or Bush. He came from the dirt of the South, with a drunken reprobate for a father and nothing but white trash in his family tree. Unlike Clinton, however, DeLay was not blessed with personal gifts -- looks, brains, charm. Instead of Oxford and Yale, DeLay dropped out of Baylor after being inveigled in a childish campus-vandalism scandal. His pre-politics career as a rat and bug killer was marked by a continual failure that has to be considered shocking in a state so teeming with vermin. An exterminator failing in southeast Texas is like a pimp failing in Bangkok during tourist season.

(p. 166):

The famously vengeful DeLay was on the way to remaking his party in the same way [as Stalin], disdaining charismatic talkers like Gingrich and Bob Livingston and replacing their type in the apparatus of Washington -- not only in Congress but in the lobbies and the think tanks, who were often forced to comply with his litmus-test hiring preferences -- with his faceless, dependable, snake-mean Christian cronies.

What was terrifying about DeLay was that he was the barking voice of that afternoon talk-radio caller given full reign in Washington. He was that same angry lout, not invoked and used by by clever academics and con men, but actually in charge: a narrow, selfish, envious, mean-spirited prick who had the whole capital on its knees. What kind of man was he? He went into national politics in the first place only because the federal government had banned a potentially carcinogenic pesticide called Mirex that DeLay had used to kill ants. That was his idea of injustice.

Fort Apache, Iraq: Travel the bloody roads with GIs , meet the carpetbaggers, go inside Abu Ghraib, and witness the catastrophic nature of the American conquest [July 13, 2006] (p. 203):

We came into this war expecting to be treated like the GIs who went into France a half century ago -- worshipped, instantly excused for the occasional excess or foible, and handed the keys to both the castle wine cellar and the nurses' dormitory. Instead we were treated like unclean monsters by the people we liberated, and around the world our every move was viciously scrutinized not only by those same Europeans we rescued ages ago but by our own press.

Bush's Favorite Democrat: In Connecticut's Democratic primary, Joe Lieberman claims he's facing a leftist "jihad," but there are two words the senator can't duck: "Iraq" and "war" [August 10, 2006] (p. 215):

No one has played the role of that "winner" more enthusiastically, or more often, than Joe Lieberman. He is everything a Washington insider loves in a politician. He is pompous, pious, and available. Routinely one of the very top recipients of campaign donations from the insurance, pharmaceutical, and finance sectors, and a man whose wife, Hadassah, is a pharmaceutical-industry lobbyist for Hill and Knowlton, Lieberman has quietly become one of the greatest allies corporate America has in Washington.

The Worst Congress Ever: How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and perverts -- in five easy steps [November 2, 2006] (p. 219):

There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Representative Mark Foley can get himself named cochairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt, and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.;S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

(pp. 233-234):

In fact, the Republican-controlled Congress has created a new standard for the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be that when a Democratic president is in power, there are no matters too stupid or meaningless to be investigated fully -- but when George Bush is president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough to warrant congressional attention. One gets the sense that Bush would have to drink the blood of Christian babies to inspire hearings in Congress -- and only then if he did it during a nationally televised State of the Union address and the babies were from Pennsylvania, where Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter was running ten points behind in an election year.

The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that long-standing arrangement and issued more than one thousand subpoenas to investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct, reviewing more than two million pages of government documents.

Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since George Bush took office? Zero -- that's right, zero, the same as the number of open rules debated this year, two fewer than the number of appropriations bills passed on time.

(pp. 241-242):

Anyone who wants to get a feel for the kinds of beasts that have been roaming the grounds of the congressional zoo in the past six years need only look at the deranged, handwritten letter that convicted bribe taker and GOP ex-congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham recently sent from prison to Marcus Stern, the reporter who helped bust him. In it, Cunningham -- who was convicted last year of taking $2.4 million in cash, rugs, furniture, and jewelry from a defense contractor called MZM -- bitches out Stern in the broken, half-literate penmanship of a six-year-old put in time-out.

"Each time you print it hurts my family And now I have lost them Along with Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life," Cunningham wrote. "I am human not an Animal to keep whiping [sic]. I made some decissions [sic] Ill. be sorry for the rest of my life."

The amazing thing about Cunningham's letter is not his utter lack of remorse, or his insistence on blaming defense contractor Mitchell Wade for ratting him out ("90% of what has happed [sic] is Wade," he writes), but his frantic, almost epic battles with the English language. It is clear that the same Congress that put a drooling child chaser like Mark Foley in charge of a House caucus on child exploitation also named Cunningham, a man who can barely write his own name in the ground with a stick, to a similarly appropriate position. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence:

posted 2008-02-08