Matt Taibbi has eyes and ears that work, unlike the so-called journalists of corporate media organizations. An excerpt:
[T]he campaign is pure chaos, Pompeii after the blast. In the annals of presidential races we haven’t experienced many days like yesterday, July 31, which ended with the futures of all major candidates appearing hopelessly clouded. Forget the national debt; there are now not-improbable scenarios in which the main issues in next year’s debates, which could easily involve both nominees in ankle monitors, are nuclear fallout and alien visitation. Our leaders, who once had the election process reduced to scripts more predictable than Everybody Loves Raymond, now seem to have no clue what will happen beyond the next few minutes.
If not for the fact that the disintegration of American society might be imminent as a result, I’d be laughing harder. It might be funny anyway. Consider: the establishment plan for the Republican Party this cycle was clearly Ron DeSantis, but a New York Times/Siena poll published yesterday shows he’s plunging like a stone, falling to 17%, a.k.a. 37 points behind Donald Trump…
Incumbent Joe Biden not only has the lowest approval rating in history — he “shouldn’t” be this unpopular “but he is,” mused a mortified Washington Post — but as of Monday, when his son’s former partner Devon Archer testified in Congress, he appeared to be careening toward withdrawal due to impairment, scandal, or both. [P]apers like the New York Times and Washington Post . . . are suddenly filled with baleful criticisms of Biden, appearing to notice flaws for the first time. Pamela Paul in the Times compared her dread feelings about a Biden-Trump rematch to Lars Von Trier’s film, Melancholia, whose premise is an inexorable collision of a rogue planet with Earth…
The cognoscenti never figured out or accepted that the support for protest candidates like Trump or Bernie Sanders even is rooted in wide generalized rage directed their way. To this day they don’t accept it. They keep thinking they can wish it away, describe it away (see Bump’s description of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as “not at this point serious competition”), indict it away. If you drop 76 charges on a candidate and he goes up in polls, you might want to consider that you might be part of the problem. But they can’t take even that heavy a hint.
