Matt Taibbi
April 20, 2009 - Smirking Chimp
.....
So as could be expected I was deluged with mail this weekend, most of it
from outraged Michelle Malkin readers, and nearly all of whom sounded the
same basic theme: that I was a bad, bad person for issuing ad hominem
attacks and should be discredited for "not having my facts straight" and for
being too much of a coward to "debate the real issues."
Which is interesting, except that no one actually found an incorrect fact in
anything I wrote, and no one seemed very interesting in debating any issues.
Instead, about 99% of the mail I got focused on the name-calling and the
"childish" sexual innuendoes. I would say that is my fault, that I should
have known that once you start dropping sack onto another columnist's face
in public you can pretty much forgo any expectation of being taken seriously
-- except that when dealing with teabagger types, you know in advance you're
not going to be taken seriously anyway. So the incentive to be restrained in
one's response (particularly when the people you're arguing with are running
around screaming about the fascist threat with tea bags dangling absurdly
from their hat-brims) is not particularly strong.
But the real reason nobody takes the teabaggers seriously is that they have
no answers to several enormous holes in the parody of a protest argument
they tried to make last week. I got nearly two hundred letters this weekend
and not one of them had an answer for any of the following:
1. If you're so horrified by debt and spending, where were your tea parties
when George Bush was adding $4 trillion to the federal deficit?
2. If you're so outraged by the bailouts, where were your tea parties when
the bailouts were first instituted by Henry Paulson and George Bush last
fall?
3. If you're so troubled by pork, where were your tea parties when the
number and cost of congressional earmarks rose spectacularly in each year of
Republican congressional rule between 1996 and the end of the Republican
majority in 2006?
A number of people wrote in to me and complained that the only reason I'm
not seeing eye to eye with them is that I have no children and therefore
don't care about the debt burden in the future. Oh, please. There's only one
reason we're talking about "the children" in this debate at all: because 95%
of the people protesting the tax outrage will actually be getting a tax
break. Until you can plausibly answer the question of why future government
debt burdens didn't bother you during the last eight years or massive
deficit spending, that whole "O the children!" bullshit has to be put back
on the shelf.
Anyway, I'd really be curious to hear some answers to these questions.
Because if the spending argument is moot, if the bailout argument is moot,
if the pork argument is moot, and the tax argument is moot, then what you're
left with is arguing that it's not waste when we spend billions handing out
soccer balls in the Anbar province, but it is waste when we build bridges in
Peoria and Tulsa.
The only thing even remotely resembling a logical justification for any of
this was the argument, made by several letter-writers, that the fact that
the teabaggers are hypocrites doesn't necessarily make them wrong about the
Obama budget. If that point is conceded at the top, I think most Americans
would be willing to discuss the rest of it, because that's a discussion
worth having. The problem is that once you admit that you sat on your hands
during a period of unprecedented waste for eight years, it makes it very
hard to take when you start calling yourselves victims of fascism and
tyranny and threatening to secede in year nine, which just happens to be the
first year of a new regime you oppose politically. In other words if you
concede the hypocrisy, the hysteria automatically becomes obnoxious and
wrong. So I don't think the "My hypocrisy is irrelevant" line holds water,
not unless you can answer one more question:
4. Would you be protesting any of this bullshit if this had been George W.
Bush's budget?
.....
I'm a political reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, a sports columnist for
Men's Journal, and I also write books for a Random House imprint called
Spiegel and Grau. My main ambition in life is to someday strangle that chick
in the Progressive Insurance commercials who is always waving her hands back
and forth and screaming, "Discount!!!" Anyone who has suggestions for how to
dump her body without being caught is welcome to write to me. I already have
plenty of plastic and a staple-gun.
