Hey, Look! No, No, Over There!! It's The New Journalism!! Or "Gonzo" Something!!

Matt Taibbi belittles John Sidney McCain III in this week's or bi-week's or whatever the hell issue of Rolling Stone. Here's why we called it the New Journalism.

You'd never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America "backward," to the failed ideas of the Sixties. "I'm surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!" he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, "That's not change we can believe in!" [...] But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the "straight talk" he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who's ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.

Plus, there's pop psychology & everything. And Rolling Stone may be pathetically old-fashioned w/ lame-ass bands like R. E. M. & Metallica mentioned on the made-from-murdered-trees cover (What is this Coldplay shit anyway? We haven't consciously heard note one from them, but someone will probably say, "Oh, they're on the ___________ commercial & we'll connect the two, & think/say, "What is up w/ that shit?") but it's no New Yorker; the story's a quick read, unless of course you move your lips when you read, in which case you'll know what Coldplay sounds like.