Matt Taibbi Quotes

Candidate Obama was either exceptionally naive or willfully disingenuous when he vowed to change the way Washington works. The very promise of Hope and Change was rooted in uprooting the Washington modus operandi. But instead of rejecting it, he embraced it all - the secrecy, the closed doors, the political favors, the near-criminal negligence.

John Boehner was and is an unprincipled ward-heeler who simply couldn't weather the transition of the Republican Party from a corporatist party with a sizable conservative base to a purely conservative party.

Whenever anything extraordinary is done in American municipal politics, whether for good or for evil, you can trace it almost invariably to one man. The people do not do it. Neither do the 'gangs,' 'combines,' or political parties.

In America, politicians do whatever to get re-elected, and a lot of decisions that were being made at that time by Kennedy were certain not to get him re-elected.

Washington is deeply frustrating because so many of the positions that politicians hold are a product of ephemeral self-interest. They reverse themselves, for themselves, all the time.

It is a matter of common knowledge that the government of South Carolina is under domination of a small ring of cunning, conniving men.

There's not a self-regulating group of nice fair-playing people in politics. There are a lot of dodgy people in politics.

Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.

Like they said about The West Wing, you can't do a show about Washington until you can.

When you start attacking cronyism and people's political interests, it gets nasty.

No matter how you rearrange President Obama's inner circle, it still looks, smells and tastes like a rotten Chicago deep-dish pizza.

Clinton talks reform, but it's business as usual in Washington with different pigs at the trough.

What a vicious practice is this of our politicians at Washington pairing off ["horse trading"]! As if one man who votes wrong, going away, could excuse you, who mean to vote right, for going away; as if your presence did not tell in more ways than in your vote.

Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.

Politics these days is a disgusting game of mudslinging, filled with selfish people with selfish aims.

Lee Atwater [Republican National Committee Chairman] saw politics as a cutthroat game and didn't mind holding the blade.

Many Americans have sensed there is a very corrupt pay-to-play system going on in Washington.

When politics is no longer a mission but a profession, politicians become more self-serving than public servants.

The political classes are despised when they deal in sound bites, embrace tokenistic campaigns and feather their own nests while trying to please all of the people all of the time.

I've been able to see some very impressive people that are in politics, and I've been able to see a lot more people that are much less impressive that I don't know if I'd want to spend my life working with. When I see sort of how the sausage is made, it's not very pretty.

Politicians in Washington work in a small, sheltered world where they lurch from crisis to crisis that they create, nurture and use as ideological triggers in their selfish pursuit of re-election.

A lot of times, politicians will go to where their strongest force is and do things for them, and that's the type of thing they do that I find offensive.

'Scandal' has always lived in this dark place with this idea that Washington is filled with this underbelly of monsters, that if the real world understood how dark, twisted and corrupt it really was, they would never agree with our government or want to be part of it. It's been kind of fun to live in that world. It felt like a fictional world.

The UPA awarded Brijesh Mishra with the second highest award of the country after Bharat Ratna. I am suggesting that he was a Congress bug, a cat's paw. He was Congress' Trojan Horse. Even as he was the NSA, he worked for the Congress party.

It's the oldest trick in Washington - when presented with a policy solution you don't like, characterize it as the bogeyman.