Press Action ::: Will Matt Taibbi Pull a Christopher Hitchens?

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Will Matt Taibbi Pull a Christopher Hitchens?

I won’t be surprised when the day comes that Matt Taibbi, the bomb-throwing columnist for Rolling Stone, pulls a Christopher Hitchens and throws his support behind a future White House decision to ramp up the United States’ already hyper-interventionist foreign policy. Or when he announces his support for a bipartisan-endorsed draconian crackdown on civil liberties. Bombings in the United States similar to Madrid in 2004 or London in 2005, I suspect, would send Taibbi to the corner of those policy-makers and pundits who support sending U.S. Muslims and political dissidents to concentration camps and suspending the Constitution.

When reading his invective, one struggles to determine what Taibbi truly believes. He talks a tough game in his articles and essays, but when the shit truly hits the fan again here in the United States, will he have the balls to stand up to the fascists, or will he transform into a “pussy,” an epithet he has used to describe Democrats too frightened to fight the Republican brownshits in Washington?

Until the day comes when Taibbi loses his backbone, I will continue to enjoy the contrarian spirit he exhibits in much of his writing. Here’s a fun passage from a few years back:

After watching George W. Bush’s press conference last Thursday night, I’m more convinced than ever: The entire White House press corps should be herded into a cargo plane, flown to an altitude of 30,000 feet, and pushed out, kicking and screaming, over the North Atlantic.

Any remaining staff at the Washington bureaus should be rounded up for summary justice. The Russians used to use bakery trucks, big gray panel trucks marked “Bread” on the sides; victims would be rounded up in the middle of the night and taken for one last ride through the darkened streets.

The war would almost be worth it just to see Wolf Blitzer pounding away at the inside of a Pepperidge Farm truck, tearfully confessing and vowing to “take it all back."

And here’s a gratifying passage from Taibbi’s latest tirade in Rolling Stone in which he explains how the Democrats have surrendered to Bush:

Even beyond the war, the Democrats have repeatedly gone limp-dick every time the Bush administration so much as raises its voice. Most recently, twelve Democrats crossed the aisle to grant immunity to phone companies who participated in Bush’s notorious wiretapping program. Before that, Democrats caved in and confirmed Mike Mukasey as attorney general after he kept his middle finger extended and refused to condemn waterboarding as torture. Democrats fattened by Wall Street also got cold feet about upsetting the country’s gazillionaires, refusing to close a tax loophole that rewarded hedge-fund managers with a tax rate less than half that paid by ordinary citizens.

Taibbi would probably argue that he’s not ideological in the same way as Hitchens, which is probably true. He would describe himself as a journalist simply on a mission to expose the follies of the political establishment. And it should be noted that Hitchens was a supporter of an interventionist U.S. foreign policy long before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, turned him into a vocal advocate for the Bush Wars of the past seven years.

And yet one wonders if Taibbi will grow tired of his journalistic bomb-throwing or get seduced by a high-paying reporting job offer in Washington where he would be forced to tone down his shtick.