Matt Taibbi: The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump

[babylonsister]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-fury-and-failure-of-donald-trump-w444943


The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump

Win, lose or drop out, the Republican nominee has laid waste to the American political system. On the trail for the last gasp of the ugliest campaign in our nation's history
By Matt Taibbi
7 hours ago

snip//

Flailing on race and immigration, his campaign in chaos, the candidate who made a brilliant farce of the election is now finding the joke is on him

Instead, the two men declared war on each other. The last straw was the release of a tape capturing Donald Trump uttering five words – "Grab them by the pussy" – during an off-camera discussion with former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about what you can do to women when you're a star.

Keeping up with Trump revelations is exhausting. By late October, he'll be caught whacking it outside a nunnery. There are not many places left for this thing to go that don't involve kids or cannibalism. We wait, miserably, for the dong shot.

snip//

In the absolute best-case scenario, the one in which he loses, this is what Trump's run accomplished. He ran as an outsider antidote to a corrupt two-party system, and instead will leave that system more entrenched than ever. If he goes on to lose, he will be our Bonaparte, the monster who will continue to terrify us even in exile, reinforcing the authority of kings.

If you thought lesser-evilism was bad before, wait until the answer to every question you might have about your political leaders becomes, "Would you rather have Trump in office?"

Trump can't win. Our national experiment can't end because one aging narcissist got bored of sex and food. Not even America deserves that. But that doesn't mean we come out ahead. We're more divided than ever, sicker than ever, dumber than ever. And there's no reason to think it won't be worse the next time.

[yallerdawg]

1. Shit, Taibbi.

Where you been for the last 7 years?

Trump is just a symptom - not the disease.

[Gabi Hayes]

2. here you go...I read the three middle books in the top display....all very enlightening, as well as

nastily hilarious in spots....reminiscent in some ways of HST

https://www.google.com/#q=matt+taibbi+books

he hates most dems as much as he loathes repubs, btw

[Gabi Hayes]

5. he loves tom friedman

When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing. Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America's ability to fall for absolutely anything-just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts- along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism. Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles?

Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a "Green Revolution"? Well, he'll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian. I've been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about-in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn't make them up even if you were trying-and when you tried to actually picture the "illustrative" figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember Friedman's take on Bush's Iraq policy? "It's OK to throw out your steering wheel," he wrote, "as long as you remember you're driving without one." Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman's analysis of America's foreign policy outlook last May: The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging.When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels." First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you're supposed to stop digging when you're in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol.

http://www.nypress.com/flat-n-all-that/

[Retired George]

3. 'tis a Tale told by a Fool, full of Sound and Fury,

signifying nuttiness!

[joshcryer]

4. Good to see Taibbi turn around after his "Trump is unstoppable" "nation of idiots" nonsense.

Sorry Taibbi, we knew, we always knew, when it was going to get serious, it was all going to come down on Trump. Trump's baggage is long and well known. It was going to become the focus once it got down to crunch time, once people started actually paying attention to the elections.

[ancianita]

6. K & R Sorry for my repost! I'll delete it if you want.

[babylonsister]

7. No, doesn't bother me.