From Goldman Sachs to David Brooks, The Many Targets of Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi assured Imus that any weird noises on his end of the line were not those of an imprisoned three-year old child, but rather were coming from a puppy.

"Nobody loves dogs more than I do," Imus assured his guest. "Or hates David Brooks more than I do."

Which was fitting, since Brooks, an Op-Ed Columnist at the New York Times, has been one of Taibbi's favorite targets of late. And if there's one thing you don't want to be, it's fresh meat for Taibbi, who famously referred to investment bank Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

Just days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, Brooks wrote in his column that Haitians were to blame for the massive destruction of their country; that their "lack of an achievement culture" and a "bad religion" centered around voodoo had led them to erect unsafe buildings.

"I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they're just a bunch of poor people," Taibbi said sarcastically.

Brooks's column, he added, was "definitely racist in tone," and spectacularly ill-timed. "There's a time to discuss what's going on in Haiti's culture, but I don't think it's when bodies have yet to be pulled out from the rubble."

Blame can be assigned, however, to AIG, which will hand out $100 million in employee bonuses despite still owing nearly $100 billion dollars to the U.S. government and taxpayers.

"There are companies that have actually paid back the money that we gave them through the TARP, the most famous bailout program that involved money that came directly from the Treasury," said Taibbi. "But none of the companies have paid back all of the bailout money, or even most of the bailout money, which came from a variety of other programs through the Fed."

AIG, Goldman Sachs, and nearly every other investment house would be broke without the bailout, and their divvying of enormous bonuses is "very brazen," said Taibbi. "It's almost a declaration of political power that they think they can do whatever they want."

You know, kind of like Toyota when it comes to making safe cars. Imus speculates that the recent and numerous recalls on a number of models is Japan's way of getting back at this country. Confused, Taibbi wondered if we had dumped defective cars on them.

"No," Imus replied. "But we dumped some bombs on them that worked fairly well."

-Julie Kanfer