Taibbi takes CBS' Lara Logan to the woodshed

Read what she wrote and please tell me constitutes faulty reasoning. She couldn't have been more on point or specific. Not the stuff of a clever wordsmith, maybe, but a straight point by point criticism that is pretty clear cut.

I am not sure where Taibbi wrote that, but it's an ad hominem attack of Megan McCardle, not a response to what she wrote. It wasn't even a particularly clever ad hominem attack.

What Taibbi can't address is the fact that using examples of bad interest rate swap investments to make a murky point (it still makes no sense) about regulation of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, as he did, is still pretty much the same as suggesting that a cab driver and a Fortune 500 CEO are the same thing because they both have jobs. It's a kindergarten comparison.

Two points about this: 1) What is the point? Anyone can sit around and cherry pick (after the fact, with 20/20 hindsight when it's easy to see winners and losers) completely unrelated entities (a blown muni finance deal. ... insurance instruments on credit default packages that explode) that lost a ton of money and suggest conspiracy theories. People hear huge dollar amounts, vaguely see the effects of those blow ups and their eyebrows raise. And there is Matt Taibi with a simplistic narrative cloaked with fancy sounding acronyms and cartoon villains hatching comic book plots. It still is a weak strained and contrived narrative if you care to look past his clever writing. 2) Why would Taibbi quote what McCardle said and bring up Jefferson County? First, an interest rate swap STILL doesn't make much of a point about CDOs and CDSs, unless the point is that every single thing in the entire world needs to be regulated to protect people from themselves. Secondly, I am not up on the details, but what happened in Jefferson County was fraud, correct? No one from J.P. Morgan is sitting in prison, just some former elected officials, correct? Wasn't Taibbi's whole point in the first place that our elected officials need to save us from Goldman Sachs (or J.P. Morgan, in the case of Jefferson County) through regulation? If so, why would Taibbi now bring up Jefferson County as a reason why we need more government intervention to stop the screw jobs? The local corrupt government perpetuated the screw job in Jefferson County!

That's what happens, when you shoehorn unrelated things into neat little narratives and try to create cookie cutter villains. The world really isn't that way. There are villains everywhere. And they are not equally villainous all of the time.

 

Yeah. But did he write an article claiming that Goldman Sachs was responsible for the sinking of the Titanic (using six degrees of Kevin Bacon as the proof) and that since the Titanic sunk, we need to regulate kids scooters because they are both forms of transportation?

Facts, details and scope matter in journalism.