Usually, when I sit down to get my fill of the day's news, I emerge sputtering, ranting, and generally ready to pack my bags and move to New Zealand. Today, I find myself feeling hopeful, and I have Matt Taibbi to thank.
Here's Matt's recent piece from Rolling Stone about the unraveling of the Republican Party. It's joyous reading. Here's a sample:
On the majority side of the floor, Republicans were huddled in clumps all over the place, screeching like zoo macaques and intermittently whipping their heads up to check the board.
What a visual. This is why, though I have occasionally found Matt's endeavors to be loathesome in the past (see more or less all of the content involving women on eXile.ru in the late 1990s/early 2000s and the horse semen story), I cannot resist his writing. Even as I cringed at the denouement of the Worst Foreign Correspondent in Moscow contest, I eagerly awaited each week's installment of the competition because the man is just an evil genius at the keyboard.
Watching DeLay wade through a crowd of his own party members during a critical vote is an awesome thing, a nature show worthy of Sir David Attenborough. DeLay moves through the aisles like some kind of balding incubus, and as he passes, Republican members instinctively turn their backs on him, not wanting to be caught in the Gorgon's gaze (or, more to the point, be threatened with the loss of a chairmanship or reelection funding).
I wish I could show this kind of simultanously dispassionate passion when I write about politics. When Taibbi writes, it's like a sociologist recording the inner workings of some kind of mysterious phenomenon. When I write (and talk) about politics, I can't help getting hysterical and angry. Ranting only seems to work for Dennis Miller, and look where it landed him. He ended up as a Republican.