October 3rd, 2007 @ 2:48 am by evmonk

If only Matt Taibbi was as widely read, respected and “serious” as Tom Friedman or Howard Fineman, we would have a lot more to look forward to in 2008. (Have you noticed that placing “serious” in quotes is so in right now? Like pogs circa 1993. I do, however, appreciate when mainstream commentators describe candidates/thinkers as “not serious” - that’s usually an indication that we should soak up as much of those unserious ideas as possible. Don’t forget the Iraq War was the most serious idea of our generation, especially among the majority of journalists and politicos who continue to paint the consistent opponents of war as trivial gadflys.)

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from Taibbi’s wonderfully uplifting new piece in Rolling Stone on the seemingly boundless absurdity of presidential politics.

Looking at the field now, it appears that in the end the horse race will come down to three viable candidates on each side — Giuliani, Thompson and Romney on the Republican docket and Hillary, Obama and the tireless John Edwards among the Democrats…

Last but not least, there are parallel irritant figures on both sides in Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, whose jobs it will be to be roundly pilloried for wasting valuable air time (especially in debates) via their embarrassingly dead-on, pain-in-the-ass candidacies. Since neither candidate is a worn-out whore, and neither candidate has cast a single vote for any of the numerous completely avoidable political catastrophes that befell the country in the last four-plus years, both will be described as “fringe” and “unserious” figures who should rightfully be assigned to the “second tier” of presidential hopefuls. Meanwhile, the press will line up to laud as exciting breaths of political fresh air a one-note B-list character actor, a southern governor who believes the earth is 6,000 years old, and a hack plagiarist from Delaware with a head full of hair plugs who offers a “statesmanlike presence” and “raises the level of discourse” as he campaigns shamelessly for the secretary of state’s job.

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Filed under: Politics, Kucinich, News on October 3rd, 2007