Taibbi’s story begins right before the 2006 elections, and ricochets from laughably cynical and corrupt Republican-led conference committee meetings to dismally predictable post 2006 Democratic backpedaling on their electoral mandate; from Iraq to the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas; from Washington to New York; all at an often dizzying pace, sadly ending just a bit before Sarah Palin was invented, but its prescience is still quite arresting in retrospect.  With characteristic bluntness, Taibbi watches the Democrats’ post-2006 immediate collapse on war funding, and correctly surmises that in Washington, the big things are already decided by the congressional leaders and the corporations that own them, and the politicians and the media therefore must endlessly prattle on about the little things while the voters are utterly ignored.  Taibbi would definitely agree with Billy Flynn, “It’s all show business!”

The heart of the book, though, is Taibbi’s undercover stint as a convert to Christian Zionism in the form of Pastor Hagee’s Cornerstone Church, a bizarre mixture of self-help gospel and right-wing politics, all served up with the same mind-control techniques on would expect from Scientology of the Moonies.  During these episodes, Taibbi morphs into Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Hunter Thompson, all rolled together, and writes about it with such self-deprecation and genuine wonder that you are flatly dumbfounded at how he keeps it up, day after astonishing day.  During the supposedly climactic “Deliverance” ritual at the end of a three-day retreat, the cartoonish spiritual leader theatrically casts out not only lust and other everyday sins, but alkso handwriting analysis and philosophy, to boot.  As the whole crowd of followers pretend vomited into handily distributed bags for an hour and a half, Taibbi writes, “He had cast out the demons of every ailment, crime, domestic problem, and intellectual discipline on the face of the earth.  He cast out horoscopes, false gods, witches, intellectual pride, nearsightedness, everything, it seemed to me, except maybe e. coli and John Updike novels.”  And yet he kept a straight face through it all and more.

I know that ol’ Nailhead has been searching for an author funnier, smarter, and harder working than I am.  I suggest Taibbi; but I saw him first.