Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season

I will always love Matt Taibbi for his exhilarating 2001 account of the time he threw a horse semen pie in the face of the NYT's Michael Wines but unfortunately his more recent political journalism is mostly high-volume hyperbole, with poorly-considered politics. Spanking the Donkey is a collection of essays from the 2004 presidential campaign. Taibbi hits the mark about 30% of the time which I guess is just barely enough; I enjoyed his experience as a Republican volunteer in Florida, where the racism of his co-workers was so strong he couldn’t even persuade them to take their socially conservative message to black churches.