A lot of people were shocked when Matt Taibbi left First Look a few weeks back, but on my way to calculating how much the world’s 126th richest person had spent on The Racket before Alex Pareene gave Greenwald’s nutsack its 1,897,456th public tongue bath (salaries + rent I’m guessing $500k at least), I found this August announcement of new hire, Laura Dawn, written by Taibbi which, in retrospect, looks unmistakably like a warning and a cry for help to prospective new employers.
“As the former Creative & Cultural Director of MoveOn.org from 2003 – 2011,” Taibbi wrote forebodingly, “and current Founder and Chief Creative Director for the creative agency & production group ART NOT WAR,” he continued, with barely concealed alarm, “Laura has spent the last decade making high-impact media —securing and shooting interviews with politicians such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards, and creating social change media with celebrities like Matt Damon, Oliver Stone, Whoopi Goldberg, John Cusack, Olivia Wilde, and many others.”
With a tone more like that of a hostage on the verge of screaming than a fearless muckraker, Taibbi added: “Her work has been called ‘radical,’ ‘vile,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘savage,’ ‘foul-mouthed,’ ‘eccentric,’ and ‘hard hitting and highly effective’ by Fox News and other major media outlets.”
Two months later, he was out the door. How could we have missed the signs?
The Rancid Honeytrap 
Back in the day, there were streakers that I thought were bolder than the sun. I have, now, such a contempt for the lay of the land, falsely raised, driven by neo-liberals as much as neo-cons, all slouching toward Bethlehem…
force of nature
Give me enough money, and I’ll make that claim about anyone, even Matt Yglesias.
She is considered an expert in both earned media strategies and the nexus between art and social change, consistently creating campaigns that generate tens of millions of dollars worth of national news coverage for the organizations she works with.
Art and social change? Doesn’t somebody have that territory covered?
I wonder if Taibbi has a sense of shame.
Watching GG tap dance in his comment thread on Cook. LOL!
How much more obvious could it be that GG & Co. have been punked by the NSA? The Intercept’s look does not evoke confidence that it will challenge the monied schemers and their spies. Its true objective appears to be gate-keeping. As for Snowden, how many traitors to the Powers are permitted to resume their conjugal lives while suffering banishment in the land of our former First Enemy, an enemy currently being manipulated into resuming that unmerited status?
As a techboobie, for years Greenwald allowed the snoops access to all his communications; to know everything about him and his friends. The snoops know him, and them, so much better than he knows himself, enticing him with exactly what he values more than human love itself – wealth, fame, and vain pretensions of power. He’s a shallow man, the more you know him. His work could never be much more than a superficial jab now and then at the withers of the beast. The snoops saw the value and effect of that limited talent – no real harm done, for to kill the beast would put our good boy out of business.
He’s provincial in many ways – goes neither deep nor wide – a shtetl mindset. Just likes to annoy the Powers and bask in their regnant attention. In reality he admires them so, he wants to be one of them, and is apparently realizing his dream. And if you don’t adore him, he draws arrows from his adolescent emotional quiver, dips them in vitriol and shoots them at your offensive perceptions of his, unknown to him, imperfections.
BTW, I see the faithful still tolerate the ongoing insult of a dysfunctional comment section!
Timing timing, that is the question… see my link.
I trust you have seen the latest work by Matt regarding the hit piece on JPM. While I don’t think that there are many who have any love for JPM, I found it backed by hearsay. What’s more, even posting as much on the RS comments or on Naked Capitalism is enough to get your comments censored, despite up-votes.
You are so right, these people on the left are just as bad as those on the right, if the discussion points in the direction that follows their ideology they love it, but even the slightest hint of skepticism of the most asinine assertions yields unbridled fury. I simply do not understand how so many are effectively programmed to avoid facts at all costs.
X
As for returning to Rolling Stone, there is this factoid about the magazine not being something much to return to, and, perhaps is of pivotal importance:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/12/09/rolling-stone-misled-readers-about-2013-interview/