Transcript - America This Week, Feb 14, 2025: "The Government is a Giant Pile of Dung"

Also, Tulsi Gabbard confirmed. Plus, "Angel Fire," by our own Walter Kirn

Matt Taibbi: All right, welcome to America This Week, I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn, I almost forgot,

Matt Taibbi: Is it that bad, are we forgetting our names yet?

Walter Kirn: I live 50 miles from Yellowstone National Park, and in great wilderness areas there’s a phenomena at this time of year called winter kill when the weaker deer and elk and so on just basically expire, starve, bog down in the snow and give up. I’m not there yet but I’m close. If I thought there were deserving wolves that could nourish themselves on my body as they do on deer in Yellowstone, I might give myself to nature and its cycles, but...

Matt Taibbi: I’ve had exactly the same thoughts. So right outside my window, there’s a big fallen tree that fortunately fell that way and not on my house, and it’s rotting and underneath it looks like a fox family’s going to have kids this year.

Walter Kirn: Aww.

Matt Taibbi: So I thought, yeah, if it gets really bad, I can just crawl under there and feed the family for a year or so.

Walter Kirn: It’s like sky burials among the Native Americans and some sects in India. You just put yourself up on a platform and let yourself be eaten by predators or under a fox log.

Matt Taibbi: I’m totally for it, I love the idea, yeah. However, we’re not there yet, so a show we will do. And boy, what a busy few days, week/ whatever it is. In fact, it’s so busy that things are going to happen while we’re taping this show that are going to make this show irrelevant, almost certainly so-

Walter Kirn: Or eerily uncannily, synchronistically prophetic. Because without the things even happening, we may get parts of what happens through unconscious transmission.

Matt Taibbi: That’s right, yes. We may may, through osmosis, absorb truths and just relay them to you. So because of that, I want to start with something completely sort of nonspecific, or not time friendly, but just something totally-

Walter Kirn: In fact.

Matt Taibbi: Bizarre.

Walter Kirn: In fact, timeless really, because I think it will go down in history as one of the great congressional assertions.

Matt Taibbi: So this is just funny, and it’s kind of unfortunate. So this is about a congressman from Illinois, from Skokie actually, the Skokie/ Evanston area. Jan Schakowsky, who was once actually recommended as a candidate for president by the nation back in 2004, back when I knew them, and I believe I’ve worked with her office over the years on a number of issues, probably Dodd-Frank and some other things. I always thought of her as one of the smart ones, and then this week this happened. She was, I forget who the witness was, but this was the questioning.

Jan Schakowsky: Yesterday, I met with a manufacturing company, but they also are engaged in getting young people more engaged in manufacturing. So I asked them, “So how many of those students that are signing up and want to do this, how many are women?” And they said, “Well, I know there’s at least 13% or something.” It was a low number. And you had mentioned trying to engage more women in manufacturing, I’m just wondering if just the name manufacturing sounds like a guy?

Matt Taibbi: Manufacturing, it has “man” in it, apparently. So this is the ranking member of the Commerce and Manufacturing committee. The root is actually not man, it’s manu or well...

Walter Kirn: Yeah, hand, hand, as in manual, as in make, okay.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, handmade and manufactum, right, or manufactura, what’s the root there?

Walter Kirn: Well, I don’t know my Latin that well, but it’s the same word for hand that goes into manual, and she was close in the way that a three-year-old might be close. Does this mean making men? I’m surprised that she didn’t think that factories are where men come from.

Matt Taibbi: I don’t want to make too much of this, but again, this is the ranking member of the committee who doesn’t know that manufacturing means made by hand.

Walter Kirn: And the committee is named for manufacturing.

Matt Taibbi: Right, exactly.

Walter Kirn: It’s a word that she sees on stationary 1700 times a week. I wonder how long she’s been holding back this thought, this witticism. I also wonder how many people on her staff have had to nod when she makes this observation?

Matt Taibbi: No, no, no, no, no. The staff, I can’t imagine that she ran that past staffers and they all said nothing, no way.

Walter Kirn: Maybe not. I like to think highly of these staffs, because there’s only one way that Congress could still exist given the absolute stupidity I’ve seen there, and that’s that the staffs run after them, like dog trainers after dogs that haven’t yet learned not to go to the bathroom on the floor, cleaning up their messes. There was probably even a press release afterwards saying the Congresswoman’s joke was much appreciated by the manufacturing community.

Matt Taibbi: Right but yeah, I guess it would be womanufacturing.

Walter Kirn: Chickyfacturing.

Matt Taibbi: I’m sorry. This is partly on my mind because I was just in Congress this week and went through my own weirdness. There was a lot of really surreal stuff that happened at that committee hearing, and I guess we can get into some of that later. But I guess the reason this matters is because this is why the political situation right now is where it is. One side of the government is moving with tremendous alacrity and purpose controversially, I’m not sure that I agree with all of their decisions, but they’re certainly doing all kinds of things that they set out to do, and the other side is just like in this free fall where they’re stuck in this twilight zone. In fact, one of the members of Congress who questioned me or questioned us yesterday, yelled at us, didn’t question us, talked about being in the Twilight Zone, and I think they have no idea what to do, and they’re just kind of lost in this echo chamber that used to make sense. I don’t know.

Walter Kirn: Okay. First of all, Matt, in a minute, let me interview you on your experience Wednesday, because I have a few of the questions that I think anyone in the public might have. But we’ve been seeing a lot of Congress lately because of the confirmation hearings, more than we do usually, except during an impeachment or something. And all Congress people wait for those few moments where it isn’t just C-SPAN addicts who might be watching them. So this view of things, which I’ve happened to be able to see up close by being at the RFK hearings, which were incredibly well attended and very highly scrutinized, has caused me to have a whole new theory about Congress. And practically, how can I put it, especially about the Democrats in Congress and in the Senate particularly, and that’s that there was no there there for a while now, that they have been cast for various reasons, various political reasons.

It’s hard to see how any of them have really fought their way up in some true Darwinian political contest because they’re very stupid, and the ones who aren’t stupid are very fraudulent. They are often not in command of the issues that they claim to be their central issues. And so her saying that manufacturing sounds like something for guys, though it looks like a big gaffe or a joke, is to me almost the rule at this point. And I came back sort of like the ancient Mariner to Montana from the Senate saying, “Hey guys, it’s not that they’re incompetent, it’s not that they’re corrupt. Yeah, they’re all those things, but they’re also just putting on a fucking show. They don’t really know what they’re talking about. They’re like ABBA singing in English or Milli Vanilli. They really aren’t informed, aware, maybe even conscious. And also by the way, some of them are vampires.”