Spanking The Donkey

Matt Taibbi is a reporter for the New York Press, a publication I’d never heard of before reading this book. I checked the website out and it looks…crude. And that’s another way I’d describe Taibbi’s book – which turns out to be largely a collection of his columns, though many are in extended form from how they appeared there or in other places. Crude – but effective. In too many ways, Taibbi clearly wants to be Hunter S. Thompson, and it’s not just the moments where he drops acid while on the campaign trail, or wears a gorilla suit on the Kerry press bus and tries not to make a big deal of it. But he’s also subversive in the best kinds of ways – infiltrating the Bush campaign offices in Orlando and really getting to know some of the people who are fervent supporters of Bush-Cheney. Doing a final-four style critique of the press in which the most idiotic (in this case, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times) "wins." (By the way, he also quotes her slobbering interrogation of John Kerry, asking him repeatedly, “Are you a liberal? Are you a liberal?” which despite many contenders was the low point for me of the campaign season.) Taibbi never pretends to be impartial, -- he hates both candidates, though he clearly loathes Bush. But if asked, he’d probably say that Kerry was too conservative for him. That’s where he’s coming from. And that’s, in the end, his entire point of the book. The conceit that the system, inherently, is flawed is not something Taibbi came up with. But he truly shows good examples, in humorous ways, of how idiotic the press is, how lily-livered the candidates are, etc. Any system that continually forces the public to choose between two undesirable candidates is a flawed system, and the book is worth reading if for no other reason, than to hammer this point home. He notes that people were inspired in the election, on both sides of the aisle, "mainly out of hatred and contempt for the guy on the other side, not inspiration or idealism.” He also will make you feel a bit guilty for making fun of Dennis Kucinich, But it’s funny, and quick reading as well. I didn’t love it, but it made me laugh out loud a few times and that’s worth something.

Rating: 7.0/10.0