The following piece was produced by the Huffington Post's Off the Bus.
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi: Screw the Bus
He's often referred to as the next Hunter Thompson but the truth of the matter is, Matt Taibbi is unique. Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine and covers national politics in columns called "Road Rage" and "The Low Post" for the magazine's online version. Taibbi has written for Rolling Stone since the 2004 election and is known for some of his outrageous antics, such as covering the John Kerry campaign in a gorilla costume, interviewing a former drug czar while tripping on acid, and working undercover as a Bush-Cheney campaign volunteer. Prior to that, Taibbi worked for ten years as a journalist in Russia, founded a satirical magazine called The eXile, played baseball for the Red Army, and professional basketball in Mongolia. Upon returning to the States, Taibbi started a Buffalo, NY alternative weekly called The Beast, and covered stories for The New York Daily News, The Nation, and others. But what Taibbi is really know for is his astute no-holds-barred writing style.
In his first book, Spanking the Donkey (The New Press), Taibbi covers the 2004 election and cuts through the dog-and-pony shows that clutter an election year: the perfect backdrops, the puffed-up speeches, and campaign journalists that constantly cover the meaningless and the absurd. Is Howard Dean too prickly to become president? Is John Kerry a good snowboarder or does his ability to speak French hurt his chances to win? Taibbi documents these offenders in a chapter called "Wimblehack," where journalists compete in a Final Four-like tournament for the worst campaign journalism of the 2004 election.
Taibbi's new book, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire (Black Cat/Grove-Atlantic Inc.) has just been released and is a compilation of Rolling Stone articles covering corruption in Washington, DC, traveling through the streets of New Orleans in a dinghy with actor Sean Penn, spending three nights in Abu Ghraib prison, and much more. In his latest Rolling Stone article, available on the web and newsstands now, Taibbi covers GOP candidate Mike Huckabee. OffTheBus caught up with Matt Taibbi and discussed a range of issues from the new book and problems surrounding campaign trail journalism.
Below the fold is a portion of the interview regarding Bernie Sanders. The rest of it you have to go to Off the Bus.
Off the Bus: In your Rolling Stone articles, you paint a shocking portrait of the United States Government. Among the revelations you made in some of your articles -- Congressman Bernie Sanders (of Vermont) getting railroaded on his amendments, the 109th Congress being the laziest in American history, and political corruption involving Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, and others. What would you say were some of the more shocking things you encountered that made you realize something is drastically wrong? Was there anything worse than what you didn't write in "Dead Elephants?"
Matt Taibbi: Well, meeting Bernie Sanders gave me the opportunity to follow him around and get that glass bottom boat look at Congress. It was really educational for me. There aren't that many feature reporters out there that get a chance to spend 7,000 or 8,000 words writing about how arcane and unsexy Congress is or how these committees work and that sort of thing. So it was really a luxury to be able to do that. I think the stuff that Sanders showed me about how bills can be completely rewritten in committee in the middle of the night, how they are sent to the floor and nobody ever reads them, how they can be rewritten in conference, and how amendments can be shot down by House leaders, I think 99% of Americans don't really understand how this stuff works and it was really eye-opening for me. It was amazing how easy it is how two, three, four people strategically placed in Congress can completely dominate the whole process. I think Americans don't understand the extent of influence that a couple of people have. If you just wanted to run Congress for your financial backers, it's really easy to do. The people I talked to, especially Sanders, were very helpful in showing me exactly how that happens. It's unfortunate that I didn't get a chance to spend more time with him. It would have been really interesting to spend a year following that whole process.
Off the Bus: He's actually getting a lot of grief from Vermont constituents for not taking a tough stand on investigations into impeachment. There are 36 towns in Vermont that passed impeachment resolutions and they expect Bernie to light a match and get the ball rolling, but now it seems like Congressman Dennis Kucinich is taking care of that.
Matt Taibbi: Well, I understand where they're coming from. There's certainly an argument for impeachment. There's no question Bush committed high crimes and misdemeanors and there's certainly a legal argument to be made. But people need to remember that Bernie Sanders is a freshman Senator and politics is all about accruing political capital and using it to the your best advantage and I think that's what he cares more about than watching an unsuccessful impeachment bid. I think Sanders is the kind of guy who wants to spend his first term trying to do stuff like getting more money for the heating oil program, veterans' health care and other things. I think that's where his head is at and I also think that's smart of him to do that. I mean, look, he's the new kid on the block and even if he were all for impeachment, he wouldn't get it. It's like the old joke about the two bulls who stand up on the hill and the young one says to the old, "Let's run down and fuck all those cows," and the other one says, "No. Let's walk down and fuck them all." I think Sanders is thinking in terms of "walking down and fucking them all" (laughter).
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