Welcome to Litsy!

I had to read this book after finishing Hate Inc. It‘s not exactly the most hopeful picture of the American electorate, but it offers sharp insights and Taibbi‘s comedic wit is impeccable.

Hard to explain in a few words how a book can be funny and tragic at the same time.In the lead up to the election everyone underestimates the anger, racism, & if there is anything such as an informed electorate anymore .People get their “news” from social media & news outlets that already agree with their opinions.The actual coverage of Bernie Sanders minimal compared to Trump‘s circus.Will democracy survive? Feeling the system is broken.

#MarchMadness #politicalFic/NonFic a little more than halfway through , maybe the most horrible part is that you wish it was fiction, but it‘s not.Funny at times , and kudos for Taibbi bringing up the fact that “w” Bush was absurd as well. While the media watches Trumps tweets ,his cabinet posts are dismantling democracy.

#booksandbooze self medicating with Devils ale to read the Taibbi , will finish with the Tolkien , best to visit the shire to relax before sleep .😁😴

Almost done with this one. Fairly humorous and terrifying at the same time.

One of my favorite (of about 1500 deliciously horrible) insults in Insane Clown President. 🤣 This particular insult is about Katrina Pierson, former Trump spokeswoman.

I thought this book was incredibly smart. It's a collection of Matt Taibbi's columns from the 2016 election & I think he, more than any other pundits I've read, understands and accurately analyzes Trump's appeal to a frustrated, disenfranchised, dumbed-down, reality-TV-watching electorate. He's viciously hilarious, a tremendous writer, and incisive thinker.

I love Matt Taibbi (quick plug for his podcast, the TARFU REPORT, my favorite thing right now). This book is a collection of his columns and reporting from the 2016 election and studded with so many mean, astute insights like this one.

What a difference a year and a half makes. 😂

Loving the illustrations in this book.

But seriously though.

Meanwhile the pessimism of Trump's revolution is intentional, impassioned, ascendant. They placed a huge bet on America's worst instincts, and won. And the first order of business will be to wipe out a national idea in which they never believed.
Welcome to the end of the dream.

Obama didn't have a lot to say about the election results, but what few lines he did speak conveyed a lot. This is a characteristic of strong people. Contrast this to Donald Trump, who vomits out great quantities of verbiage, taking so many positions at once that no one of them has much meaning after a while.

On Trump: That such a small man would have such an awesome impact on our nation's history is terrible, but it makes sense if you believe in the essential ridiculousness of the human experience.

In the good old days, when elections were merely stupid and not also violent and terrifying, we argued over which candidate we'd rather have a beer with, instead of wondering why both parties were getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the same people.

How Giuliani isn't Trump's running mate, no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate television love story since Beavis and Butt-head. Every time Trump says something nuts, Giuliani either co-signs it or outdoes him. They will probably spend the years after the election doing prostate medicine commercials together.

On Mike Pence: The man who once opposed clean needles on moral grounds was now ready to march through history with a serial groper and tit-gazer.

Trump has enjoyed an extraordinary run of sinister luck since the beginning of this race. The seas have parted for him over and over again in a pattern so improbable, it makes one guess at the existence of a Supreme Being with a serious grudge against the United States.

We could never quite tell what Trump was: possibly the American Hitler, but just as possibly punking the whole world in the most ambitious prank/PR stunt of all time. Or maybe he was on the level, birthing a weird new rightist/populist movement, a cross of Huey Long, Pinochet and David Hasselhoff.

Then there was Scott Baio. Scott Baio, ladies and gentlemen! Not the Finz or Richie or even Pinky Tuscadero, but the man who played Chachi, a gimmicks character in a show about an America that never existed, a time when there were no black people and the last gasps of our apartheid state were called Happy Days.

But Bush's tautologies weren't gaffes or verbal slips. They just represented the limits of his reasoning powers: A=A. There are educational apps that use groups of images to teach two-year-old to recognize that an orange is like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that developmental level. And we elected him president.

Trump isn't the first rich guy to run for office. But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the media can't resist a car wreck. The more he insults the press, the more they cover him: He's pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor. Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn't know how to turn the cameras off, even when it's filming it's own demise.

Trump surely believes he saw that celebration of Muslims in Jersey City, when it was probably a clip of people in Palestine. When he says, "I have a great relationship with the blacks," what he probably means is that he liked watching The Cosby Show.

Republicans won middle American votes for years by taking advantage of the fact that their voters didn't know the difference between an elitist and the actual elite, between a snob and an oligarch. They made sure their voters' idea of an elitist was Sean Penn hanging out with Hugo Chavez, instead of a Wall Street bank financing the construction of Chinese factories.

In the crowd, there's slow clapping, and confusion. Finally, Trump wraps up by making a bold promise about the future under a Trump presidency.
"African-American citizens and Latino citizens," he promises, "will have the time of their life!"
What is this, the musical climax to Dirty Dancing? Has a stranger civil-rights speech ever been delivered?

The real Donald Trump does not speak in metaphors, let alone un-mixed ones. The man who once famously pronounced "I know words, I have the best words" scorched through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla "China--money--bad!").

The audience roars. This is the Trump they fell in love with. It's the same uber-confident, self-congratulating gasbag who bulldozed to the Republican nomination on the strength of long, unscripted rants that were glorious tributes to every teenager everywhere who has ever taken a test without studying.

Madison and Jefferson never foresaw this situation. They knew there was danger of demagoguery, but they never imagined presidential candidates exchanging "mine's bigger than yours" jokes or doing "let's laugh at the disabled" routines. There's no map in the Constitution to tell us how to get out of where we're going. All we can do now is hold on.

People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president. Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any setting.

Ted Cruz in person is almost physically repellant. Psychology Today even ran an article by a neurology professor named Dr. Richard Cytowic about the peculiarly off-putting qualities of Cruz's face.
He used a German term, backfeifengesicht, literally "a face in need of a good punch," to describe Cruz.