TAIBBI VS. LIBERALS. "The biggest problem with modern American liberalism may be the word itself," writes Matt Taibbi. "There's just something about the word, liberal, something about the way it sounds -- it just hits the ear wrong. If it were an animal it would be something squirming and hairless." Are we not past this by now? After endless books by George Lakoff and Jeffrey Feldman and Geoffrey Numberg on words and framing and language and linguistics, have we really not ascended beyond fruitless whining about how the word "liberal" somehow makes you feel like less of a holy warrior? Apparently not. And Taibbi goes further, quoting three anonymous "iconoclastic columnists and journalists who've had bylines in places like The Nation"(!) who get all quivery when someone tries to call them a liberal. "When the people who are the public voice of a political class are afraid to even wear the party colors in public, that's a bad sign," writes Taibbi, "and it's worth asking what the reasons are." This is your crisis, Liberalism: Self-defined journalistic iconoclasts don't like you as a descriptor. Taibbi goes on, with an admirable lack of self-consciousness, to first blame Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and Michael Savage for saying mean things about liberals, and then - in the next paragraph, natch -- writes, "the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility." Writer, read thyself. The article continues like this. Liberals ignore "hardcore" economic issues but whine about the PATRIOT Act "in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI." Lucky thing that Matt Taibbi was paying such close attention to discern the secret reverse psychology animating the ACLU. Taibbi's an interesting writer. His gifts as a prose stylist are undeniable. His evisceration of Tom Friedman's The World is Flat stands as one of the great achievement's of the written word. But this skill with a one-liner, this very sharpness of pen, can also convince editors to publish tripe like this piece, which is an endless series of assertions and rhetorical questions -- no evidence needed. Who, for instance, is on this Left? Taibbi writes that "Thus," -- and there's really no previous supporting evidence requiring a thus -- "the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion." Who are these "people?" I assume not Andy Stern, or John Sweeney, or Bruce Raynor. I assume not George Miller or John Edwards or Taibbi's own hero, Bernie Sanders.
