Low-down Reporting

It isn't as if there is any scarcity of material. It's time that is in short supply. I have some history of trading sleep for posts, but recently that has seemed a less than sound proposition.

But we must keep up with our referrals and reading. Tonight's feature is a post from the excellent Down With Tyranny site, well worth bookmarking on its own merits. The music industry connections of the DWT author often jangle especially well me as I rank music up there with oxygen. This particular column caught my attention though because of reference to exceptional hard-hitting writing of one Matt Taibbi, who has a new column for Rolling Stone that isn't buying the corporate-funded swill of the democratic party skunks who are a good part of the reason for that pervasive smell of methane and offal in the country these days. Please check this out. Follow this link to DWT post for links to series of Taibbi articles:

Since my earlier post, I've now read all four outings to date in Matt Taibbi's new online-only column, "The Low Post," for rollingstone.com (also posted on AlterNet), and all I can say is:

Wow!

Not only is the guy really, really smart, and not only can he really, really write, but he still thinks of himself as a reporter, doing real reporting, not to be confused with the thumb-sucking I do here. He gets out there and observes what he's writing about.

As I was reading, I found myself wanting to pass along just about every sentence. I can't do that, obviously, but let me give you a sample.

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Now for the sample I promised. This is the end of the Hillary Clinton column:

To milk the blood of soldiers and innocent civilians for the principle of rank careerism is surely lower even than sacrificing young lives for oil or money, but the Democrats will get away with it, because American voters have always been too afraid to contemplate the reality of their monolithic system of government.

The only kind of change most dissenting voters in this country can contemplate is the rejection of an openly drooling imperialist like Joe Lieberman, whose real crime was not his war stance but his refusal to participate in the kind of craven cover-your-ass posturing the Hillarys and Joe Bidens and John Kerrys have indulged in this election season. Had Lieberman merely pretended to be antiwar once things went wrong in Baghdad, he almost certainly could have counted on the pusillanimity of the American voter to carry him to yet another Connecticut landslide.

Beltway pros like Hillary have long understood that in tough times, the vast majority of disgruntled Americans would rather find a way to convince themselves that their party agrees with them than face the fact that they never had any choice at all on a wide range of crucial issues. They're willing to be swayed by a carefully scripted display of canned anger like Hillary's outburst in the Senate because the alternatives--third-party politics, grass-roots activism, dropping out of society altogether--are too exhausting and radical to even imagine. Because getting to the root causes of things is so hard and scary, they'll settle for punishing an unpopular politician, even if it means electing his accomplice.

So they'll vote, even for a factory-produced fraud like Hillary Clinton, because voting is easy. Much easier than doing something. That's the real platform the Democrats are running on this November.

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