Sympathy for Matt Taibbi as he receives media flogging.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/02/this_is_what_happens_if_you_te.html

The above is a blog entry in NEW YORK magazine intended as a snarky takedown of Matt Taibbi, best known for recent ROLLING STONE articles pulling back the curtains on how the U.S. government and Wall Street (particularly investment bank titans like Goldman Sachs) really do business.

This passage kind of got to me (I'll do some highlighting):
"He’s unique in that he doesn’t see anything that is good," a former editor tells Vanity Fair. "He just notices the flaws in people." But woe to those who point out his flaws, as writer James Verini, who met with Taibbi found while trying to write a piece about Exile, the English-language magazine Taibbi co-published in Moscow in the nineties.

Sounds a lot like what certain people say about me when I say that certain poetry emperors don't do a lot of good for the world of local poetry.

But I'm not Matt Taibbi--daring to highlight-in-yellow piggish, thuggish behavior by governments, corporate instruments and investment banks, and taking abuse from a corporate mainstream media who prefers for us all to shut up and consume, taking everything at no more than face value.

I'll go out on a limb and say that Taibbi, for his occasional flaws (a tendency to be too uncomfortable with blue-collar America, despite his Billy Bob Thornton's-kid-brother appearance), loves the USA and what it could and should be.

And it's too bad he's being whipped for that in the pages of NEW YORK and VANITY FAIR.