When I Grow Up, I Want To Be Matt Taibbi

Author, columnist, political commentator, Rolling Stone contributor -- Matt Taibbi is da man!  I should be so lucky as to turn phrases like the Great Taibbi.

From The Clown Car Rolls On, RS 12/3/15.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gop-clown-car-rolls-on-20151117

Excerpts:

Jeb Bush doesn't seem at all like a power-crazed, delusionally self-worshipping lunatic, and that's basically his problem.  He doesn't want this badly enough to be the kind of effortless sociopathic liar you need to be to make it through this part of the process.

In 2008, Obama sold tolerance and genial intellectualism.  In 2016, Marco Rubio -- a debt addict with a burgeoning Imelda Marcos shopping complex, -- sells a kind of strident, bright-eyed dickishness. 

In another election, John Kasich might be serious contender, being as he is from Ohio, a former Lehman Brothers stooge, and a haranguing bore with the face of a dogcatcher.  Kasich in person seems like a man ready to physically implode from bitterness at the thought that his carefully laid scheme for power might be undone by a flatulent novelty act like Donald Trump.

America dug Carly Fiorina when she was a John Carpenter movie about feminists harvesting baby brains.  But when she talked about anything else, they were bored stiff.

People began picking apart old stories Ben Carson had told.  Everyone who's ever been to a megachurch recognizes the guy who overdoes the "before" portion of his evangelical testimony, telling tall tales about biker gangs and coke orgies. Carson fits this model.  He was probably never anything but a nerd with an overheated imagination.

The political media has always been able to finish off candidates once they start bleeding.  The bullying is considered a sacred tribal rite among the Beltway press, and it's never not worked.  Until this year.  Donald Trump should have been finished off a dozen times -- after the John-McCain-was-a-wuss-for-getting-captured line, after the blood coming out of her "whatever" bit, after the "Mexicans are rapists" episode, etc., etc.

But we don't finish them off anymore.  We just keep the cameras rolling -- The ratings stay high, the voters don't abandon their candidates -- they just tune in to hate the media smart-asses even more.