Customer Reviews

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

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As a longtime fan of Hunter S. Thompson's political reporting and social commentary I was first exposed to Matt Taibbi when i learned that he had inherited the very same job that the good Dr. HST held at the Foriegn Affairs Desk at Rolling Stone magazine. Pretty bold move to take that one on because nobody (I thought) could inherit that mantle from HST and do it justice. Well, I was wrong. Matt did it and did it well.

This book is a collection or articles (I assume from various sources - I don't recall seeing all of these in Rolling Stone). He takes us to see places and meet people we already think we know from the news stories of the day (or yesterday) and manages to make the stories (some now old and lame) fresh and new in the process.

My only complaint is the same one I had upon reading HST - severe depression at the state of our government and our fellow humans. Damn but the truth is painful and this book is full of truth.

You will love it. If you don't, there is probably something wrong with you.

In spite of the off-putting title, this book is a delectable collection of Taibbi's habit-forming Rolling Stone essays on politics in the Bush era. His topics range from Michael Jackson to Lynndie England to (my favorite) Tom DeLay.
He fearlessly travels to New Orleans (with Sean Penn, as it happens) to see the Katrina disaster firsthand; he gets embedded with the troops in Iraq, then dis-embeds to go inside Abu Ghraib in the company of a mercenary. He is suitably appreciative and humble in the company of the soldiers (but not the contractors) with whom he is traveling. But the most horrifying story may be the one about Taibbi's time in the company of Bernie Sanders, the independent Congressman from Vermont, as bills he works on in the Republican Congress get snuffed out one by one. Whatever rules used to exist are either ignored or rewritten, all without regard for fairness or decency or even, quite possibly, for legality. It's the most stunning up-close look at a dysfunctional government a reader could stand.
Taibbi has been referred to as a "gonzo" journalist, and indeed there is a bit--just enough--of his "self" in the reporting; but he is mainly a deeply insightful observer and chronicler of things unseemly and egregious. While I regretted the very occasional occurrence of a superfluous four-letter word (usually, they appear in just the right places, one of his stylistic gifts), he seldom makes these gaffes, and his writing is almost always pure art. He does not write like an angel: he writes like a sharp-eyed, been-there done-that, hard-nosed, soft-hearted reporter with a mission to write the truth and a clear sense of the poignant. While his view is deeply and appropriately cynical, he has a superb sense of humor and command of language, and underneath it all, an unmistakable sweet soul.

This book is a masterful creation of reality, snark, wit and intellect. Matt shines the light of truth on just how far gone our government is. You can find him on the show Real Time With Bill Maher often. That is how I found out about him and his book. It's so refreshing and disheartening to read this book. You never get the real story from TV news on just how incredibly broken every part of Washington DC is. This is probably one of the best books I have read in a while.

Taibbi's "Smells Like Dead Elephants" is mostly too funny to describe - especially describing Michael Jackson's trial, Bernie Sanders' efforts to pass legislation and amendments, and attending (no-longer) Senator Burns' birthday party pretending to be a lobbyist for drilling in the Grand Canyon. Then the more serious moments of Lnnydie England and her trial for Abu Gharaib abuses, and later having the guts to stay there for three days.

Definitely a "Must Read."

Matt Taibbi says it like it is when he asserts that Congress has become an excercise of raw power w/no principles, and in that environment corruption has flourished. It has hijacked the national treasury, frantically ceded power to the executive, and sold off the federal government in a private auction. He details the five easy steps they accomplished this by: 1)Rule By Cabal 2) Work As Little As Possible - And Screw Up What Little You You Do 3) Let The President Do Whatever He Wants 4) SPEND SPEND SPEND 5)Line Your Own Pockets. But you could boil the whole sordid mess down to a few basic concepts. Sloth. Greed. Abuse of Power.
I especially like the author's succinct descriptions/as in the intellectual "neocon" advisors - a group of people so stupid they could only have been bred in expensive graduate schools. Or his description of a witness in the Michael Jackson trial - she expressed herself almost exclusively in saccharine, retch-inducing platitudes of the sort one might hear on Oprah or at a motivational retreat for recovering glue addicts.
But it is his astute political observations that make him a pleasure to read - The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureucratic abomination/a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish. If you control the Rules Committe, you control congress. A singular example of this was when the first Patriot Act/to the Rules Committe was delivered for consideration. They trashed this biparttisan version and replaced it w/ a completely different bill that had been written years ago/ ?
If your like me you'll love his character descriptions/ex. - Tom Daschle was a marionette of the banking and credit-card industries whose public personna recalled a hopped-up suburban vacuum-cleaner salesman.
There are also some great pieces he does on Iraq - an insane blunder committed by a buch of criminal incompetents who have managed so far to avoid the lash and rack only because the machinery for avoiding reality is so advanced in this country.
But the best stories in a number of fine pieces are his ones on New Orleans/Katrina - by her early satellite portrait another one of those watery curlicues that runs up the gulf from time to time, turning gap-toothed hayseeds out of their trailers on live television, titillating Middle America just enough to inspire the odd few days of canned-food drives or teddy-bear vigils.
After the recent insurance reward-incompetence debacle bill that passed/ I needed a few laughs and reminders.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!!

I give Matt maybe another few years to become crotchety and bitter before he inherits the mantle of a Hunter S. Thompson, but this is an OK book with some decent play by play of how pathetic our Congress is, some good snark about the Enron scumbuckets, and a very good piece from Iraq that is probably the best of the bunch. Otherwise, occasionally uneven-poor choice opening up with a weak piece about Michael Jackson that gives the reader the impression that skipping around is something they'll want to do, but "Dead Elephants" is still better than anything Laura Ingraham is going to write, ever.

Excellent book. A MUST READ for everyone who wants to see how the government really runs behind the scenes. It's funny, witty, and scary to read. Read it NOW!

I purchased the book because I enjoyed his writing in Spanking the Donkey. I enjoyed the book because I the liberaism was minimal. This book is truly partisan. I quit reading before I was 1/4 of the way as I was so bored.