Quote

At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing.

Matt Taibbi

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Matt Taibbi
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: March 2
Author
Editorial Columnist
Journalist
Writer
Matthew C. Taibbi
Matthew Taibbi
Nothing
Thing
Versus
Tea
Root
Roots
Party

More quotes by Matt Taibbi

Image
There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.
Matt Taibbi
Image
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.
Matt Taibbi
Image
It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.
Matt Taibbi
Image
America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.
Matt Taibbi
Image
The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis - and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway - shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence.
Matt Taibbi
Image
People are beginning to become disturbingly comfortable with a kind of official hypocrisy. Bizarrely, for instance, we've become numb to the idea that rights aren't absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale.
Matt Taibbi
Image
For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them - emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next.
Matt Taibbi
Image
Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.
Matt Taibbi
Image
The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.
Matt Taibbi
Image
The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.
Matt Taibbi
Image
Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.
Matt Taibbi
Image
The problem with the Tea Party is that it's been used in a way that scares people into supporting an agenda that's counter to their own interests.
Matt Taibbi
Image
Obviously, people who commit crimes should be punished. Even people who steal socks and 'Snow White' videos should probably do time if they have priors, especially serious priors. But the punishment has to fit the crime, and the standard has to be the same for everyone.
Matt Taibbi
Image
The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.
Matt Taibbi
Image
There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true.
Matt Taibbi
Image
The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
Matt Taibbi
Image
Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.
Matt Taibbi
Image
The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.
Matt Taibbi
Image
In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years.
Matt Taibbi
Image
Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.
Matt Taibbi