Taibbi's latest...

...Last week, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi wrote a harsh-but-somewhat-heartfelt column about Hillary's beyond-generic entrance into the race.

Hillary Clinton announced her run for president last week. Now it was her turn to slip the "national conversation" line four sentences into her first speech as a national presidential candidate. You have to wonder what it says about a political candidate when she runs out of her own ideas less than fifty words into her national sojourn.

Actually, it took less time than that; the very first lines of her speech ("I'm in. And I'm in to win") were a cheap ripoff of Disney teenie idol Corbin Bleu's "Push It to the Limit" lyrics. Think about that: In preparation for what was clearly the biggest and most important speech of her life to date, Hillary Clinton sat down, plucked the inspirational top from a crappy teenie boy-band song, and then plunged right into a student-body-right regurgitation of DLC focus-group campaign gobbledygook, rhetoric that was still bruised and squashed quite flat from the pounding it took on the Kerry campaign trail two years ago. This was her way of introducing the future President Clinton's "new ideas" to the world.

You get the feeling he could always bite somebody's head off, James Wolcott-style, without really trying or caring. But there's also this blurb that shows that he's not doing this as a writing exercise:

What's so tragic about Hillary's political evolution is that her decision to morph into a caricature of a Washington stuffed suit seems so clearly a conscious decision on her part, a way of overcompensating for the abuse she took when she first arrived on the Hill over a decade ago to push her health care plan. Whether you love her or hate her, Hillary is a compelling story and an iconic figure in the history of modern feminism. Hers was a journey marked by intense public humiliation and the most savage kind of abuse. En route to her current status as a favorite for the Democratic nomination she has had to navigate, publicly, all the most dangerous minefields that exist for the modern professional woman -- the dilemma of whether or not to put her husband's career over her own, the burden of having to work overtime to be taken seriously in a male-dominated professional environment, the specter of abuse and discrimination by closed-minded people who see strong women as a threat to older traditional values, being rewarded for one's success by sexual humiliation at the hands of a husband more attracted to youth and feminine vulnerability than loyalty, strength, and achievement, and so on.

Had Hillary embraced head-on her undeniable role as an unwitting martyr/archetype for the modern professional woman, had she opened up her campaign by actually showing us what her private thoughts have been throughout all of these trying times, and what she might think the meaning of her journey has been or could be, she would have instantly established herself as an extraordinarily interesting and compelling story, at the very least. Instead, Hillary is clearly so spooked by the experience of not being taken seriously by the Beltway establishment that she's gone overboard in the direction of being a typical Inside-Baseball, full-of-shit Washington hack, spraying cardboard cliches like machine-gun fire. She's Joe Biden without the plugs.

This is what makes Taibbi good. RS is leaning on him like he's the new Hunter S. Thompson, and as long as he keeps doing stuff like going out on a boat with Sean Penn, et al, immediately after Katrina, and brilliantly inserting himself and his world into columns, he'll keep right on reminding them of HST. But the thing about Taibbi is, like HST, just when he's on the brink of a major take-no-prisoners rant, he comes back down to earth just long enough to tell you why what he's saying matters, and why he's not just blowing smoke. Fear and Loathing on the '72 Campaign Trail is a bit heartbreaking as you witness HST slowly devolving from optimism and excitement to "This is going to end very badly," and taking it very very hard. Taibbi does the same somewhat in his writing.

This week, he takes on, among others, the equivalent of a helpless kitten to anyone with minor verbal prowess and the ability to grasp facts...the media in general and Fox News in particular, in regard to Obama-madrassa complete and total fabrication.

The way our national media is currently constructed, a lie of this magnitude broadcast on a major network becomes an irreversible blow within, I would guess, about 24 hours after it appears. There are rare cases of an unsourced hoax blowing up quickly enough that it won't stick to a politician -- the John Kerry mistress story is a good example -- but for the most part, once the lie is out there, it's there to stay. This is especially true given the nature of the audience for outlets like Fox and Hannity. Unless you force a Hannity or a John Gibson to apologize by ripping his own still-beating heart out on national television, their audiences will assume that any "retraction" comes with a grain of salt, that the original report was true.

Years after George Bush himself admitted that there is no link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, I continue to meet people who believe just the opposite -- that the original implications furthered by the White House and the talk-radio preachers were true, and that the no-link concession was something somehow forced on Bush and the likes of Fox by hyper-cautious media lawyers and lefty journalists who, it is assumed, harbor some secret allegiance to Saddam Hussein and/or the cause of Islamic terrorism in general.

...

Now we're seeing the same thing with the Obama story; it is lingering, even after it has been totally discredited. Emboldened by a generation that has refused to punish their libelous behavior, these guys now just take whatever "facts" they like and run with them. Hannity is one culprit. Michael Savage, a spineless little fuckhead who should be torn apart by hyenas, responded to the debunking of the Obama story by telling his listeners that Obama "will not reply" to the original Insight report, a blatant lie. He added, for good measure, that "assuming the world is still here" after a Clinton-Obama administration, Obama would then run for president with "Saddam Hussein's younger grandson" as his running mate.

The very fact that the liars are allowed to continue their trade unpunished is a sort of endorsement of their original versions of the "truth." I have absolutely no doubt that many Americans believe deep down in their gullible hearts that if people like Hannity and Limbaugh were really liars, they would be pulled off the air, or punished for some reason. They see that a Michael Savage can be yanked from a lucrative job for gay-bashing, but there appears to be no punishment at all for unchecked, intentional lying, which is at least as serious an offense for a journalist.

...

If the press is serious about saving itself as a social institution, it has to start policing its own business. We all have to encourage the likes of Barack Obama to hire the meanest lawyers on the planet and to file the hairiest lawsuits imaginable against the Hannitys, Gibsons, and Savages of the world. We have to impress upon the victims of these broadsides that choosing to ignore that style of libel is a betrayal of the public trust and an act of political cowardice that the rest of us end up paying for in spades. That's the ugly truth: Until one of those monsters goes down in a fireball of punitive litigation, we are all fucked. And it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Go read both posts. Trust me, I didn't take all the good stuff...there's still plenty left to read.