Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire QUOTES

1 " There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

2 " Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife’s edge. We’re a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there’s a dial tone, and your front yard isn’t underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there’s no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating. "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

3 " There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality. "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

4 " Abu Ghraib is the symbol of American mistakes in Iraq, the place where the weird criminal perversions of bored, porn-surfing American teenagers clashed spectacularly with fastidious, sexually inviolate Islamic culture. It was also a most powerful symbol of our misguided perception of ourselves and our place in the world.

We came into this war expecting to be treated like the GIs who went into France a half century ago—worshipped, instantly excused for the occasional excess or foible, and handed the keys to both the castle wine cellar and the nurses’ dormitory. Instead we were treated like unclean monsters by the people we liberated, and around the world our every move was viciously scrutinized not only by those same Europeans we rescued ages ago but by our own press.

The failure of Abu Ghraib was the failure to accept the role we had created for ourselves as new masters of subject peoples. We wanted to rule absolutely and also to be liked, which was why our first reaction after the scandal broke was to issue profuse apologies, call for a self-flagellating round of investigations, and demand the prison’s closure. A hegemonic power more comfortable with ruling would have just shot the reporter who broke the story and moved on.

But America has never been able to stomach that kind of thing, which is why, incidentally, this occupation of Iraq is probably not going to work. We are too civilized to make ourselves truly feared in public, but not civilized enough to properly restrain our power in private. "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

5 " So long as the investigation is still open, Gunnels explains, there is no way to request documents pertaining to the case through the Freedom of Information Act. “That investigation will probably stay open a long time,” he says. "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

6 " Two of the most long-awaited legislative wet dreams of the Washington Insiders Club—an energy bill and a much-delayed highway bill—breezed into law. One mildly nervous evening was all it took to pass through the House the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for years now a primary strategic focus of the battle-in-Seattle activist scene. And accompanied by scarcely a whimper from the Democratic opposition, a second version of the notorious USA Patriot Act passed triumphantly through both houses of Congress, with most of the law being made permanent this time. "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

7 " He was a walking cut corner, a thumb on the scale of American history. The "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

8 " There will be no rack, no stoning, no scorpion-filled sand pit, no bucket of fire ants. Just a sanitary plea agreement and a single blow of the gavel, and “Casino Jack” Abramoff will disappear for a few years of weight lifting and Talmudic study. "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

9 " Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out. "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

10 " smartass ice heathens from the north descended upon small-town America to laugh at the superstitious but numerically superior yokels of the heartland. In a breathtakingly accurate preview of things to come, the yokels actually won the trial, but history judged them the losers—thanks mainly to the flamboyant propaganda of a godless misanthrope named H. L. Mencken, the brilliant Darwinian ancestor of the modern liberal media. "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

11 " Of course it’s fairly obvious where it’s coming from. Even the most casual Democratic voters understand by now that there is a schism within the party, one that pits “party insiders” steeped in the inside-baseball muck of Washington money culture against . . . well, against us, the actual voters. The insiders have for many years running now succeeded in convincing their voters that their actual beliefs are hopeless losers in the general electoral arena, and that certain compromises must be made if the party is ever to regain power. This defeatist nonsense is sold to the public in the form of beady-eyed party hacks talking to one another in the opinion pages of national media conglomerates, where, after much verbose and solemn discussion, the earnest and idealistic candidate the public actually likes is dismissed on the grounds that “he can’t win.” In his place is trotted out the guy the party honchos insist to us is the real “winner”—some balding, bent little bureaucrat who has grown prematurely elderly before our very eyes over the course of ten or twenty years of sad, compromise-filled service in the House or the Senate. This “winner” is then given a lavish parade and sent out there on the trail, and we hold our noses as he campaigns in our name on a platform of Jesus, the B-2 bomber, and the death penalty for eleven-year-olds, consoling ourselves that he at least isn’t in favor of repealing the Voting Rights Act. (Or is he? We have to check.) Then he loses to the Republicans anyway and we start all over again—beginning with the next primary election, when we are again told that the antiwar candidate “can’t win” and that the smart bet is the corporate hunchback still wearing two black eyes from the last race. No "

― Matt Taibbi , Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire