Who is Matt Taibbi and why is he suddenly everywhere? If you've been interviewed on Colbert, you are ubiquitous.
And also a really stupid liberal. It's bizarre that a so-called political journalist has his primary gig at Rolling Stone magazine, don't you think? Not to throw stones, because I'm a blogger, but I never tried to convince anyone to take me seriously and...fuck it, let's throw stones.
Taibbi: "
'Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal,' says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking
amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it." Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency."
This amazing passage appears in the 5th paragraph of Taibbi's Bible-length jeremiad. He's totally right, too: the Citigroup deal WAS amazing, and it also
happened before Obama was president. THAT is real journalism, folks! You just make sure that you give all the facts (no dates, though; just facts) and then go ahead and attribute to the president something that
in the absence of a time machine cannot possibly be his fault. You know what fucking pissed me off the most about George W. Bush when he was president? Watergate. Clinton's biggest problem was so totally Iran-Contra. Thomas Jefferson should have had more ammunition and then the Americans would have won at Bunker Hill! Shit, Taibbi, this is fucking awesomely easy! Sweet!
He then proceeds to argue that, because Obama hired people from major financial firms to address the financial state of the country,
while simultaneously trying to save those same major firms, the president is some kind of puppet of Wall Street schemers who are using him to enrich themselves "at the expense of everybody else" for...some goddamn reason. Figure it out yourself!
Taibbi seems utterly unaware of the absurdity of his little tantrum. Perhaps he would care to suggest alternative financial advisers Obama could have turned to -- I mean, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had plenty of great people who were looking for work. Same with Wachovia, Bank of America, AIG...the list goes on. Come on, Taibbi: which of these firms should have staffed-up the Treasury of the United States? Surely, you have some ideas. Let's hear 'em!
....
Oh, and don't miss the part where Taibbi, presumably in all seriousness, quotes a Republican congressman who is critical of Obama's bailout moves. Oh, the shame! That'll have Democrats rethinking the whole save-the-economy thing! He then talks to some teabaggers, who he says are fuckwits, but useful because they "don't hate Obama for any reasons that make sense" -- whereas a staunch and brilliant liberal like Matt Taibbi, well, as you can see, HE has all kinds of ironclad reasons! Obviously. He went to
college, you know, and like, read Howard Zinn and like, yeah.
Matt Taibbi clearly doesn't know what he's talking about and hasn't thought it through. Thank Christ he isn't a real reporter, or his editor would have moved him to the weather beat, or somewhere else where he doesn't have to be right but a small amount of the time, and his facts can be checked by simply opening a window and one eyeball. His conclusion, in case you aren't convinced that he's been laboring under a misapprehension since at least last November, suggests that Obama somehow "changed" in office. The president, apparently, used to be a true "man of the people," who vowed to slay those capitalist pig-dogs and return us all to a state of happy idiocy on the land, or at least overhaul this damn modern economy to make it less hurty and more, I dunno, good-feely. Except, and this is the important thing,
he never ever promised or even hinted that he would do any such thing and Matt Taibbi would know that, along with all the other fucking whiny, dumb liberals out there, if they'd just clean out their fucking ears and listen, really listen, to what other people say. Barack Obama ain't your hero and never was, and he does not want to be. He wants to be the president, whereas the closest any of the dumb liberals ever got to that point was...uhhh.... Look, let's be clear: just because
you think you love him doesn't mean the reverse is true. So, Matt, you look like a huge asshole when you have a lover's quarrel later, in public, where you're the only one with an issue and the other guy doesn't even know he's supposed to be involved with you.
Finally, judge for yourselves whether Taibbi makes any sense when he offers up interpretations of the White House's economic plans like this: "At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals." One wonders whether Taibbi really believes that "the public," much less the government, should be making money off the economic recovery. What happens to the government when it becomes a business, or worse, when it becomes an investor? The point was to save the economy from suffering more massive damage, not to make profits -- though the government got plenty of Citigroup stock in the deal that might one day turn out to be useful.
Oh, and let's not mention to Matt the new report that shows that
all but a small fraction of the TARP funds will be recovered, or that Citigroup has made a $20 billion payment on its loan, or that only months after the stimulus went into effect, the government was already collecting billions in interest payments and may even show Matt's prized profit on its bank loans. No, that sort of fact-mongering would not do. We're supposed to be waving our pitchforks and storming the Capitol and denouncing our president because, hey, the fucking asshole did what he said he was going to do and did it in a defensible way.
