Matt Taibbi rocks

From a recent Matt Taibbi column:

Then there’s this whole business of liberals who are accused of “rooting” for failure in Iraq. I’m sorry, but the next pundit who whips that one out should have his balls stuffed down his throat. You cocksuckers beat the drum to send these kids to war, and then you turn around and accuse us of rooting for them to die? Fuck you for even thinking that. We’re Americans just like you. You don’t have the right to get us into this mess and then turn around and call us traitors. Your credibility is long gone on this issue. Shut up about us.

Beyond that, what you say doesn’t even make any sense. For most of us, if we thought there was any chance this thing could work, we’d have been for it, or at least not so violently against it. Instead, our opposition to the war was based on our absolute conviction that it would end in disaster — which it incidentally has. But according to Klein, if we see a guy step off the top of the Empire State Building, we’re supposed to root for him to nail the dismount. The whole issue is irrelevant and absurd. This is a catastrophe, not a baseball game. “Rooting” is a kid’s word; grow the fuck up.

Five long years, and we still haven’t found a way to unshit the bed. The standard line is “forget the past, what are we going to do about it now — and besides, we’re turning a corner . . . again.” Step one — remove the clowns who got this thing so colossally wrong. (And no fair making any of them Governor of Indiana.) Once they admit they were really, really wrong; apologize for squandering $500 billion — not to mention 4,000 dead and 40,000 injured; and let other people make the decisions, maybe we can come up with a strategy that minimizes our losses. We’re already too far in the hole for there to be any reasonable likelihood of “winning” — and by “winning,” I mean a result where the benefit outweighs the cost.

And, for any of you out there who want to start throwing around terms like “surrender” or “defeatist” or whatever, by all means, I urge you to articulate a reasonably likely result from this adventure that is worth more than $500,000,000,000, 4,000 American soldiers’ lives, and 40,000 casualties. (Which is actually giving you a deal since that doesn’t include the future costs that will have to be incurred to get to whatever the result might be.) As it is, we seem to resemble a gambler way down at the casino, throwing more money down on the black jack table trying to get even so that the money he’s already lost isn’t “wasted.”