Thought of the Day: Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has just written a scathing new piece called "Full Metal McCain". With his characteristic blend of wit, anger, and deep skepticism about the purity of human motives, he lays bare John McCain as a man:

...who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, "One of us! One of us!" all the way through to November.

Taibbi displayed the true extent of his cynicism in his 2005 book Spanking the Donkey. The highlights of the book include an exercise in which he "removes all the crap" from John Kerry's 2004 nomination acceptance speech. He brutally slashes and burns the address, labeling this as "partisan pandering" and that as "false promises". In the end, having cut vast tracts of the speech, he is left with only two sentences:

I was born in Colorado. America can do better.

[Continued]

In "Full Metal McCain", the writer interprets the Republican 2008 campaign as a rerun of the racist southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater:

When it comes to presidential politics, you either are [white, and therefore suitable to regular voters] or you aren't. And Barack Obama aren't. If you can't grasp the simple math of that statement, you don't know much about elections in this country. It's not about the war, or the economy, or the faltering Republican brand, or any of that: This is about hate and fear, and a dark instinct in our blood going all the way back to Salem, and whether or not a desperately ambitious ex-heretic named John McCain can whip up a big enough mob in time to drown the latest witch.

I have more faith in the American public than this. I believe that America is ready to elect a black president. I don't have absolute confidence, and I honestly don't know how the November election will turn out. Our nation still has deep racial wounds which have healed only in part since the days of Dr. King and Rosa Parks.

One misconception about this election is that the predominant issue is race. I am not for Barack Obama because he is black, nor am I for him despite his race. Unfortunately, we must recognize that for many, the decision will be made based purely upon the color of his skin, and this forces us to take a good long look at who we are as a nation.

We pretend that the wounds of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation are healed. Ask any black American: this is not so. For forty-odd years, we have denied the issue, minimized its importance, ignored its very existence. We have somehow convinced ourselves that black America is somehow operating on an equal plane as white America, and in so doing have reinstated the racial stratification which we eradicated in name in 1965.

2008 is a painful year for America. We are maturing, but the time has come to acknowledge the issue of race. No longer can it be pushed to the bottom of the list. Now we must make a decision: to move beyond three hundred years of racial division and hate, or to indefinitely postpone the time when we undoubtedly will have to come to terms with race.

Whether or not Obama is elected in November will not affect whether the issue is acknowledged. So long as the media feigns ignorance and the politicians refuse to discuss it, the issue will not emerge. But I have confidence in my generation, there exists a powerful new sentiment of racial understanding. Our generation is excited, it is active, and it is revolutionary in its excitement and activity.

Racism and blind ethnic or religious hatred can only exist where there is a lack of understanding, and there can only be understanding when we acknowledge the issue and begin the challenge of ensuring true racial justice. For these reasons, America needs a President who can lead an honest dialogue on race, who can bring black America and white America together, and who can bring about the change we've been waiting for all these years.

-The Young Sentinel