Hilarious Book on the 2004 Election

I'm not sure that that post title makes a whole lot of sense, given what an unmitigated disaster the 2004 election was for the United States and, I think one can say without hyperbole, the world. But I just finished Matt Taibbi's Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season, which manages to be both insightful and, well, hilarious. I read it on the plane this morning (flying to the Twin Cities to run the Twin Cities Marathon tomorrow), basically cover-to-cover, and I laughed out aloud several times. So, yes, it's LOL.

Here's a nice point, on the massive flags, balloons, etc. (p. 66, on a Dean event): As much as the reporters snickered about campaign fakery, and occasionally cracked about it in print, there is no question that they were atracted to the big campign symbolism like moths to a lamp. To be full of shit in American politics is a signal to our political press that you are serious . . . .

On the Democrats dealing with potential vote loss to a Green candidate (p. 203): If [the Democrats] want to end the Green Party problem . . . [a]ll the Democrats have to do is renounce the WTO and NAFTA, create a universal health care system, and slash the defense budget . . . . But the Democrats won't do that; they're too addicted to corporate money. They're money junkies. And as anyone who's had any experience with junkies will tell you, junkies cannot be trusted. They'll say anything you want them to say about going straight, but at the critical moment, they'll still steal your television and shoot it right into their arms.

I'm not sure that Taibbi says anything that your typical leftist FFB reader hasn't thought before, but his skewering of the media, often from an insider's point of view, is really worth a read. In one of the more inspired sections of the book, he designs and conducts a single-elimination tournament to determine who is the worst political journalist in the U.S., based on 2004 campaign writing. This chapter, putting journalists and pundits head-to-head, and then taking apart their prose, is truly inspired.

There's also a chapter where Taibbi goes "under cover" to work as a Bush campaign volunteer in Orlando, Florida, for several weeks. This enables Taibbi to analyze the Republican mind, with interesting results. (The chapter is called "Bush Like Me," which is also truly inspired.)