A friend of mine told me politics is a reality show for MAGAts. A lot of Trump's appeal to the Republican voters makes more sense when I think of it that way. I think that's the case Taibbi is making.
You’ve made me think of a new post. The presidential campaign is the national job interview. The only thing that should matter is what the candidates say they’ll do in office if they win. Covering this like it’s a Comedy Central version of ‘American Idol’ is a terrible idea.
I'd read that. My brother and I, during the Trump Administration, tried to separate out Trump's odious behavior from policy. I don't think the average NYT reader, much less than the average citizen, knows Trump is going to pull out of NATO (https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4136979-bolton-trump-second-term-nato/). Cover that NYT, not the horse race.
Donald Trump hasn't said that he would pull out of NATO in his second term.
John Bolton said that Trump would pull out of NATO in his second term.
That's a crucial difference.
John Bolton has even less credibility with me than Donald Trump. Bolton can't even meet that low bar.
However, in stark contrast to Donald Trump, John Bolton mysteriously retains what appears to be permanent status as an Eminence of Gravitas within the corridors of entrenched power that honeycomb Official Washington. Thankfully, the voices of moderation there have thus far been able to overrule the worst of his Warmongering (I use the term advisedly.) But Bolton remains assured that one day soon, his American Crackpot Realism Militarist views will prevail.
fwiw, in both 2016 and 2020, I acceded to pragmatic reality of being cornered into voting for Trump's D opponents- even though if I had ever possessed any established influence in the selection of Democratic Party Presidential nominees, neither Hillary or Joe would have been asked to the first interview.
That said: strictly as a hypothetical exercise in mirthless humor, if a presidential contest came down to Trump vs. Bolton, I'd vote for Trump in a heartbeat.
It's been widely reported, by people not named John Bolton, that Trump wants to pull out of NATO. Exiting NATO was an example of things Trump has said or has been reported to say that he's going to do in a second term. You wrote a whole comment responding to my comment about someone I didn't even mention. Go away.
You linked to an article by John Bolton- a link that I read, in the interest of find out what you might be referring to. All I got was what John Bolton said.
That counts as a "mention." You're responsible for the reference support you supply.
My 2/5/2024 keyword search of the key phases [ "donald trump" "pull out of NATO" ] yields these results
News stories about Trump's intention to pull the US out of NATO membership that go back to the spring of 2016, when the allegation was lodged by Hillary Clinton. According to Factcheck:
FactCheck Posts
What’s Trump’s Position on NATO? By D'Angelo Gore
Posted on May 11, 2016
"Hillary Clinton went too far when she claimed that Donald Trump said “we should pull out of NATO.” Trump has said that he would “certainly look at” pulling the United States out of the international security alliance, because it is “obsolete” and “is costing us a fortune.” But the Clinton campaign provided nothing indicating that Trump advocates pulling out now..."
As we know, Trump won the 2016 election, and did not pull the US out of NATO. Even though he could have, the same way he pulled out of the Kyoto accords. It's worth noting that Vladimir Putin didn't invade Ukraine during Trump's 1/2016-1/2021 term, either. And that Ukraine ended up getting more military aid from Trump than from Obama or Bush. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-trump-biden-ukraine-military-aid-1.6371378
The allegation was made again, in July 2018:
Reuter's investigated the accusation and concluded that it was untrue:
"BRUSSELS (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump did not threaten to pull out of NATO at the second day of a summit on Thursday, despite a tough rebuke of allies for spending too little on defense, two NATO sources told Reuters.
"...After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, member countries agreed to boost defense budgets and “move toward” spending 2% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024. The U.S. spends about 3.4% of its GDP on defense.
Since Trump took office, European allies and Canada have added $41 billion to their defense budgets. By the end of next year, this will rise to $100 billion, Stoltenberg said. Germany, however, remains the main target of Trump’s ire because it now plans to spend 1.5% by 2024, which is lower than the 2% guideline..."
Trump's intentions in regard to his bluster on NATO were always clear to some of us: he was out to drive a hard bargain. As it happens, he got some success with his threats. That's one of the few things that Trump is competent at- and incidentally a wheelhouse that his recent predecessors have been notably reticent to enter. It's an asset that appeals to his following immensely- and one that kneejerk Trump haters can only spin by Making Him Wrong, even when he got a positive result. I've never thought that Trump was Presidential material, but at least I'm able to give him credit where credit is due. It also needs to be pointed out that complaints from American news media pundits about the US footing too much of the bill for NATO go back to the Cold War era. Trump may be the first President to have ever taken that grievance seriously. The bottom line is that Trump had four years to pull out of NATO (which conceivably would have considerably bolstered the prospects of success for a Russian invasion of Ukraine.) But Trump didn't do that. And Putin didn't invade Ukraine until nearly two years after Trump left office, either.
Matt Taibbi has been widely misunderstood in regard to his coverage of Donald Trump, and the history of partisan political attacks aimed at him. He's spent nearly eight years trying to tell the Democrats that concocting empty accusations and slipshod insinuations about Donald Trump is a tactic that was practically guaranteed to backfire from the start. Ironically, Trump's weaknesses- outright vacancies, in some cases- would have allowed amply room for his opponents to bring strong challenges in order to discredit his competence on all sorts of issues. Even in terms of personal charisma, Trump's act gets old after a while. But compared to the ineptitude and insulation of bien pensant lifestyle liberal Democrats at connecting with ordinary working people, Trump comes across to his audiences like a wise old sage.
A streetwise response to Trump would have been to dim the spotlight on him. An authentically streetwise response to the GOP would have been to start LISTENING to the legitimate grievances of ordinary working people (instead of devising favors to do FOR them, without their input.) But the lawn-tennis liberals who fund and run Democratic Presidential campaigns are not streetwise. And their response was Panic. Panic that Trump organizers and supporters have been able to spin into their own set of extreme responses, including Sedition and Conspiracy To Subvert Democracy.
That's where we're at these days, this race to the bottom, about who's going to strike more fear into the Voters about what the Opposition would do if victorious. It would be a much more clear choice if only one side was going off the rails. But it's still happening. Which brings me back to the most recent Predictions of news reports in 2023 and 2024, that Trump Will Pull The US From NATO If Elected In 2024:
I can post more. They're all either re-posts of the same report, or they rely on the same story as their principal source:
Rolling Stone
Trump Plots to Pull Out of NATO — If He Doesn’t Get His Way
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley
October 23, 2023·6 min read
The original is behind a paywall, but it's found re-posted in the first Yahoo link (and elsewhere.)
As if that story- featuring comments by two unnamed sources inside the Trump campaign as its only new content- weren't enough, Rolling Stone went on print a follow-up story, featuring Biden's condemnation [I could only find a paywalled story, so far]:
Considered in terms of investigative journalism value, this is like bundling junk in tranches to sell as a CDO with a AAA rating. And if you're mad that I pointed out that it's both sleazy and incompetent to pass off that sort of weak-ass partisan propaganda as journalism, I can only imagine what you'll think of the American electorate when you read this:
‘Wow!’: NBC’s Kristen Welker Shocked By New ‘Truly Stunning’ Biden-Trump Poll
Lee Moran Updated Mon, February 5, 2024 at 7:12 AM EST·2 min read
"“When you ask folks, ‘Hey, if it’s the general election and it’s Trump versus Biden,’ in our poll, Donald Trump now leads Joe Biden by five points. Compare that to the last time we pulled back in November. Trump was ahead then, but it was only by two points.”
As it happens, I have my own concerns about a 2024 Trump Presidency- not on account of anything to do with NATO or Ukraine, but over my worries about Trump going back in to the Middle East with a series of moves that will end up in a full-scale war. I'm already worried about Biden's escalations over US military bases in Syria (where US troops are based in the hostile territory of a regime that we're actively involved in trying to overthrow with our, uh. proxies) and Iraq (where the Iraqi parliament has voted twice to expel US troops- once after Trump's assassination of Iranian General Suleimani, and again just a few weeks ago, a hint that the Biden administration has refused to take.) But at least Biden appears to be trying to thread some sort of needle in the Middle East.
My fears about Trump have nothing to do with NATO or Ukraine; they're about the possibility that no one seems to want to ask Trump about- about whether, if he were elected President and Commander-in-Chief in 2024, Donald Trump would favor ordering an all-out war against Iran.
It's also worth noting that Trump is tight buddies with Netanyahu, and Biden is not. If Netanyahu somehow manages to survive his political challenges into 2025, there's no telling what a Trump-Netanyahu/US-Israel alliance would do, in terms of increasing direct military involvement and widening the war in the Middle East.
The Achille's heel in that rationally ideal proposal is that the track record of accountability for US Presidents keeping their campaign promises is nil, once they're installed in office. The pattern is to keep the easiest promises (which are also coincidentally the most banal and trivial); partially keep a few more important ones; and blatantly ignore- or even perfidiously reverse- the boldest of their campaign promises. What are the voters going to do abut it? For both better and worse( as with this aspect) the US doesn't have a Parliamentary system. We're stuck with our Chief Executive for a four-year term.
More to the point, presidential candidates often make promises in their speeches that they know damn well they won't be able to keep, because of the power of their Congressional opposition to stop them.
Paradoxically, that fact accounts for my lack of alarm about Trump's hyperbolic rhetoric. If Trump were to be re-elected, he wouldn't be able to do even a small fraction of what he hints at doing (with a wink- don't you notice him winking? "what rubes!" It's keyfabe.) Trump's doing this to troll his fixated opponents. And they're still falling for it, as much as the most moon-eyed fraction of his supporters. Still giving him more publicity, free, than he could hope to buy.
(The grandiloquent expressions of high dudgeon and panic look like a PMC Academia thing, to me. The Trump Resistance and their media auxiliary thinks that they'll somehow be able to exert some crucial faculty-meeting pressure on Republicans, to Cancel him. All they're doing is helping to keep his name at the top of the headlines...I'm all in favor of investigations of Trump, but I view the fact that they're giving him high-profile exposure as an unwanted side effect. Certainly there's no need to supplement that with scare editorials and propaganda conjectures. Least of all by Robert Kagan, John Bolton, William Barr, William Kristol, or all of the other neocons out there currently trying to launder their reputations with hysterical pronouncements crafted to curry favor with the Trump Resistance.)
oh, come on. Both you and Karen have missed one of Matt Taibbi's most valid and important points: that for decades on end, American Politics has been increasingly crafted by the Luxury Legacy Media to be presented to the Public as a Reality Show. But none of the newsertainment showrunners planned on the possibility that a media-savvy interloper would be able to see the game, and then turn it to the benefit of his own personal political fortunes.
I think you're misreading Matt, to a great extent. My impression is that he's been saying the same thing to the Democratic Party establishment that I've been saying for well over a decade as a comment writer on Salon and on the Atlantic: The First Step Is To Admit That YOU Have A Problem.
That problem is not going to be solved by denial, or ad hominem attacks, or the distraction hypnosis of "look over there- [Republican candidate here, most recently Donald Trump]- Be Very Afraid!"
The Democrats need to Listen. They need to stop imagining that they can somehow control the narrative by narrowing it to a handful of the issues they're most comfortable with addressing, and then counting on success- or even viability- merely as a result of presenting an increasingly disillusioned and fed-up population of voters with a fait accomplit based around the single-choice fatal flaw of first-past-the-post voting, a ballot structure which permits both of the two major parties to base their appeal on scaring them about the prospects of a victory by opposing party- a raison d'etre that's decrepit and pathetic, and which shows no sign of improving.
The Republicans veered off into demagoguery long ago- "feeding red meat to their base", I think it's called. Telling people what they want to hear in defiance of the facts is disgraceful politics, but at least it's a tactic that's based on Listening to the voters.
The "leadership" of the Democrats, by contrast, are too busy trying to impress their well-heeled, "advanced degree" bien pensant peer group to realize that an increasing number of common ordinary working people are not buying what they're selling. Because the Democrats don't Listen. To the extent that the Democrats use a positive appeal, they're relying on the high-minded rhetorical pretense of offering something to everyone (without disturbing the material fortunes or luxury beliefs of their upper 10%)- and then not delivering on most of it (which see the earlier parenthesis), and whinging about their failures. Sometimes the whinging centers on how their own voters have failed them. That isn't getting anything for anybody. Except for maybe the people the Democrats are paying to run the same old playbook.
A friend of mine told me politics is a reality show for MAGAts. A lot of Trump's appeal to the Republican voters makes more sense when I think of it that way. I think that's the case Taibbi is making.
You’ve made me think of a new post. The presidential campaign is the national job interview. The only thing that should matter is what the candidates say they’ll do in office if they win. Covering this like it’s a Comedy Central version of ‘American Idol’ is a terrible idea.
I'd read that. My brother and I, during the Trump Administration, tried to separate out Trump's odious behavior from policy. I don't think the average NYT reader, much less than the average citizen, knows Trump is going to pull out of NATO (https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4136979-bolton-trump-second-term-nato/). Cover that NYT, not the horse race.
Donald Trump hasn't said that he would pull out of NATO in his second term.
John Bolton said that Trump would pull out of NATO in his second term.
That's a crucial difference.
John Bolton has even less credibility with me than Donald Trump. Bolton can't even meet that low bar.
However, in stark contrast to Donald Trump, John Bolton mysteriously retains what appears to be permanent status as an Eminence of Gravitas within the corridors of entrenched power that honeycomb Official Washington. Thankfully, the voices of moderation there have thus far been able to overrule the worst of his Warmongering (I use the term advisedly.) But Bolton remains assured that one day soon, his American Crackpot Realism Militarist views will prevail.
fwiw, in both 2016 and 2020, I acceded to pragmatic reality of being cornered into voting for Trump's D opponents- even though if I had ever possessed any established influence in the selection of Democratic Party Presidential nominees, neither Hillary or Joe would have been asked to the first interview.
That said: strictly as a hypothetical exercise in mirthless humor, if a presidential contest came down to Trump vs. Bolton, I'd vote for Trump in a heartbeat.
It's been widely reported, by people not named John Bolton, that Trump wants to pull out of NATO. Exiting NATO was an example of things Trump has said or has been reported to say that he's going to do in a second term. You wrote a whole comment responding to my comment about someone I didn't even mention. Go away.
You linked to an article by John Bolton- a link that I read, in the interest of find out what you might be referring to. All I got was what John Bolton said.
That counts as a "mention." You're responsible for the reference support you supply.
My 2/5/2024 keyword search of the key phases [ "donald trump" "pull out of NATO" ] yields these results
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22donald+trump%22+%22pull+out+of+nato%22&t=newext&atb=v336-1&ia=web
News stories about Trump's intention to pull the US out of NATO membership that go back to the spring of 2016, when the allegation was lodged by Hillary Clinton. According to Factcheck:
FactCheck Posts
What’s Trump’s Position on NATO? By D'Angelo Gore
Posted on May 11, 2016
"Hillary Clinton went too far when she claimed that Donald Trump said “we should pull out of NATO.” Trump has said that he would “certainly look at” pulling the United States out of the international security alliance, because it is “obsolete” and “is costing us a fortune.” But the Clinton campaign provided nothing indicating that Trump advocates pulling out now..."
As we know, Trump won the 2016 election, and did not pull the US out of NATO. Even though he could have, the same way he pulled out of the Kyoto accords. It's worth noting that Vladimir Putin didn't invade Ukraine during Trump's 1/2016-1/2021 term, either. And that Ukraine ended up getting more military aid from Trump than from Obama or Bush. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-trump-biden-ukraine-military-aid-1.6371378
The allegation was made again, in July 2018:
Reuter's investigated the accusation and concluded that it was untrue:
"BRUSSELS (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump did not threaten to pull out of NATO at the second day of a summit on Thursday, despite a tough rebuke of allies for spending too little on defense, two NATO sources told Reuters.
Asked if he had issued the threat to quit the military alliance, both sources said: "No"." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-summit-trump-threat-idUSKBN1K216H/
The allegation was made again in November 2018, based entirely on inferences by readers of a Tweet made by Trump:
"Trump torches allies, threatens NATO pullout after tense WWI memorial trip to Paris Alex Lockie Nov 12, 2018, 8:00 AM EST
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-slams-allies-threatens-nato-pullout-after-wwi-paris-trip-2018-11?op=1
But Trump didn't pull the US out of NATO, did he?
Some background, from April 2019:
"...After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, member countries agreed to boost defense budgets and “move toward” spending 2% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024. The U.S. spends about 3.4% of its GDP on defense.
Since Trump took office, European allies and Canada have added $41 billion to their defense budgets. By the end of next year, this will rise to $100 billion, Stoltenberg said. Germany, however, remains the main target of Trump’s ire because it now plans to spend 1.5% by 2024, which is lower than the 2% guideline..."
Trump's intentions in regard to his bluster on NATO were always clear to some of us: he was out to drive a hard bargain. As it happens, he got some success with his threats. That's one of the few things that Trump is competent at- and incidentally a wheelhouse that his recent predecessors have been notably reticent to enter. It's an asset that appeals to his following immensely- and one that kneejerk Trump haters can only spin by Making Him Wrong, even when he got a positive result. I've never thought that Trump was Presidential material, but at least I'm able to give him credit where credit is due. It also needs to be pointed out that complaints from American news media pundits about the US footing too much of the bill for NATO go back to the Cold War era. Trump may be the first President to have ever taken that grievance seriously. The bottom line is that Trump had four years to pull out of NATO (which conceivably would have considerably bolstered the prospects of success for a Russian invasion of Ukraine.) But Trump didn't do that. And Putin didn't invade Ukraine until nearly two years after Trump left office, either.
Matt Taibbi has been widely misunderstood in regard to his coverage of Donald Trump, and the history of partisan political attacks aimed at him. He's spent nearly eight years trying to tell the Democrats that concocting empty accusations and slipshod insinuations about Donald Trump is a tactic that was practically guaranteed to backfire from the start. Ironically, Trump's weaknesses- outright vacancies, in some cases- would have allowed amply room for his opponents to bring strong challenges in order to discredit his competence on all sorts of issues. Even in terms of personal charisma, Trump's act gets old after a while. But compared to the ineptitude and insulation of bien pensant lifestyle liberal Democrats at connecting with ordinary working people, Trump comes across to his audiences like a wise old sage.
A streetwise response to Trump would have been to dim the spotlight on him. An authentically streetwise response to the GOP would have been to start LISTENING to the legitimate grievances of ordinary working people (instead of devising favors to do FOR them, without their input.) But the lawn-tennis liberals who fund and run Democratic Presidential campaigns are not streetwise. And their response was Panic. Panic that Trump organizers and supporters have been able to spin into their own set of extreme responses, including Sedition and Conspiracy To Subvert Democracy.
That's where we're at these days, this race to the bottom, about who's going to strike more fear into the Voters about what the Opposition would do if victorious. It would be a much more clear choice if only one side was going off the rails. But it's still happening. Which brings me back to the most recent Predictions of news reports in 2023 and 2024, that Trump Will Pull The US From NATO If Elected In 2024:
https://news.yahoo.com/trump-plots-pull-nato-doesn-130000410.html
https://politicalwire.com/2023/10/23/trump-plots-to-pull-out-of-nato/
https://www.salon.com/2023/10/24/the-biggest-internal-threat-threatens-to-pull-us-out-of-nato--again/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-plots-to-pull-out-of-nato-if-he-doesnt-get-his-way/ar-AA1iHAeA
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2790854/trump-would-never-help-europe-if-attacked/
https://prospect.org/world/2023-10-25-trumps-plan-to-destroy-nato/
Those are all top stories on the first page of my search for [trump "pull out of nato" 2023]:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=trump+%22pull+out+of+nato%22+2023&t=newext&atb=v336-1&ia=web
I can post more. They're all either re-posts of the same report, or they rely on the same story as their principal source:
Rolling Stone
Trump Plots to Pull Out of NATO — If He Doesn’t Get His Way
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley
October 23, 2023·6 min read
The original is behind a paywall, but it's found re-posted in the first Yahoo link (and elsewhere.)
As if that story- featuring comments by two unnamed sources inside the Trump campaign as its only new content- weren't enough, Rolling Stone went on print a follow-up story, featuring Biden's condemnation [I could only find a paywalled story, so far]:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/biden-campaign-trump-nato-plot-1234860683/
Considered in terms of investigative journalism value, this is like bundling junk in tranches to sell as a CDO with a AAA rating. And if you're mad that I pointed out that it's both sleazy and incompetent to pass off that sort of weak-ass partisan propaganda as journalism, I can only imagine what you'll think of the American electorate when you read this:
‘Wow!’: NBC’s Kristen Welker Shocked By New ‘Truly Stunning’ Biden-Trump Poll
Lee Moran Updated Mon, February 5, 2024 at 7:12 AM EST·2 min read
https://news.yahoo.com/wow-nbcs-kristen-welker-shocked-080308522.html
"“When you ask folks, ‘Hey, if it’s the general election and it’s Trump versus Biden,’ in our poll, Donald Trump now leads Joe Biden by five points. Compare that to the last time we pulled back in November. Trump was ahead then, but it was only by two points.”
As it happens, I have my own concerns about a 2024 Trump Presidency- not on account of anything to do with NATO or Ukraine, but over my worries about Trump going back in to the Middle East with a series of moves that will end up in a full-scale war. I'm already worried about Biden's escalations over US military bases in Syria (where US troops are based in the hostile territory of a regime that we're actively involved in trying to overthrow with our, uh. proxies) and Iraq (where the Iraqi parliament has voted twice to expel US troops- once after Trump's assassination of Iranian General Suleimani, and again just a few weeks ago, a hint that the Biden administration has refused to take.) But at least Biden appears to be trying to thread some sort of needle in the Middle East.
My fears about Trump have nothing to do with NATO or Ukraine; they're about the possibility that no one seems to want to ask Trump about- about whether, if he were elected President and Commander-in-Chief in 2024, Donald Trump would favor ordering an all-out war against Iran.
It's also worth noting that Trump is tight buddies with Netanyahu, and Biden is not. If Netanyahu somehow manages to survive his political challenges into 2025, there's no telling what a Trump-Netanyahu/US-Israel alliance would do, in terms of increasing direct military involvement and widening the war in the Middle East.
Bibi wants Trump back in office and is manipulating the Gaza war to achieve that result.
The Achille's heel in that rationally ideal proposal is that the track record of accountability for US Presidents keeping their campaign promises is nil, once they're installed in office. The pattern is to keep the easiest promises (which are also coincidentally the most banal and trivial); partially keep a few more important ones; and blatantly ignore- or even perfidiously reverse- the boldest of their campaign promises. What are the voters going to do abut it? For both better and worse( as with this aspect) the US doesn't have a Parliamentary system. We're stuck with our Chief Executive for a four-year term.
More to the point, presidential candidates often make promises in their speeches that they know damn well they won't be able to keep, because of the power of their Congressional opposition to stop them.
Paradoxically, that fact accounts for my lack of alarm about Trump's hyperbolic rhetoric. If Trump were to be re-elected, he wouldn't be able to do even a small fraction of what he hints at doing (with a wink- don't you notice him winking? "what rubes!" It's keyfabe.) Trump's doing this to troll his fixated opponents. And they're still falling for it, as much as the most moon-eyed fraction of his supporters. Still giving him more publicity, free, than he could hope to buy.
(The grandiloquent expressions of high dudgeon and panic look like a PMC Academia thing, to me. The Trump Resistance and their media auxiliary thinks that they'll somehow be able to exert some crucial faculty-meeting pressure on Republicans, to Cancel him. All they're doing is helping to keep his name at the top of the headlines...I'm all in favor of investigations of Trump, but I view the fact that they're giving him high-profile exposure as an unwanted side effect. Certainly there's no need to supplement that with scare editorials and propaganda conjectures. Least of all by Robert Kagan, John Bolton, William Barr, William Kristol, or all of the other neocons out there currently trying to launder their reputations with hysterical pronouncements crafted to curry favor with the Trump Resistance.)
oh, come on. Both you and Karen have missed one of Matt Taibbi's most valid and important points: that for decades on end, American Politics has been increasingly crafted by the Luxury Legacy Media to be presented to the Public as a Reality Show. But none of the newsertainment showrunners planned on the possibility that a media-savvy interloper would be able to see the game, and then turn it to the benefit of his own personal political fortunes.
If Taibbi showed one micron of objection to this I might scrape some respect for him. In fact, Taibbi is a nihilist with no connection to anything.
I think you're misreading Matt, to a great extent. My impression is that he's been saying the same thing to the Democratic Party establishment that I've been saying for well over a decade as a comment writer on Salon and on the Atlantic: The First Step Is To Admit That YOU Have A Problem.
That problem is not going to be solved by denial, or ad hominem attacks, or the distraction hypnosis of "look over there- [Republican candidate here, most recently Donald Trump]- Be Very Afraid!"
The Democrats need to Listen. They need to stop imagining that they can somehow control the narrative by narrowing it to a handful of the issues they're most comfortable with addressing, and then counting on success- or even viability- merely as a result of presenting an increasingly disillusioned and fed-up population of voters with a fait accomplit based around the single-choice fatal flaw of first-past-the-post voting, a ballot structure which permits both of the two major parties to base their appeal on scaring them about the prospects of a victory by opposing party- a raison d'etre that's decrepit and pathetic, and which shows no sign of improving.
The Republicans veered off into demagoguery long ago- "feeding red meat to their base", I think it's called. Telling people what they want to hear in defiance of the facts is disgraceful politics, but at least it's a tactic that's based on Listening to the voters.
The "leadership" of the Democrats, by contrast, are too busy trying to impress their well-heeled, "advanced degree" bien pensant peer group to realize that an increasing number of common ordinary working people are not buying what they're selling. Because the Democrats don't Listen. To the extent that the Democrats use a positive appeal, they're relying on the high-minded rhetorical pretense of offering something to everyone (without disturbing the material fortunes or luxury beliefs of their upper 10%)- and then not delivering on most of it (which see the earlier parenthesis), and whinging about their failures. Sometimes the whinging centers on how their own voters have failed them. That isn't getting anything for anybody. Except for maybe the people the Democrats are paying to run the same old playbook.
(more later)