The End of Empire - required reading

This book is essential reading, as is anything written by Matt Taibbi in general.

To take you back a bit, I first discovered him when he was reporting on the Kerry campaign in 2004, out of which came this excellent book - Spanking the Donkey. Required reading for anyone who, like me, woke up on the morning of the 3rd November 2004, wondering how the Democrats had managed to bollix up another election against Dubya.

But then, I became a fan for life when I read this piece of his, featuring The Moustache of Mediocrity, aka Thomas Friedman. Apart from anything else, I loved this bit:
On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

And there's more:

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

I know it's brutally unfair to him to say this, because it's been said of so many posturing typewriter operators with just a handful of brain cells among them, but if ever there was a successor to Hunter S. Thompson's mantle as an intelligent, outraged and raging chronicler of our strange and stupid times, it's Taibbi.

The book is a thoughtful and considered delve into some pretty strange avenues of American behaviour that are almost mainstream - as Taibbi says, far from coming to their senses and trying to figure out how to get the US out of the mess that their lying, thieving and downright criminal politicians have landed them in, the great American public seem to be chasing even stranger rabbits down even weirder holes. He doesn't even bother to add the obligatory positive ending last chapter - he lays it out like he sees it, and it ain't pretty!