There is nothing more hilarious when people give wondrous powers to the United States. It’s no surprise that Russia Today would feast on a the idea that the “Green Revolution” is a US orchestrated plot. Russia already convinced itself that every colored revolution was cooked up in Langley.
And this makes Craig Roberts a perfect guest (I know nothing about Wayne Madsen, but his wiki entry suggests that he’s a crank). He argued that the Iranian protests are “classic CIA destabilization” in an article on Counterpunch. What a sad convergence of opinion between some in the American Left, Russia’s conservatives, and the theocrats in Iran.
The idea among some Leftists that every uprising they don’t like is the work of the CIA (or Mossad) always strikes me as orientalist.
Speaking of Taibbi, flipping TV channels recently while in a hotel I saw part of an interview of him. In my extreme superficiality, I was surprised by how boringly square he looked. I don’t know what I expected, but not that.
Here is an expert of a Megan McArdle’s takedown of Taibbi:
“a number of you have asked me what I thought of Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone piece on Goldman Sachs. What I think, sadly, is that Matt Taibbi is becoming the Sarah Palin of journalism. He seems to deliberately eschew understanding his subjects, because only corrupt, pointy-headed financial journalists who have been co-opted by the system do that. And Matt Taibbi is here to save you from those pointy headed elites.
Taibbi is a gifted narrative journalist, whose verbal talents I greatly admire. But financial meltdowns don’t offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system. Confronted with this, Taibbi doesn’t back away from the narrative form, or apply it to smaller questions where it is more appropriate, as William Cohan did in House of Cards. Instead, he grabs whoever’s nearest to hand and builds them up into a gigantic straw villian, which he proceeds to bash with a handful of recently acquired technical terms that he clearly doesn’t quite understand. It’s not that everything he says is wrong, but the bits that are true aren’t interesting, and the bits that are interesting aren’t true. The whole thing dissolves into the kind of conspiracy theory he so ably lampooned in The Great Derangement. The result is something that’s not even wrong. It’s just incoherent.”
Interesting blog
His career can be plotted on the same chart as Paul Klebnikov, Chrystia Freeland, Matt Brysinski–There were even more names I cannot think of, all trying to launch journalism careers from the Moscow bureau in the 90s.
Indeed, it was the beat that launched a thousand careers. Lots of people who made their journalistic bones in Moscow have moved on to other (bigger and better? debatable) places and roles. Of the people you mentioned, Freeland got a book out of her time in Moscow and is now in a management role with the FT (according to Wikipedia, which also reveals that she is a “Canadian-Ukrainian”). Brzezinski Jr. has been a law firm partner in DC for a while now, I doubt he is interested in being a practitioner of gonzo journalism anymore. I don’t really have an opinion on Taibbi’s work, other than to say that as everyone seems to agree it is very readable.
Thanks for your thoughts Kolya and Lyndon. Taibbi’s name and his GS story just keep getting more play, as I understand GS is to announce record profits today. I’m unfamiliar with Megan McArdle – but, her quote makes me laugh and gets at the point I was trying to make, however badly. ie, that there were all these ambitious, credentialed financial writers trying to launch from Moscow in the 90s and reinvent in the wider English language press later. And they were flame-outs or sell-outs for various reasons. Then you have Mr. eXXXile, who just based on his degrees and his launch publication seems lighter weight. And, yet his name recognition just keeps growing, writing about whatever – now finance. Surely, I’m not as smitten as poemless, but I wondered if he was like a Zorro, ie one needs to look beyond the baffooning to see that he’s actually quite serious in his mission and brave in his targets. (Maybe I am as smitten as poemless, maybe I like square.) But, I probably give him to much credit there…I can see where he’d get under the skin of a career financial reporter like Ms. McArdle. However, as Jon Stewart made clear in his take down of the “money honey’ Maria – the financial press has a lot to be defensive about. Time will tell if he’s got longevity in this field.
I think my smitten-ness is less to do with his journalistic acumen and more to do with the fact that the eXile was the only publication in the universe that was verifying for the world my own observations over there while every other journalist couldn’t stop gloating about peachy keen life in the new Russia was. Probably precisely because they were in the warm safe womb of a Moscow bureau while people like Taibbi bothered to venture outside the walls of the bureau, embassy, their hotels and local pizza joints. I would not put Taibbi and Ames on that same career track. With hindsight, perhaps it appears that way. But I get the impression he was doing journalism to justify being in Moscow while others were in Moscow to justify their journalistic credentials.
“Chris Von Doom on June 29, 2009 11:08 am
Contrary to myths about the magic powers of the CIA, you cannot motivate tens of thousands of people to act using covert operations.”
What a Moronic statement do you think the CIA in the 50′s in Iran when they installed the government of the Shah were not able to use techniques to cause instability to motivate key demographic of the country.
The CIA provides millions of dollars to groups inside Iran on propaganda to motivate people against the government although there is probably wide spread resentment among certain sectors of the population.
poemless, you wrote:
“while every other journalist couldn’t stop gloating about peachy keen life in the new Russia was.”
If you are referring to Russia in the 1990s, my memory is quite different. Western media back then seemed to be replete with stories about how hard life is in Russia: crime, corruption, short life expectancy, violence, etc, etc.
Tess, my comment on how “square” Taibbi looked on that TV appearance was meaningless and superfluous.
Megan McCardle, by the way, is one of the bloggers for The Atlantic. She’s a young and very smart economist. I know she voted for Obama, but she’s not a Democrat. She’s socially liberal, but fairly conservative in the economic sense. I guess that makes her a libertarian of sorts, but I don’t know whether she would agree with such label. Frankly, I don’t know whether she was fair to Taibbi in the piece I excerpted. I appreciate McArdle’s intellectual honesty and sometimes find her interesting, but in terms of economic policy I’m quite to the left of her (not that I know much of economics–I’m simply stating my own preference.)
For what it’s worth the beginning of a response from Taibbi to McArdle:
“While I’m here: a lot of people have been writing me asking me to respond to Megan McArdle’s bizarre freakout on the Atlantic website, where she lambasted my Goldman piece in curiously discombobulated fashion and then apparently spent the next couple of days jamming her feet in her mouth in the comments section (Megan at 6:52 P.M. on July 10: “No, his facts are wrong, his conclusions are wrong, and only his discomfort with Goldman Sachs’ role in our public life is correct.” Megan three hours later: “Or perhaps a better way to say it is that the facts are right, but the mini narratives are ludicrously wrong.”). I’m reluctant to get into this, among other things because I’ve already done two different too-long responses to critics of this piece, and I’m also supposed to be writing something else right now, so… But I will get to her later in the week, when I have time, and I’m going to need time, just going by one quick read-through of her piece.”
Quick note on McArdle, since I brought her into this thread. As as I said, she voted for Obama, but her leanings are libertarian. I was wrong about her being an economist. She has done with work with economists, but her background is in business finance. Also, a few days ago the Boston Globe listed her as one of the new conservative voices. So, although it seems that she does not label herself as such, at least some conservatives see her as of their own. In other words, she’s more conservative than I had thought.
Old thread….
Since I excerpted a Taibbi takedown, let me excerpt from a Curious Capitalist post in which he’s praised:
“The same goes for Matt Taibbi and his already legendary Goldman Sachs rant. If all financial journalists shared Taibbi’s disregard for fairness and his juvenile glee in name-calling, financial journalism would be unbearable. But since most financial journalists try so hard to be fair that they often miss the truth, and write with such sobriety as to be unreadable, Taibbi offers a welcome change of pace and point of view.”
http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/07/20/two-cheers-for-a-more-diverse-journalistic-ecosystem/