What's that smell, Taibbi?

Regular “What’s the Diehl?” readers know that I’m in a Matt Taibbi phase right now. I enjoyed reading his book, Smells like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire, recently. And by “enjoyed,” I mean, “He’s a fantastic writer who shoots from the hip and depresses the sh*t out of me by opening my eyes to sickening things I never wanted to see.” The book’s last chapter, entitled “The Worst Congress Ever,” contains the following:

It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans have given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a systematic effort to not only to deny the Democrats any kind of power-sharing role in creating or refining legislation but to humiliate them publicly, show them up, pee in their faces.

Washington was once a chummy fraternity in which members of both parties golfed together, played in the same pickup basketball games, probably even shared the same mistresses. Now it is a one-party town – and congressional business is conducted accordingly, as though the half of the country that the Democrats represent simply doesn’t exist.

This was written in 2006. Although the composition of Congress has changed, the nature of politics and the truth of historian and moralist Lord Acton’s adage, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” have not.

I love this writer. I hate what I learn from him.