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- GenresRomance
622 pages, Spiral-bound
First published January 1, 2014
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54 people want to read
About the author
Testy McTesterson
120 books1,944 followersIt's definitely effort. It takes a lot of work. Persistence is key. Link to Amazon [http://www.amazon.com]Link to Steve Jobs [http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walt... ]Link to J.K.Rowling [https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... ]This is bold text. [This is bold text ]This is italic text. [This is italic text ]This text is underlined. [This is underlined text ]This text is striked out. [This is striked out text ]This is block quote [
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 74 reviews
May 18, 2021
wonderful book
Read
April 28, 2020Nice book !!!!
Read
December 24, 2020
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
January 8, 2019
No, but really, who tests the testers?
Read
June 30, 2020Nice book
September 6, 2020
Great
February 18, 2019
[**Warning: this text may contain spoilers.**]
Link to Amazon [http://www.amazon.com]
Link to Steve Jobs [http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walt... ]
Link to J.K.Rowling [https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... ]
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Link to Amazon [http://www.amazon.com]
Link to Steve Jobs [http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walt... ]
Link to J.K.Rowling [https://www.goodreads.com/author/show... ]
This is bold text. [This is bold text ]
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August 18, 2014
this is the account I want.
Read
June 6, 2017Good
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 30, 2018
Great!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 3, 2023
who tests the testers
Want to read
August 23, 2024Good
October 5, 2018
Nailed it! Matt Taibbi’s conclusions about the state of the American electorate, the country’s political parties, and about its news media -- conclusions that he reached after an insightful and comprehensive analysis of all three is spot on. The Introduction is well-organized and studiously documented. The full title of the book is:
Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus.
I did not enjoy the book so much as I appreciated it. The author clearly did not write it as a work of entertainment, but as a quantum of information that would be valuable to an informed American citizen and voter. In his introduction to the book, Taibbi makes a pretty solid case for the moral, ethical and intellectual bankruptcy of the news media in America, and especially of the electronic news media (think television). This, in spite of the fact that he, himself, is a journalist who writes extensively for Rolling Stone magazine.
This book was difficult to review because it is comprised (primarily) of twenty-six different (presumably independently-copyrighted) dispatches that were written at the behest of Mr. Taibbi’s employer: Rolling Stone magazine. I felt it best, then, to review each chapter independently
Chapter 1, titled The Great Derangement Redux, was taken from a book the author wrote about ten years ago called The great Derangement. The chapter was taken from the introduction to that book. In it, Taibbi describes just how the alternate reality that has captured both the right and left wings of American political thought developed in our country after about 2004.
Chapter 2 of the book was originally written and published on August 12, 2015 and is titled: Inside the GOP Clown Car. It is a description of the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign on the Republican side. In the chapter, Taibbi describes the extraordinary influence exerted by the major television networks (including Fox) when they forced candidates to attain certain minimum poll numbers in order to be able to participate in the televised debates. This left the candidates in positions of trying to outdo each other with wildly crazy assertions that would fire up the emotions of a sufficient number of Republican voters to make their required approval numbers, and so their debate participation would be ensured. It worked for those candidates who adopted the strategy. Unfortunately, Donald Trump, as a former TV reality show star, knew the process better than any of them, and he outdid all of them, eventually gaining the nomination of the Republican Party.
Chapter 3, written and published originally on August 21, 2015, is titled, Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny. It is subtitled, Win or lose, Trump’s campaign threatens to unleash the Great American Stupid. The author describes the moment when Donald Trump stopped being funny as being when he defended two brothers from South Boston who beat up a homeless Hispanic man and then told police that Donald Trump was right and all these people needed to be deported. Trump declined to condemn the violence, instead telling reporters that “. . . the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again.”
Chapter 4 was written on September 4, 2015. It is titled: The Republicans Are Officially the Party of White Paranoia. This essay is a fairly concise and accurate description of how the Republican Party embraced the absurd right-wing notion that the white race is the one being persecuted in America today. He provides data to back up this assertion, and some of it would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. He describes how voters are consistently “conned” by their parties, and especially Republican voters.
Chapter 5 was written on September 8, 2015 and is a meaningless article about choosing which actors should be cast in which Republican candidate parts should a movie or TV show be made about them. It did not, in my opinion, substantively contribute to the book.
Chapter 6 was written a week later, on September 16, 2015, and is a set of rules for a drinking game to be played in a bar by watchers of the televised Republican presidential campaign debate. It added nothing to the book.
In Chapter 7, Taibbi became serious again. This chapter is titled The Case For Bernie Sanders. It was written on November 3, 2015. In it, he describes the candidate and his early days in the campaign. Most striking were the final words of the chapter: “More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It’s the rest of us who are lost.”
Chapter 8 brings the author back to the Republican Clown Car, where he continues his analyses of the lesser-known Republicans in the race. It was written on November 17, 2015. The subtitle of the chapter is: On the campaign trail with the most dishonest, bumbling and underqualified pack of presidential candidates in history. The article was written while the author was covering the candidates as they campaigned in New Hampshire, and it is a fairly serious analysis of their positions on various issues.
On November 25, 2015, Taibbi wrote an article titled: America Is Too Dumb for TV News, and it is Chapter 9 of this book. The piece is centered around Trump’s assertion that he saw (on television) thousands (and thousands) of people in Newark, New Jersey cheering, dancing and celebrating when the twin towers collapsed on 9/11 of 2001. Other right-wingers claimed that it was in Paterson, New Jersey, and not Newark, but the author analyzes the matter and reports what Trump probably actually saw. Never mind that it never happened as asserted, Trump would not retract it, and a good many Americans believed him (and still do). The author concludes that we can’t handle the truth by saying: “Maybe in the wake of Paris that’s the way people feel, but it’s not close to what happened. If we can’t remember things correctly, even in the video age, things are going to get ugly fast in this country.”
Chapter 10 was written on December 10, 2015 and is titled: It’s Too Late to Turn Off Trump. In it, Taibbi describes the pandering to Trump that was evident on the Morning Joe news/talk TV show broadcast by MSNBC. During the show, host Joe Scarborough compared Trump to John McCain in 2008, with his Straight Talk Express. Trump already had the TV news media in his pocket.
In Chapter 11, Taibbi returns to the inane set of rules for a drinking game to be played during a televised Republican candidates’ debate. It adds nothing to the book.
Chapter 12 addresses Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, the very large Wall Street investment bank. In the article, Taibbi refers to Blankfein as a “Vampire Squid” and the “Chief Executive Cephalopod” of the bank. In addition to Blankfein, the author also takes on Timothy Geithner (former Secretary of the Treasury) and former President Bill Clinton, lumping them together as a clique with common goals and objectives.
Taibbi returns to addressing the TV media in Chapter 13 when he describes the groveling and brown-nosing of Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski when dealing with Trump on their morning talk/news TV show on MSNBC. Unfortunately for them, their off-camera conversations with Trump were caught on tape and released to the public through the LA Times.
Chapter 14 was written on February 24, 2016. It is titled: How America Made Trump Unstoppable. After attending a Trump rally in New Hampshire and seeing how Trump supporters were instructed to treat protestors, the author comments that “In a Trump presidency, there will be free tar and feathers provided at the executive’s every public address.” Then, Taibbi goes on to further describe the corruption of the election process by pointing out that the complicity of the television news and entertainment industries, and the raising of huge amounts of campaign moneys means that “Nine out of 10 times in America, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And those candidates then owe the most favors.” He elaborates further by adding: “Meaning that for the pleasure of being able to watch insincere campaign coverage on TV for free, we end up having to pay inflated Medicare drug prices, fund bank bailouts with our taxes, let billionaires pay 17 percent tax rates, and suffer a thousand other indignities.”
On the next page, the author insightfully says that: “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.” On the very next page, the author makes another prediction: “You think the media sucks now? Just wait until reporters have to kiss a brass Trump-sphinx before they enter the White House press room.” Recently, Trump and his Press Secretary Sean Spicer banned reporters representing several news outlets from attending White House press briefings. These outlets included such notable news sources as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Politico, BuzzFeed, and the esteemed BBC, along with the Guardian.
On March 1, 2016, Matt Taibbi wrote the article that became Chapter 15 of this book. Titled: Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Donald Trump, it is a caustic review of the Bush years in the White House. In response to the wails of GOP insiders to the effect that Trump’s ascendency would mark the beginning of the end for the Republican Party, Mr. Taibbi points out that “. . . Trump isn’t the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today’s nightmare possible.”
In Chapter 16, the author deals with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Titled: Why Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton, the chapter talks about the changes that affected the Democratic Party after the disastrous campaign of George McGovern in 1972, along with the big election loss of Walter Mondale in 1984, and how those events subsequently shaped the modern Democratic Party. It was written on March 25, 2016.
Chapter 17 was written on May 18, 2016. It is titled: RIP,GOP: How Trump’s Campaign Is Killing the Republican Party. In the author’s view, the modern Republican party died right after the 2016 Indiana Republican primary election when Donald Trump beat Ted Cruz. In his victory speech, Trump praised Reince Priebus, Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Taibbi went on to say: “The crowd roared. The RNC had kissed Trump’s ring. That was it, right there, the death of the modern Republican Party.”
The author makes a very good case for the fact that, at this point, the Republican Party had split into two Republican Parties. “One led by Trump, was triumphant at the ballot, rapidly accruing party converts, and headed for Cleveland (site of the Republican National Convention) for what . . . was sure to be the yuugest, most obscene, most joyfully tacky tribute to a single person ever seen in the television age.” In describing the other half of the Party, Taibbi goes on to say: “The other Republican Party was revealed in the end to be a surprisingly small collection of uptight lawyers, financiers, and Beltway intellectuals who’d just seen their chosen candidate, the $100 million Jeb Bush, muster all of four delegates in the presidential race.”
On June 9, 2016, the author wrote the article that was to become Chapter 18 of the book. Titled: Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons from Their Brush with Bernie, the chapter tells us how the Democrats failed to take any lessons from the 2016 elections, and how constituents are disdained in Democratic Congressional offices. He points out how the party elders believe that Bernie Sanders’ popularity as a candidate was an anomaly, not to be repeated in any future elections.
Written on June 30, 2016, Chapter 19 of the book is titled: In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears. It is subtitled: Fears of demagoguery are provoking a frightening swing in the other direction. In this chapter, Taibbi describes a reflexive reaction to the rise of Trump. He quotes people who are important in the Republican establishment as saying that the problem in America is that we have “too much” democracy. He points out that, although we have periodic elections that make us believe that we have self-rule, the reality is that “we can only be allowed to choose between candidates carefully screened by wealthy donors. Nobody without a billion dollars and the approval of a half-dozen giant media companies has any chance at high office.”
Chapter 20 was first written on July 22, 2016. It is titled: Trump’s Appetite for Destruction: How Trump’s Disastrous Convention Doomed the GOP. It is subtitled: Republican National Convention made a joke of American democracy. In this chapter, Mr. Taibbi relates his perceptions of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
With the 2016 presidential election less than three months away, Matt Taibbi wrote another dispatch from the campaign trail on August 15, 2016, and it became Chapter 21 of this book. The chapter is titled: The Summer of the Media Shill, and it is subtitled: Campaign 2016 won’t just have lasting implications for American politics. It’s obliterated what was left of our news media. Once again, the author shows us his amazing prescience.
Chapter 22 was written on September 6, 2016, and is titled: How Donald Trump Lost His Mojo. Primarily, the chapter describes Trump’s rants, raves and campaign speeches subsequent to the Convention, and how his shift in tone resulted from his increased use of a teleprompter and pre-written texts prepared by his campaign staff. It made him appear confused and indecisive.
The next chapter of the book (Chapter 23) was apparently written the day after the previous chapter: September 7, 2016. It is titled: The Unconquerable Trump. The main theme of the chapter seems to be Taibbi’s admission that he was wrong in his chapter about Trump losing his mojo. He wrote this dispatch in response to a CNN poll that had shown Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton. He was mystified, and he goes into a lot of detail about that in the chapter.
By October of 2016, the presidential campaign had reached a fever pitch. Taibbi wrote another dispatch (Chapter 24) on October 16, 2016 and titled it: The Failure and Fury of Donald Trump. The chapter is subtitled: 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. The primary theme of the chapter is an annual event hosted by Republican Congressman and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. The event is called the “GOP Fall Fest,” and is held in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. The author’s prescience failed him this time, however. In the last paragraph of the chapter, Taibbi asserts: “Trump can’t win.” But Trump did win, and this shows (again) the dangers of journalists making prognostications.
Chapter 25 was written two days after the election (presumably after the author had begun to recover from his grief). On November 10, Taibbi wrote the chapter titled: President Trump: How America Got It So Wrong. The subtitle on this one is: Journalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump presidency – now, we all must pay the price. Confirming the suspicions of many perceptive Americans, he pointed out that: “Whenever we [journalists] sought insight into the motives and tendencies of this elusive creature, our first calls were always to other eggheads like ourselves. We talked to pollsters, think-tankers, academics, former campaign strategists, party spokes hacks, even other journalists. Day after day, our political talk shows consisted of one geek in a suit interviewing another geek in a suit about the behavior of pipe-fitters and store clerks and cops in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia.”
The last chapter of the book (Chapter 26) was written on November 18, 2016, ten days after the election. It is titled: President Obama’s Last Stand, and is subtitled: Even Obama’s critics will soon have plenty of reason to appreciate him. In this chapter, Taibbi describes the greatness of President Barack Obama in maintaining his equanimity “in the face of absurd accusations and vicious rumor-mongering” propagated by the now-President, Donald Trump, about Barack Obama not being born in the United States, among other things. “The birther controversy was racism and profiling elevated to a Wagnerian level: Here was a black man who had made his way to the Oval Office, and a giant portion of the population still considered him to be literally trespassing.” The author goes on to assert: “From a personality standpoint, Obama is everything Trump isn’t. He is in control of his emotions, thick-skinned, self-aware, ingratiating, strategic, and temperamentally (if not politically) consistent. A striking quality of Obama as President is that he did his job without seeming to need to take credit for things all of the time, which kept the political price down on many of his decisions.” Taibbi’s concluding words of the chapter are: “At a time when a lot of Americans feel they have little to be proud of, we should think about our outgoing President, whose humanity and greatness are probably only just now coming into true focus.”
The author wrote a brief epilog to this book, but he didn’t write it after he wrote the final chapter, but the day before: one day after the election. He wrote it right after dawn on November 9, 2016, and he says, “I’m in shock. Right up until the end, I didn’t believe America would actually do it.” He concludes by saying that “Trump’s election marks the end of an era.” He tells us that the era “began back on August 28,1963 with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I have a Dream speech, establishing no matter how incomplete, no matter how unfulfilled, the template for 50 years of race relations.”
Also in the epilog, the author takes on the alt-right, its political philosophies and the tactics of Lenin it used to gain its objectives. He quotes one of their books (their “bible,” in fact) as saying that, although the alt-right is primarily made up of college-educated men, it purports to sympathize with the working class. The alt-right claims that the Left hates them because they are dangerously bright, but they insist that they’re not skinheads. As Trump voiced their central philosophy: “I love the uneducated.”
The author’s uncanny prescience in seeing the candidate Donald Trump for what he really was and is, for seeing the news media for what it was and is, and for seeing the American electorate for what it is, was truly remarkable, especially since he made his predictions as early as 2015. As I hope I’ve shown in this review, the author wrote this book contemporaneously in 2015 and 2016 as a series of press dispatches from the campaign trail. Over the 26 Chapters I have discussed, he has shown a surprising amount of consistency in his observations and his analyses, especially regarding the news media, the Republican Party, and Donald Trump.
One thing I will say is that Matt Taibbi has been very liberal with his criticism of the new media, and especially so in this book. If you are interested in the American political process, and if you are wondering just exactly how Donald Trump managed to become President of the United States, wonder no more. Read this book. It will tell you everything you need to know.
I did not enjoy the book so much as I appreciated it. The author clearly did not write it as a work of entertainment, but as a quantum of information that would be valuable to an informed American citizen and voter. In his introduction to the book, Taibbi makes a pretty solid case for the moral, ethical and intellectual bankruptcy of the news media in America, and especially of the electronic news media (think television). This, in spite of the fact that he, himself, is a journalist who writes extensively for Rolling Stone magazine.
This book was difficult to review because it is comprised (primarily) of twenty-six different (presumably independently-copyrighted) dispatches that were written at the behest of Mr. Taibbi’s employer: Rolling Stone magazine. I felt it best, then, to review each chapter independently
Chapter 1, titled The Great Derangement Redux, was taken from a book the author wrote about ten years ago called The great Derangement. The chapter was taken from the introduction to that book. In it, Taibbi describes just how the alternate reality that has captured both the right and left wings of American political thought developed in our country after about 2004.
Chapter 2 of the book was originally written and published on August 12, 2015 and is titled: Inside the GOP Clown Car. It is a description of the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign on the Republican side. In the chapter, Taibbi describes the extraordinary influence exerted by the major television networks (including Fox) when they forced candidates to attain certain minimum poll numbers in order to be able to participate in the televised debates. This left the candidates in positions of trying to outdo each other with wildly crazy assertions that would fire up the emotions of a sufficient number of Republican voters to make their required approval numbers, and so their debate participation would be ensured. It worked for those candidates who adopted the strategy. Unfortunately, Donald Trump, as a former TV reality show star, knew the process better than any of them, and he outdid all of them, eventually gaining the nomination of the Republican Party.
Chapter 3, written and published originally on August 21, 2015, is titled, Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny. It is subtitled, Win or lose, Trump’s campaign threatens to unleash the Great American Stupid. The author describes the moment when Donald Trump stopped being funny as being when he defended two brothers from South Boston who beat up a homeless Hispanic man and then told police that Donald Trump was right and all these people needed to be deported. Trump declined to condemn the violence, instead telling reporters that “. . . the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again.”
Chapter 4 was written on September 4, 2015. It is titled: The Republicans Are Officially the Party of White Paranoia. This essay is a fairly concise and accurate description of how the Republican Party embraced the absurd right-wing notion that the white race is the one being persecuted in America today. He provides data to back up this assertion, and some of it would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. He describes how voters are consistently “conned” by their parties, and especially Republican voters.
Chapter 5 was written on September 8, 2015 and is a meaningless article about choosing which actors should be cast in which Republican candidate parts should a movie or TV show be made about them. It did not, in my opinion, substantively contribute to the book.
Chapter 6 was written a week later, on September 16, 2015, and is a set of rules for a drinking game to be played in a bar by watchers of the televised Republican presidential campaign debate. It added nothing to the book.
In Chapter 7, Taibbi became serious again. This chapter is titled The Case For Bernie Sanders. It was written on November 3, 2015. In it, he describes the candidate and his early days in the campaign. Most striking were the final words of the chapter: “More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It’s the rest of us who are lost.”
Chapter 8 brings the author back to the Republican Clown Car, where he continues his analyses of the lesser-known Republicans in the race. It was written on November 17, 2015. The subtitle of the chapter is: On the campaign trail with the most dishonest, bumbling and underqualified pack of presidential candidates in history. The article was written while the author was covering the candidates as they campaigned in New Hampshire, and it is a fairly serious analysis of their positions on various issues.
On November 25, 2015, Taibbi wrote an article titled: America Is Too Dumb for TV News, and it is Chapter 9 of this book. The piece is centered around Trump’s assertion that he saw (on television) thousands (and thousands) of people in Newark, New Jersey cheering, dancing and celebrating when the twin towers collapsed on 9/11 of 2001. Other right-wingers claimed that it was in Paterson, New Jersey, and not Newark, but the author analyzes the matter and reports what Trump probably actually saw. Never mind that it never happened as asserted, Trump would not retract it, and a good many Americans believed him (and still do). The author concludes that we can’t handle the truth by saying: “Maybe in the wake of Paris that’s the way people feel, but it’s not close to what happened. If we can’t remember things correctly, even in the video age, things are going to get ugly fast in this country.”
Chapter 10 was written on December 10, 2015 and is titled: It’s Too Late to Turn Off Trump. In it, Taibbi describes the pandering to Trump that was evident on the Morning Joe news/talk TV show broadcast by MSNBC. During the show, host Joe Scarborough compared Trump to John McCain in 2008, with his Straight Talk Express. Trump already had the TV news media in his pocket.
In Chapter 11, Taibbi returns to the inane set of rules for a drinking game to be played during a televised Republican candidates’ debate. It adds nothing to the book.
Chapter 12 addresses Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, the very large Wall Street investment bank. In the article, Taibbi refers to Blankfein as a “Vampire Squid” and the “Chief Executive Cephalopod” of the bank. In addition to Blankfein, the author also takes on Timothy Geithner (former Secretary of the Treasury) and former President Bill Clinton, lumping them together as a clique with common goals and objectives.
Taibbi returns to addressing the TV media in Chapter 13 when he describes the groveling and brown-nosing of Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski when dealing with Trump on their morning talk/news TV show on MSNBC. Unfortunately for them, their off-camera conversations with Trump were caught on tape and released to the public through the LA Times.
Chapter 14 was written on February 24, 2016. It is titled: How America Made Trump Unstoppable. After attending a Trump rally in New Hampshire and seeing how Trump supporters were instructed to treat protestors, the author comments that “In a Trump presidency, there will be free tar and feathers provided at the executive’s every public address.” Then, Taibbi goes on to further describe the corruption of the election process by pointing out that the complicity of the television news and entertainment industries, and the raising of huge amounts of campaign moneys means that “Nine out of 10 times in America, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And those candidates then owe the most favors.” He elaborates further by adding: “Meaning that for the pleasure of being able to watch insincere campaign coverage on TV for free, we end up having to pay inflated Medicare drug prices, fund bank bailouts with our taxes, let billionaires pay 17 percent tax rates, and suffer a thousand other indignities.”
On the next page, the author insightfully says that: “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.” On the very next page, the author makes another prediction: “You think the media sucks now? Just wait until reporters have to kiss a brass Trump-sphinx before they enter the White House press room.” Recently, Trump and his Press Secretary Sean Spicer banned reporters representing several news outlets from attending White House press briefings. These outlets included such notable news sources as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Politico, BuzzFeed, and the esteemed BBC, along with the Guardian.
On March 1, 2016, Matt Taibbi wrote the article that became Chapter 15 of this book. Titled: Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Donald Trump, it is a caustic review of the Bush years in the White House. In response to the wails of GOP insiders to the effect that Trump’s ascendency would mark the beginning of the end for the Republican Party, Mr. Taibbi points out that “. . . Trump isn’t the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today’s nightmare possible.”
In Chapter 16, the author deals with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Titled: Why Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton, the chapter talks about the changes that affected the Democratic Party after the disastrous campaign of George McGovern in 1972, along with the big election loss of Walter Mondale in 1984, and how those events subsequently shaped the modern Democratic Party. It was written on March 25, 2016.
Chapter 17 was written on May 18, 2016. It is titled: RIP,GOP: How Trump’s Campaign Is Killing the Republican Party. In the author’s view, the modern Republican party died right after the 2016 Indiana Republican primary election when Donald Trump beat Ted Cruz. In his victory speech, Trump praised Reince Priebus, Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Taibbi went on to say: “The crowd roared. The RNC had kissed Trump’s ring. That was it, right there, the death of the modern Republican Party.”
The author makes a very good case for the fact that, at this point, the Republican Party had split into two Republican Parties. “One led by Trump, was triumphant at the ballot, rapidly accruing party converts, and headed for Cleveland (site of the Republican National Convention) for what . . . was sure to be the yuugest, most obscene, most joyfully tacky tribute to a single person ever seen in the television age.” In describing the other half of the Party, Taibbi goes on to say: “The other Republican Party was revealed in the end to be a surprisingly small collection of uptight lawyers, financiers, and Beltway intellectuals who’d just seen their chosen candidate, the $100 million Jeb Bush, muster all of four delegates in the presidential race.”
On June 9, 2016, the author wrote the article that was to become Chapter 18 of the book. Titled: Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons from Their Brush with Bernie, the chapter tells us how the Democrats failed to take any lessons from the 2016 elections, and how constituents are disdained in Democratic Congressional offices. He points out how the party elders believe that Bernie Sanders’ popularity as a candidate was an anomaly, not to be repeated in any future elections.
Written on June 30, 2016, Chapter 19 of the book is titled: In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears. It is subtitled: Fears of demagoguery are provoking a frightening swing in the other direction. In this chapter, Taibbi describes a reflexive reaction to the rise of Trump. He quotes people who are important in the Republican establishment as saying that the problem in America is that we have “too much” democracy. He points out that, although we have periodic elections that make us believe that we have self-rule, the reality is that “we can only be allowed to choose between candidates carefully screened by wealthy donors. Nobody without a billion dollars and the approval of a half-dozen giant media companies has any chance at high office.”
Chapter 20 was first written on July 22, 2016. It is titled: Trump’s Appetite for Destruction: How Trump’s Disastrous Convention Doomed the GOP. It is subtitled: Republican National Convention made a joke of American democracy. In this chapter, Mr. Taibbi relates his perceptions of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
With the 2016 presidential election less than three months away, Matt Taibbi wrote another dispatch from the campaign trail on August 15, 2016, and it became Chapter 21 of this book. The chapter is titled: The Summer of the Media Shill, and it is subtitled: Campaign 2016 won’t just have lasting implications for American politics. It’s obliterated what was left of our news media. Once again, the author shows us his amazing prescience.
Chapter 22 was written on September 6, 2016, and is titled: How Donald Trump Lost His Mojo. Primarily, the chapter describes Trump’s rants, raves and campaign speeches subsequent to the Convention, and how his shift in tone resulted from his increased use of a teleprompter and pre-written texts prepared by his campaign staff. It made him appear confused and indecisive.
The next chapter of the book (Chapter 23) was apparently written the day after the previous chapter: September 7, 2016. It is titled: The Unconquerable Trump. The main theme of the chapter seems to be Taibbi’s admission that he was wrong in his chapter about Trump losing his mojo. He wrote this dispatch in response to a CNN poll that had shown Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton. He was mystified, and he goes into a lot of detail about that in the chapter.
By October of 2016, the presidential campaign had reached a fever pitch. Taibbi wrote another dispatch (Chapter 24) on October 16, 2016 and titled it: The Failure and Fury of Donald Trump. The chapter is subtitled: 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. The primary theme of the chapter is an annual event hosted by Republican Congressman and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. The event is called the “GOP Fall Fest,” and is held in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. The author’s prescience failed him this time, however. In the last paragraph of the chapter, Taibbi asserts: “Trump can’t win.” But Trump did win, and this shows (again) the dangers of journalists making prognostications.
Chapter 25 was written two days after the election (presumably after the author had begun to recover from his grief). On November 10, Taibbi wrote the chapter titled: President Trump: How America Got It So Wrong. The subtitle on this one is: Journalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump presidency – now, we all must pay the price. Confirming the suspicions of many perceptive Americans, he pointed out that: “Whenever we [journalists] sought insight into the motives and tendencies of this elusive creature, our first calls were always to other eggheads like ourselves. We talked to pollsters, think-tankers, academics, former campaign strategists, party spokes hacks, even other journalists. Day after day, our political talk shows consisted of one geek in a suit interviewing another geek in a suit about the behavior of pipe-fitters and store clerks and cops in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia.”
The last chapter of the book (Chapter 26) was written on November 18, 2016, ten days after the election. It is titled: President Obama’s Last Stand, and is subtitled: Even Obama’s critics will soon have plenty of reason to appreciate him. In this chapter, Taibbi describes the greatness of President Barack Obama in maintaining his equanimity “in the face of absurd accusations and vicious rumor-mongering” propagated by the now-President, Donald Trump, about Barack Obama not being born in the United States, among other things. “The birther controversy was racism and profiling elevated to a Wagnerian level: Here was a black man who had made his way to the Oval Office, and a giant portion of the population still considered him to be literally trespassing.” The author goes on to assert: “From a personality standpoint, Obama is everything Trump isn’t. He is in control of his emotions, thick-skinned, self-aware, ingratiating, strategic, and temperamentally (if not politically) consistent. A striking quality of Obama as President is that he did his job without seeming to need to take credit for things all of the time, which kept the political price down on many of his decisions.” Taibbi’s concluding words of the chapter are: “At a time when a lot of Americans feel they have little to be proud of, we should think about our outgoing President, whose humanity and greatness are probably only just now coming into true focus.”
The author wrote a brief epilog to this book, but he didn’t write it after he wrote the final chapter, but the day before: one day after the election. He wrote it right after dawn on November 9, 2016, and he says, “I’m in shock. Right up until the end, I didn’t believe America would actually do it.” He concludes by saying that “Trump’s election marks the end of an era.” He tells us that the era “began back on August 28,1963 with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I have a Dream speech, establishing no matter how incomplete, no matter how unfulfilled, the template for 50 years of race relations.”
Also in the epilog, the author takes on the alt-right, its political philosophies and the tactics of Lenin it used to gain its objectives. He quotes one of their books (their “bible,” in fact) as saying that, although the alt-right is primarily made up of college-educated men, it purports to sympathize with the working class. The alt-right claims that the Left hates them because they are dangerously bright, but they insist that they’re not skinheads. As Trump voiced their central philosophy: “I love the uneducated.”
The author’s uncanny prescience in seeing the candidate Donald Trump for what he really was and is, for seeing the news media for what it was and is, and for seeing the American electorate for what it is, was truly remarkable, especially since he made his predictions as early as 2015. As I hope I’ve shown in this review, the author wrote this book contemporaneously in 2015 and 2016 as a series of press dispatches from the campaign trail. Over the 26 Chapters I have discussed, he has shown a surprising amount of consistency in his observations and his analyses, especially regarding the news media, the Republican Party, and Donald Trump.
One thing I will say is that Matt Taibbi has been very liberal with his criticism of the new media, and especially so in this book. If you are interested in the American political process, and if you are wondering just exactly how Donald Trump managed to become President of the United States, wonder no more. Read this book. It will tell you everything you need to know.
February 18, 2019
[**Warning: this text may contain spoilers.**]
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]September 24, 2018
No sé si Dios lo tendrá así,
Por algún servicio desagradable que he hecho,
Eso, en su destino secreto, fuera de mi sangre
Él criará venganza y un azote para mí;
Pero tú haces en tus pasajes de la vida
Hazme creer que solo estás marcado
Por la ardiente venganza y la vara del cielo
Para castigar mis maltratamientos. Dime otra cosa,
¿Podrían tales deseos desordenados y bajos?
Tales pobres, tales desnudos, tales lascivos, intentos tan malos,
Tales placeres estériles, sociedad grosera,
Como eres emparejado e injertado,
Acompaña la grandeza de tu sangre
¿Y mantener su nivel con tu corazón principesco?
Por algún servicio desagradable que he hecho,
Eso, en su destino secreto, fuera de mi sangre
Él criará venganza y un azote para mí;
Pero tú haces en tus pasajes de la vida
Hazme creer que solo estás marcado
Por la ardiente venganza y la vara del cielo
Para castigar mis maltratamientos. Dime otra cosa,
¿Podrían tales deseos desordenados y bajos?
Tales pobres, tales desnudos, tales lascivos, intentos tan malos,
Tales placeres estériles, sociedad grosera,
Como eres emparejado e injertado,
Acompaña la grandeza de tu sangre
¿Y mantener su nivel con tu corazón principesco?
December 22, 2017
NIce book
May 7, 2018
Very good!!!!!!!!
Read
January 22, 2019Modified review
Read
February 26, 2020Good book
Read
March 12, 2020test review
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Read
December 10, 2020Good
Read
September 21, 2021kekw poop
Want to read
April 1, 2022Good
Read
May 11, 2022Good
Displaying 1 - 27 of 74 reviews