As the brutal Bush years draw to a close we can reflect on how we got where we are. The twists and turns of missteps and outright chicanery can dazzle the most savvy newshounds among us. I mean, who would have written a plot in which the Vice President of the United States was so craven as to plant a story in the New York Times and then refer to that story as evidence for the need to invade a sovereign nation in an act of “preventative” war? It’s preposterous and yet that is exactly what happened. The list goes on and on and continues to grow and it’s hard for mere mortals to keep up, nevermind understand.

Enter: Matt Taibbi.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when Hunter S. Thompson killed himself. I mean, how am I supposed to make sense of such a depraved creature as Don Rumsfeld? How am I to put George W. Bush‘s bumbling management into any sort of modern context? Who am I to distill into plain English the mortgage and loan/credit crunch/economic culture fuck we’re living? I am few, Taibbi is many.

Sure, we had Jon Stewart and (previous Upright Standing Man of the Year winner) Stephen Colbert to shed light on the hypocrisy and lunacy of the last eight years, but they are essentially nice and decent guys. Times like these require savagery and Matt Taibbi is not afraid to call Sarah Palin “a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV.” This while the rest of the media was politely accepting her as representation of “middle America” even though they knew too what Taibbi was able to put in print.

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