Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Taibbi's "Low Post"

After what seems like an eternity, Matt Taibbi has returned with a weekly web-only column, with pieces on Lamont-Lieberman, David Brooks, the DLC & Yuppie Paranoia, and Hillary Clinton:

Beltway pros like Hillary have long understood that in tough times, the vast majority of disgruntled Americans would rather find a way to convince themselves that their party agrees with them than face the fact that they never had any choice at all on a wide range of crucial issues. They're willing to be swayed by a carefully scripted display of canned anger like Hillary's outburst in the Senate [against Donald Rumsfeld] because the alternatives -- third-party politics, grass-roots activism, dropping out of society altogether -- are too exhausting and radical to even imagine. Because getting to the root causes of things is so hard and scary, they'll settle for punishing an unpopular politician, even if it means electing his accomplice.

So they'll vote, even for a factory-produced fraud like Hillary Clinton, because voting is easy. Much easier than doing something.