Like I said, I was working from notes. I reread his piece carefully. I don't find Taibbi's defense very persuasive; for instance, I think if you read his piece, it's pretty clear that he's suggesting that PE firms put up pennies on the dollar, and that they were in some manner culpable for the first dotcom bubble and for the 2008 crisis. I also think that even when Taibbi is "right", what he's mostly doing is hyperventilating over banal side-issues that aren't the real problem. I read his writing about downside protection for PE deals and wonder what he'd say about liquidation preferences.
But either way: I concede the point that Taibbi's LBO writing is mostly notable because Dan Primack took the time to write a takedown. It's not as bad as his NYC parking meter writing, or his Obama bailout writing, or, god help us, his writing on dark pools and HFT.
On the other hand: being (mostly) directionally right about LBOs is kind of a lay-up? Like, it was the plot of Wall Street.
The original article is at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/greed-an.... I don't know whether I read it before, but I just skimmed it now.
The takedown was at http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/04/greed-debt-and-mat... but has moved to https://fortune.com/2012/09/04/greed-debt-and-matt-taibbi/. It is behind a paywall and I didn't read it. However I can go off your cheatsheet for a sample.
Taibbi's response to the takedown is at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bain-and....
Point by point.
1. Taibbi never claimed that PE firms were behind the 2008 crisis. In fact his article doesn't mention the 2008 crisis. And appropriately not since Romney exited Bain in 2000 and that crisis is not the subject of the article.
2. Taibbi's follow-up acknowledges that "Democrat-leaning" was a poor phrasing, and also his description was specifically of the Blackstone Group in the early 1990s. (The original phrasing did make that clear - read it for yourself.) And he has a point that they supported Bill Clinton in 1992, following which their chairmanm Roger Altman, left to be Clinton's Deputy Treasury Secretary.
3. When you talk about returns from PE LBOs you have to be clear about returns for whom. He enumerated multiple cases where the returns for Romney and Bain came regardless of whether the companies succeed. Whether they came for the PE funds that people invest in is a different story. And the examples that he gave are NOT downside protection.
4. Taibbi DID NOT claim that Bain Capital did LBOs in the tech sector. Go read what he wrote and verify that. Any impression to the contrary shows a lack of reading comprehension. What he DID say is that tech bubbles bring easy money, some of that money gets invested in PE companies, and with that "dry powder" they get to go shopping. But they don't go shopping for tech companies. Instead they do things like shop for toy companies and donut shops.
If you're interested in where he talks about PE firms doing LBOs of unprofitable 2-year-old tech companies, I strongly suggest that you pull out quotes of him saying that they do. You may have trouble though. He nowhere says that.
Your comment about a "poor track record of reliably saying things that are true" appears to be more appropriately applied to the criticisms of Taibbi than to Taibbi himself.