From Campus Progress
By Justin Elliott

For the past few years, Matt Taibbi has delivered something invaluable to Rolling Stone’s one-million-plus subscribers: political reporting that brilliantly explains, exposes, and entertains. A roving national reporter who writes from a left-libertarian perspective, Taibbi has also called a lot of people a lot of nasty names. Ken Lay was “your typically unremarkable mealy-executive type, the kind of person you would expect to be eaten first in any lifeboat situation,” while Christopher Hitchens is “a man who has had his intellectual face lifted so many times, he can’t close his eyes without opening his mouth.” One of Taibbi’s columns was titled simply, “Eat me, Joe Biden.”

Taibbi’s new book, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire, collects his work during George W. Bush’s administration, including pieces on Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, Congress, the Lieberman-Lamont race, and the Lynndie England and Michael Jackson trials. What gives this latest collection—his past two were Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season and The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia—staying power is not Taibbi’s near-acrobatic talent as a takedown artist or his occasional undercover stunt, though those things do make his work great fun to read. Rather, it’s the solid research and reporting that informs everything he writes.

Taibbi spoke with Campus Progress last week about the war, stalking Thomas Friedman, and Jack Abramoff’s College Republican days.

Campus Progress: The most affecting piece in your new book is about Cindy Sheehan’s campout in Crawford back in 2005. Your article had a hopeful tone, and for a lot of people on the antiwar side of things, that was a hopeful moment. Two years later the war’s still going strong. What happened?

Matt Taibbi: The antiwar movement is always going to have a disadvantage in our modern political arena because we have an antagonistic commercial media that’s going to be inclined to not pay a whole lot of attention. They’re going to be inclined to paint it in a negative or ambiguous light if they can. What happened with Cindy Sheehan—it started out as this movement that had a really clear and unambiguous and simple, emotionally powerful message that was connected to this woman who had really lost a son overseas. And it morphed into something that was different. I hate to criticize antiwar protestors or people who showed up and gave their time to this whole thing—but one of the things that happens there is that you have Cindy Sheehan alone to start with, and then within like three days you have the Cuban Five and the Free Mumia people and every circus act of the protest crowd that came to plant their flag.

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