Just finished reading Matt Taibbi's book about the 2004 presidential election, Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season, last week just in time to start reading his stuff for the 2008 election. He's one of the few political writers outside of bloggerdom who is genuinely angry with the whole system but remains savagely funny about the whole thing even when you can see it is driving him crazy. (Crazy enough to drop acid and dress up as a viking during a John Kerry event.)

And you've got to admit any system where you have to raise $27,000,000 a quarter just to campaign for your party's nomination is pretty screwed up and geared towards something only on the vaguest of nodding terms with true democracy. (And if you don't spent that kind of money you're going to be comic relief - Mike Gravel, old and crazy and half-French! Dennis Kucinich, short and crazy and hot wife! - at best.)