Matt Taibbi

Mike Huckabee Is Not a Sane Man

Posted Thu, 11/29/2007 - 17:23 by bartley
in

I'd come to get my first up-close glimpse of the man Arkansans call Huck, about whom I knew very little -- beyond the fact that he was far behind in the polls and was said to be very religious. In an impromptu address to a small crowd, Huckabee muttered some stay-the-course nonsense about Iraq and then, when he was finished, sought me out, apparently having been briefed beforehand that Rolling Stone was in the house.

"I'm glad you're here," he told me. "I finally get to tell someone who cares about Keith Richards."
[...]
But all the attention on his salesmanship skills obscures the real significance of his rise within the Republican Party. Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism. Rather than employing the patented Bush-Rove tactic of using abortion and gay rights to hoodwink low-income Christians into supporting patrician, pro-corporate policies, Huckabee is a bigger-government Republican who emphasizes prison reform and poverty relief. In the world of GOP politics, he represents something entirely new -- a cross between John Edwards and Jerry Falwell, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher who actually seems to give a shit about the working poor.

But Huckabee is also something else: full-blown nuts, a Christian goofball of the highest order. He believes the Earth may be only 6,000 years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from "primates" and thinks America wouldn't need so much Mexican labor if we allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce.

Matt Taibbi's Yeltsin obit

Posted Wed, 04/25/2007 - 16:27 by bartley
in


The swelling Swiss bank accounts that Boris Nikolayevich lived off of as he drank his gurgling elderly self to death in the last eight years were just a modern version of the stolen haystacks the lazy Butka peasants slept on eighty years ago. Like them, Yeltsin stole whatever he could get his hands on and then lived out his days rolling in his bounty like a human pig -- because a sovok doesn't know how to enjoy anything except to roll around in it like a pig. Yeltsin was just better at it than the rest of his peers. And he survived longer than the rest of them because his "life" was, until today, just a biological technicality -- it is hard to kill what has, inside, been dead all along.
[...]
I ran a cover in my Moscow newspaper The eXile that showed a picture of a wobbling Yeltsin over the headline, "Die Already!!!" But he didn't. He survived and lived to turn over power to the next vampire, the Thief Mark VII, Vladimir Putin. Then he disappeared somewhere to spend seven glorious years drinking himself to death -- a Soviet version of Leaving Las Vegas, set in Switzerland and the south of France. Like all the great Russian monsters, like Stalin and Lenin and Brezhnyev and Andropov and a million other czars big and small, he died peacefully of natural causes while murders raged all around him, a piece of fat noiselessly clogging his heart while he slept in his stolen bed.

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