In case you missed it, America’s best political writer, Matt Taibbi weighed in on L’affair Breitbart on the Rolling Stone blog:

I’ve decided it isn’t even necessary to have the debate over whether or not the Tea Partiers are racists. It’s enough to point out that the Tea Party and its sympathizers contain too many people like Andrew Breitbart (the idiot blogger from the Big Government website who originally posted the Sherrod video), Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, all of whom popped huge public woodies the moment the Sherrod video surfaced.

It’s just not necessary to say whether or not these people are racists. All that needs to be pointed out is that when they get a chance to gape at a video purporting to show a black Obama official confessing to having mistreated a white farmer (it turned out to be the opposite of that, of course), or a tape of Black Panther King Shamir talking about “killing cracker babies,” the word that best describes the emotions they display at these times is glee.

They enjoy these morbid stories about offenses to white dignity way too much. I caught Glenn Beck talking about some case involving a Black Panther who was intimidating people at a voting booth back in 2008—the guy had this pervy smile on his face that made him look exactly like one of those creepy dudes sitting hunched over at the edge of the bed playing the cuckold in cheating-wife porn videos. Over the Black Panthers! Who the hell has even seen a Black Panther since the seventies? The whole thing reminds me of that Chris Rock routine about Native Americans—“When was the last time you saw two Indians?”

I love how he ends the piece by asking “Is anyone else dreading 2012?”

I feel ya, dude. It’s going to be an all out brawl. 2012 might be the year the American republic ends up so frayed as to be ungovernable. The rightwing has backed itself so far into a corner that there is almost no way that they can still walk it back anymore. People are going to die during the next national election cycle. 2008 was merely the opening act. It’s already fucking fucked up. The rhetoric is so mean and hateful that the next step is easy to predict: Violence. 

Looked at from one point of view, the whole Axis of Idiocy (Fox News, tea baggers, conservative Christians) thing we’re seeing in this country is nothing short of a mass mobilization of some of the meanest and stupidest people to publicly present themselves that I have witnessed in my entire life. Don’t get me wrong, I consider most of these sad, deluded fools to be people whose time will somewhat quickly come to an end. The Tea party is a manifestation, by and large, of cranky old white people. They’ll be dying soon enough and their grandchildren will not be replenishing their ranks. It’s just not going to work that way. the demographics all but prohibit it from happening. Still, even if, historically speaking, it’ll be temporary, what happens in the meantime is going to make for a really trying couple of decades, ‘cause there is a mean genie that’s gotten out of the bottle and he ain’t going back in anytime soon.

The Tea Party is Perverted and Irrelevant (Rolling Stone)

 
I’m someone who, like many of you, I am sure, had high hopes for the Obama presidency. After two terms of Bush, it really felt like the country was turning the page. Inauguration Day felt like a wonderful exhalation of 8 years of just… pollution. I thought Obama would be the second coming of FDR, I really did, but almost a year later, has anything truly changed? Has anything gotten better for the common man? We all know that the Wall Street oligarchs are sitting prettier than ever, what about the rest of us?

Today’s Huffington Post had a nice bit of reporting from Ryan Grim about Ben Bernanke’s remarks to the Senate Banking Comittee today and as I read it, I was absolutely enraged. This asshole has got to go. If Obama is getting his advice from guys like Ben Bernanke (and Geithner and Rubin) we are fucking doomed!

Let this sink in:

Ben Bernanke has overseen the greatest expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in its history, pouring trillions of dollars into Wall Street firms at roughly zero interest rates.

His generosity, however, has a limit.

In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee today, where he’s seeking re-appointment as the Fed’s chairman, Bernanke called for cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security even as unemployment rises and the middle class is endangered.

Citing legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, Bernanke said of the retirement and health care funds that are the legacy of the New Deal: “That’s where the money is.”

Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) sympathized with Bernanke, saying that, because of entitlement spending, “you’re going to be looking at a situation where the Congress will be unable to provide any kind of fiscal discipline because of the mandatory spending. That puts an enormous burden on your plate.”

“Well, Senator, I was about to address entitlements,” Bernanke replied. “I think you can’t tackle the problem in the medium term without doing something about getting entitlements under control and reducing the costs, particularly of health care.”

Bernanke reminded Congress that it has the power to repeal Social Security and Medicare.

“It’s only mandatory until Congress says it’s not mandatory. And we have no option but to address those costs at some point or else we will have an unsustainable situation,” said Bernanke.

But here are several other obvious options that could make the situation sustainable—including a transaction tax on Wall Street speculation or a slight tax hike on the wealthiest Americans.

Bernanke talks as if increasing taxes on the wealthy simply isn’t an option.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) followed Bennett and pointed out that “there’s only really two ways you can deflect this deficit, and that’s either by cutting expenditures or raising income taxes or other forms of taxes.”

Reed asked him if he could think of other ways, but Bernanke returned to entitlement money as the way to balance the budget.

“Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is, as he put it,” Bernanke said. “The money in this case is in entitlements.”

When I read this I wanted to throw up. Apparently Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the last honest men in government felt the same:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who has placed a hold on Bernanke’s nomination, was apoplectic when HuffPost told him Bernanke was pushing for cuts in entitlement spending. “Bernanke wants to cut entitlement spending? Well, that confirms everything I’m saying,” Sanders fumed.

“The CEOs and top people on Wall Street make huge bonuses, and what? We’re going to cut back on Social Security and Medicare? That’s what we’re going to do?”

I think Sen. Sanders has the right idea, don’t you? Here’s what Progressive change said of Sanders (I wholeheartedly agree!)

Now, Bernie Sanders has taken the brave step of putting a “hold” on renominating Bush’s choice for another 4-year term at the helm of our economy.This is huge. Wall Street will not be happy, and they’ll go after Sanders with everything they’ve got. Most senators wouldn’t even consider going up against them like this. That’s why Bernie Sanders is a real progressive hero.

If you want to donate money to Bernie Sanders, click here.

And finally, here’s an information rich clip of Rolling Stone’s ace political editor Matt Taibbi’s take on Obama’s economic team. It’s a preview of Taibbi’s upcoming expose for the magazine titled “Obama’s Big Sellout”:

“[Bob] Rubin probably more than any other person was responsible for the financial crisis by deregulating the economy [while] in the White House. And he had a major role in helping destroy one of the world’s biggest company in Citigroup. He has one of the worst tack records you can find, but he was basically the guy who was the architect of the entire Obama policy. Obama put him in charge of everything. “

These guys are idiots. Hell, they’re practically traitorous! They’re traitorous idiots. They should be fired with extreme prejudice. And then tar and feathered.

You think I’m joking?

 
As readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi. No one, save for Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, comes close to his ability to hone in on the very essence of a political issue and then lacerate the guilty parties with the flick knife of his prose. What an amazing writer. It’s all A game with Taibbi, but he’s especially on point when he writes about Sarah Palin. Sample some of the goods from his most recent column at True/Slant:

Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s significance, because in some ways it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.

Palin ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù and there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s just no way to deny this ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.

On the small matter of Palin’s aptitude for the presidency:

Most of the rest of the book just catalogs her Gump-esque rise to national stardom (not having enough self-awareness to detect the monstrous narcissistic ambition that in reality was impelling her forward all along, she labors in the book to describe her various career leaps as lucky accidents or mystical acts of Providence) and the seemingly endless parade of meanies bent on tripping her up along the way. The book is really about her battles with these people, how much they did and do suck, and how difficult and inherently unfair life is for a decent hardworking American gal who just wants to live life, serve God, and try to be president without being bothered all the time.

Viewed through the prism of this particular brand of insanity (Palinsanity? does that work?), Katie Couric?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s notorious Palin interview last year really was a cheap shot. After all, Katie was trying to nail Palin ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù which is mean! Who among us can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t sympathize with the experience of being sandbagged by some slick professional rival who catches you in a moment of weakness and, instead of lending a helping hand, drives a fireplace poker through your eye?

You?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢d have to be thinking about the broader picture, about the fact that the president of the United States ought not to be a drooling yahoo whose two favorite Supreme Court cases are Roe v. Wade and Roe v. Wade and who thinks living near Canada counts as foreign policy experience, to not see what an asshole Katie Couric was being. And that other reality, the reality where one worries about a national political candidate having the brains of an innertube, is less immediate than the five-foot airspace radius around the Palin bobblehead. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s harder for the average person to connect with, I guess.

Sarah Palin, WWE Star