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105 of 107 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hugely entertaining for skeptics about American politics, May 4, 2005
This review is from: Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season (Hardcover)
First, a disclaimer: Taibbi is very harsh with Christian fundamentalists and people of similar political beliefs. If you are one of those people, you'd be well-advised to stay away.
On the other hand, you don't have to be a raging left-winger to enjoy Taibbi's commentary otherwise. While the author's politics may be very left of center, he savages Democratic politicians as much or more than Republicans. There is a strong moral center in this book, which is why I characterize it as skeptical, not cynical. Taibbi comes from a journalist family and he has a keen eye for seeing through the spectacle that the political process is--as a symbiotic relationship between journalists and politicians and the junk-food diet public--simultaneously overfed and undernourished.
Taibbi's real bias, if you will, is in favor of substance and thought and against superficial b.s. of all types. So Kerry's ridiculous tarmac football photo ops come under fire, as do the artfully "diverse" Dean photo ops, and the shallowness of Wesley Clark's efforts to act knowledgeable about labor disputes. The only guy who comes out better than before is the one we love to make fun of: Dennis Kucinich. I'll admit that I was at one point a supporter of each of the first three and loved to make of that ridiculous gnome Kucinich. Taibbi expertly demolishes the appeal of making Kucinich into the national laughingstock, pointing that, yes, he looks ridiculous, but it's the media as bully that wants to make fun of him to reassure our own insecurities about not being that guy with the sculpted abs on the cover of Men's Health. Ouch. Touche, Mr. Taibbi.
This book is the perfect successor to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. It's easy to forget that before Hunter became an overblown drug culture character, he was an incisive and talented political commentator. I hope Taibbi keeps his head on straight and maintains his focus on politics. Enthusiastically recommended.
(And you know what? I take it back. A smart Christian fundamentalist should read this book and, with knowledge of the secular left's impressions of them, write a good Taibbi style analysis of what that tells us. That would make for a good read.)
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70 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hugely Entertaining and Devastatingly On Point, April 27, 2005
This review is from: Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season (Hardcover)
In SPANKING THE DONKEY, Matt Taibbi presents something the combined forces of the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, and countless dozens of other journalistic outlets proved sadly incapable of presenting: an honest and unflinching look at the 2004 Presidential campaign in all its glorious inanity, irrelevance, and hypocrisy. Taibbi illustrates repeatedly the sheer silliness of the American whistle stop primary campaigning process, from the image-driven beauty contests in which every contestant struggles to make the least possible concrete statements to the press-driven horse race assessments. Along the way, he savages nearly every Democratic candidate, particularly John Kerry and Wesley Clark, reserving a soft spot in his heart only for the intellectual honesty and depth of belief in the quixotic campaign of Dennis Kucinich.
To address the Republican side of the process (since there were no meaningful primaries), Taibbi details a priceless, two-month escapade in which he went undercover as a volunteer in the Florida campaign operation of George W. Bush. In so doing, the author provides a fascinating look at a typical collection of Republican political operatives, campaign volunteers, and the Right's "true converts." He gives us a Tampa Deputy Sheriff who espouses a form of military cloning that would put Hitler to shame, a campaign office staffer who casually throws out a comment to a black volunteer that, "I know how you people don't like to work," and campaign volunteers whose take on Bush's gay policy is, "I don't know. He's never said anything."
More significant, Taibbi speculates from his observations that Republicans are not overtly racist, they simply tolerate or look the other way whenever racism appears among their number. As one campaign office worker noted, KKK country is Bush country. He also comments on the "Left Behind," apocalyptic Christian syndrome: "The problem...with Republicans in general... is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans, and so on....They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that will create opponents."
Beneath this collection of expanded Rolling Stone pieces and selections from Taibbi's New York Press columns lie some disturbing truths and several interesting conjectures on the author's part. Taibbi mercilessly lambastes the mainstream media for their shallowness, their distance from the world of real people and real lives, their avoidance of controversy in order to protect their access to even more campaign trivia and tripe, their clubbiness (among themselves and with the candidates), and their write-850-words-a-day-and-mail-it-in attitudes. He saves some of his strongest diatribes for the press's craven coverage of the President's Thanksgiving Day trip to Iraq, an event that most of the world's press shredded for the callous and transparent publicity stunt that it was. Taibbi brilliantly deconstructs numerous examples of empty writing from the lions of the political reporting scene (Woodward, Fineman, Milbank, Will, etc.) and accuses them as a group of the greatest possible fraud: facilitating the election process as a theatrical ritual for "legitimizing a political process the rest of the country knows instinctively is a bunch of ****." The candidates are irrelevant, as long as we are led to believe that the process is real, that it matters, and that all is well because we all believe in the legitimacy of what we are seeing.
Matt Taibbi's writing is enjoyable to read, sarcastically on point with regard to Democrats and Republicans alike. Every other page contains a memorable comment or a great one-liner. He dissects our electoral process for the meaningless, sound bite-filled beauty contest it is, increasingly a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, engaged in a "race to see which Ivy League graduate is quicker to reach for a duck call at the sight of a Reuters photographer."
SPANKING THE DONKEY is certainly well left of center, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable dissertation on a process so intellectually bankrupt barely half our citizenry can be bothered to participate. Instinctively, it seems, they already know the truth. Mike Taibbi makes it fun to read and think about, but he is also deeply serious beneath the sarcastic veneer. How can you not relish a book whose conclusion on the 2004 Presidential election reads: "The Republicans won last week...because a large number of them stand for being deranged lunatics who believe that the Bible was the last book ever written, and for being intellectual cowards who hide from the terrifying complexities of modern society by placing all of their beliefs in infantile concepts like faith, force, and patriotism."
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gorilla (suit) Journalism At It's Finest!, April 11, 2005
This review is from: Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season (Hardcover)
Matt Taibbi, political contributor to Rolling Stone, New York Press, that magazine with the airbrushed nude photos, and many others, has always been able to wring hilarious true stories from the interiors of gorilla suits and from the hazes of hallucinogens. Now he does it in an easy to carry book form!
Join Taibbi on a whirlwind tour crisscrossing America as the nation decides on which man in an expensive suit the Democratic party fingers to run against Bush. It's a fun ride, and just turbulent enough for you to keep an air sickness bag close by. People from most points on the political spectrum will either love or hate this book, seeing that he shows neither the left or the right in a favorable light. Everyone is a victim of Taibbi's skewering. Pass the hot sauce!
Many of the pieces have been published before, and the best are what stayed. This way I don't have to worry about shelling out $4 for a copy of Rolling Stone if another awful "mall-ternative" band is on the cover. For new readers, he keeps things interesting - has a great gift for metaphor, a sense of humor that can cause sudden stomach pain, and a large collection of celebrity toenail clippings.
Only one disappointment - Punching The Donkey would have been a far better title.
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