So he’s not exactly Hunter S. Thompson, who filed so many stories covering presidential campaigns for Rolling Stone magazine over the years. But if his latest story about Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann is any indication of what’s to come this election cycle, Matt Taibbi’s reporting will have an edge to it.
In an appearance promoting the Bachmann piece on Wednesday’s “Imus in the Morning” program on the Fox Business Network, Taibbi offered one reason he was rooting for a Bachmann Republican presidential nomination – the porn films it would inspire.
“Actually, yeah, I’m actually kind of rooting for her to win the nomination, because I can’t wait to see the porn movies that they make,” Taibbi said. “Bachmann-inspired films are going to be great.”
Aside from the pornography angle and his liberal bias against Bachmann, Taibbi explained why the Minnesota congresswoman should be taken seriously.
“I mean, who didn’t see ‘Nailin’ Palin’ – that was classic cinema,” he continued. “And so this is basically sort of a big profile on Michele Bachmann and spent about a month kind of following her around a little bit and the basic thesis is that, you know, she is — everybody laughs at her, she’s hilariously funny, but she’s got a shot. She’s got a real shot of winning the nomination. It’s just kind of laid out for her perfectly. She really could easily take Iowa. Romney is not really competing there. She’s got Mike Huckabee’s organization. She’s got a lot of support in that state and then after that, you know, she’s got the Tea Party contingent backing her and Romney and Paul could split the vote after that, it could really happen.”
Taibbi told viewers that Bachmann wasn’t stupid, but she did have her flaws. Despite those flaws, she is more of a politician than former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin he said.
“No, she’s not [stupid],” Taibbi said. “She’s crazy and believes a lot of things that are completely nuts and she doesn’t really know a whole lot of things, you know, that — like for instance she had that amazing situation when the Chinese talked about maybe changing their reserve currency and she thought they were somehow, the United States was going to stop using the dollar as its currency and you know, proposing a law to permit that. So she’s very confused about a lot of things, but she really knows how to do politics. She’s very, very — a relentless campaigner and everybody who I talked to who’s ever opposed her in the past said you should not underestimate this person. She knows how to do this thing. She’s not like Sarah Palin. She loves the campaigning aspect of it. She loves pounding the pavement and is going to be a formidable opponent.”