Showing posts sorted by relevance for query glenn greenwald. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query glenn greenwald. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, May 20, 2013

Glenn Greenwald Goes All Out in Defense of Professor Joseph Massad's Anti-Semitic Screed

I'm a firm believer in free speech, and if it was me I wouldn't have taken down Columbia Professor Joseph Massad's vile essay attacking World War II-era supporters of a Jewish homeland as "Zionist anti-Semites." But I wouldn't be going to bat for such vile people either. Not so for Glenn Greenwald, who's been on a Twitter jihad attacking Al Jazeera for removing Massad's hate-piece.


Here's the problem for Greenwald: Even the most ardent free speech advocate would still recoil from defending Massad --- because people like this are perverting the history of the Holocaust in promotion of a second Holocaust against the Jews. William Jacobson has the story, "Al-Jazeera runs then deletes anti-Semitic screed by Columbia Univ. Prof. Joseph Massad":
Even Mondoweiss, yes Mondoweiss, the harshest of websites when it comes to Israel, had trouble stomaching Massad’s arguments:
Well, with Massad we’ve come a long inverted way. He sees the Jewishness that most Jews celebrate as colonial and – criminal.

Massad stops short – I think – of a Euro-American Jewish Zionist conspiracy to dominate the world.

Understanding Jewishness at war with the world and with Jewishness itself. It’s a tough sell.
Now the Massad article is gone from Al-Jazeera (h/t @GlennGreenwald). Spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was not too much for Al-Jazeera initially, but perhaps the attention called to the screed was too much. I’d be curious if the article ran in non-English versions of Al-Jazeera and if it has been removed there.
More at the link. And really, if Mondoweiss has second thoughts, then, boy, that's really gotta be some over-the-top screed.

In any case, check Greenwald's timeline for updates.

Posted by AmPowerBlog at 5:00 AM 0 comments
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Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Glenn Greenwald's Anger at the "Non-Greenwald Power Structure"

I've blogged quite a bit on Glenn Greenwald, because, frankly, the guy drives me positively batty!

I'm not the only one, it appears. Megan McArdle's got a post up responding to Greenwald's latest rants, and I just love the introduction:

Sigh. Glenn Greenwald lashes back. Mr Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure...
The "non-Glenn Greenwald power structure"!!

So true! Greenwald's a master at offering wholly unsubstantiated propositions as if these were gospel from on high - and those who dismiss them will undoubtley face eternal damnation (or criminal trial, which is probably preferable for Greenwald!).

I noted yesterday, for example, how crazed Greenwald sounds sometimes:

The indisputable fact is that McCain, on foreign policy issues, holds views far to the Right and far outside of mainstream American public opinion. In Media World, the GOP presidential nominee is always a centrist, a new kind of Republican, a trans-partisan pragmatist, while the Democratic nominee is always just a dogmatic liberal....

But depicting McCain as a "centrist" is an attempt to mainstream decidedly extreme positions, and worse, it obscures and distorts one of the vital issues that ought to be decided in the election: namely, whether McCain's radical foreign policy views and war-based national security approach -- grounded in the defining Bush/Cheney doctrine -- is something America wants to continue.
Well, as I've pointed out time and again, the Bush doctrine's actually right in line with a long tradition of preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony in American foreign policy.
Greenwald also claim repeatedly how public opinion backs his positions, for example, that a majority of the public opposes the administration root and branch on the war. The claim's absurd, of course, and I wrote an entire post disabusing Greenwald of the notion: "Glenn Greenwald is Wrong About Iraq Public Opinion."

So you can see why I just love McArdle's new phrase: the "non-Glenn Greenwald power structure"!

The latest Greenwald entry purports to provide further evidence that the U.S. media establishment enables - even abets - the alleged "crimes" of the Bush administration and its Democratic Party toadies.

Apparently, for Greenwald, McArdle's part of the conpiracy, and here's part of her conclusion in rebuttal:

Frankly, his assertions sound bizarre, even lunatic, to anyone who has ever met a journalist or a newspaper editor. And the later part of his rant, during which he accuses me and Dan of supporting the media establishment because it is helping us cover up our war crimes, ranges into the kind of frenzied conspiracy-theorizing that I generally associate with Ron Paul's more wild-eyed supporters. You know, the ones who tell you that when the rEVOLution comes, you'll be the first one with your back against the wall. The ones who aren't really arguing with you, but rather using you as a stand-in for everyone they've ever disagreed with, including the kids who made fun of them for wetting their pants in first grade. The ones who are filing their bizarrely capitalized missives from atop the massive stockpiles of canned goods and ammunition they have stored in an abandoned copper mine.
Frenzied conspiracies? You've got to love it!

See more at Memeorandum.
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 12:10 PM 0 comments
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Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Glenn Greenwald's Sock Puppetry!

I don't know if Glenn Greenwald uses sock puppets to defend himself in the blog wars of which he's constantly engaged.

I can point to what others are saying, arguments which make Greenwald look like a hack.

Karl at Protein Wisdom has a post up, "Rick Ellensburg: The Silence of the Sock-Puppets," which suggests Greenwald's engaged in pseudonymous posting defending himself:

Rick Ellensburg is quite upset that Megan McArdle and Dan Drezner supposedly defended the establishment media in response to another recent Ellensburg screed, which complained that the media was more interested in covering stories like Barack Obama’s bad bowling score or his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright than the declassification of the 2003 “torture memo” drafted by John Yoo, then a deputy in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel.

In reality, Drezner and McArdle did not defend the media so much as critique Ellensburg’s arguments.
Rick Ellensburg? Who's Rick Ellensburg?

As Ace of Spades notes, Ellensburg's Greenwald's "magic boyfriend" who pops up at key moments to defend Greenwald in the blog wars:

It has already been proven that "Rick Ellensburg," Certified Greenwald Defender, blogs from the same area of Brazil that Glenn Greenwald does. And is active on the internet at the same time as Greenwald. And favors the same "to recap" construction and use of hyphens that Greenwald does.
But check out Patterico:

Glenn Greenwald is irate that conservative bloggers dared to take notice. Greenwald (also known as Thomas Ellers and Rick Ellensburg, among others) complains bitterly that conservative bloggers went digging deep into the comment sections of various liberal blogs, found inappropriate and hateful comments, and then began insisting that these isolated comments proved something.

To the contrary, Greenwald insists, anonymous comments by hateful leftists prove nothing about the left generally. Nothing!
Here's more, from Patterico:

If your mouth is agape at the shameless hypocrisy of this, then you must [not] be familiar with Greenwald.

These comments are staggeringly hypocritical, viewed in the light of Greenwald’s extensive history of spotlighting anonymous comments at conservative blogs to reach broad-brush conclusions about the entire conservative movement. Greenwald is a prime practitioner of this “transparently flimsy and misleading method” of tarring the other side. And, in marked contrast to Greenwald’s tender concern today for whether ugly leftist comments “are representative of the blog itself,” Greenwald is famous in conservative circles for highlighting extreme comments on conservative blogs — comments that in no way represent the views of the posts to which they are responding, or of the bloggers generally.
I think folks are clearly on to Greenwald's hypocrisy.

But if you don't have time to follow all the lines of circumstantial proof of Greenwald's sock puppetry, just read McArdle's incredibly powerful logical takedown of Greenwald, and her immortal line:

Mr Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure...
Touche!
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 5:53 AM 0 comments
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Bwahaha! British High Court Rules Against Glenn Greenwald's Criminal Mule David Miranda

Well, they're criminals, as I reported earlier, "Glenn Greenwald Launches 'The Intercept' in Pathetic Diversion Against Impending Criminal Charges of Fencing Stolen Intelligence."

See Telegraph UK, "David Miranda loses 'illegal detention' fight":
Partner of journalist who exposed secret information leaked by Edward Snowden was held for nine hours at Heathrow under anti-terror laws.

The partner of the journalist at the centre of the Edward Snowden spying leaks has lost his High Court challenge that he was detained unlawfully last year.

Brazilian David Miranda was held for nine hours at Heathrow airport last August under counter terror laws after police discovered some 58,000 documents from the Snowden leaks cache.

His partner, Glenn Greenwald, was the writer who exposed the secret information stolen by the CIA contractor Snowden and published in the Guardian newspaper.

The articles, revealing information on the US National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ, caused a political storm and led to accusations that the leaks had put national security at risk.

Mr Miranda was stopped on August 18 at Heathrow as he travelled from Germany to Brazil.
More.

And be sure to check Louise Mensch's feed:


And of course, the pitiful groveling at Greenwald's, who some day, God willing, will rot in jail:




Posted by AmPowerBlog at 9:05 AM 0 comments
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Glenn Greenwald: True Hypocrite

It's interesting that Glenn Greenwald, in his new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, takes down John Wayne as the template for the prancing, hypocritcal he-man Republican.

I live in Orange County, California, where Wayne lived. On occasion I stop by his resting place, to sit under the tree by his headstone, and reflect aloud about life in the United States today. It's pieceful there; and while Wayne wasn't my favorite actor, I've always appreciated the "True Grit" he brought to his roles.

I don't think I've ever mentioned this before, but I was reminded of my Wayne visits in reading Dean Barnett's review of Greenwald over at the Weekly Standard, especially this passage:

Greenwald posits John Wayne as the archetypal Republican - a guy who acted tough and noble but whose personal life was ignoble and at times pathetic. Greenwald acidly notes, "John Wayne flamboyantly paraded around as the embodiment of courage, masculinity, patriotism, wholesomeness and warrior virtues" when in fact he was a Lothario who went to great lengths to avoid military service during World War II. (Worse still, Wayne inflicted "The Green Berets" on the movie-going nation in the 1960s, a cinematic crime that can never be fully forgiven.)

You'll want to take special note of Greenwald's none-too-subtle code language that has the Duke "flamboyantly parading." Throughout "Great American Hypocrites," neocons and other Republicans are reliably "prancing" or perambulating in some less than manful way. Greenwald stretches with both holding up John Wayne as a Republican idol and all his talk of prancing. For what it's worth, in my conversations with neocons, I've never heard a single one of them mention John Wayne. I've also noticed that they seldom "prance" let alone "flamboyantly parade." Well, maybe a couple do, but they are the exceptions.
I can't vouch for too many neocons, but I doubt Wayne's the biggest model for aspiring prancing-warmongers out there, but hey, easy strawman-ish case selection for Greenwald I suppose.

Barnett, interestingly, says that Greenwald's a good guy:

I KNOW THIS WON'T endear me to many of my fellow conservatives, but I like Glenn Greenwald. I've spoken to him a few times on the radio and have enjoyed our jousts.
I simply can't imagine having a rousing intellectual exchange with the guy, but at least Barnett's fair-minded when he notes:

The sad fact is that Greenwald often opts for personal attacks rather than reasoned argument.
It's sad because, frankly, Greenwald does have some intellectual firepower, but his ad hominems are so grating that one wants to let him have it upside the head.

But check Jules Crittenden as well:

There is no indication ... [that this is] in fact a serious book, or anything but a partisan bid for money and attention. You’re welcome, by the way, Glenn, for this bit of gratuitous attention. It’s my pleasure. However infantile the book is … [Barnett's] review itself is worth a read. Given Greenwald’s boundless self-admiration, I presume the cover has a big picture of the sockpuppet himself on it.

No, apparently it doesn’t. Astonishing. I would have thought the unself-conscious self-adoration would have trumped other artistic, marketing, humility, self-mockery concerns, etc.

You can admire Glenn and his curriculum vitae at the link, and also observe how busy he is going to be promoting himself and his latest great contribution to western civilization. It’s already got one, but for the second edition, here’s a suggested edit on the subtitle: Takes One to Know One.

Jonah Goldberg at The Corner, shrewdly wasting less time and space on this than I did, proclaims Greenwald “one of the most easily and profitably ignored voices in the blogosphere.” Considering the competition, that’s no insignificant accomplishment.

Prior Greenwald scholarship, with links to the important work others have done in the study of Greenwald:

Lacking Even the Ethics of a Journalist.

Here's this from book's blurb at Barnes and Noble:

More a partisan screed than a reasoned argument meant to persuade undecided readers, this repetitive text frequently devolves into personal attacks and vast generalizations.

But also note Barnett's conclusion:

Great American Hypocrites will likely be a big hit. Whatever the equivalent of red meat is for the angry left, this book is it.

That sounds about right.

Posted by AmPowerBlog at 12:08 PM 0 comments
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Monday, February 10, 2014

Glenn Greenwald Launches 'The Intercept' in Pathetic Diversion Against Impending Criminal Charges of Fencing Stolen Intelligence

I mentioned yesterday that Glenn Greenwald's a pathological liar. And what better way for a pathological liar to deflect the buring heat of justice bearing down than to accuse your accusers of being pathological liars?

And what better venue to denounce your accusers than the communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, which is the most anti-American news outlet this side of MSNBC?



The occasion for Greenwald's cries and accusations is the launch of his much-touted, Pierre Omidyar-backed media venture, "The Intercept."

They've got three pieces up at the website, which launched today: "Welcome to The Intercept"; "New Photos of the NSA and Other Top Intelligence Agencies Revealed for First Time"; and "The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program." (At Memeorandum.)

Both Greenwald and partner Jeremy Scahill stress the intense urgency of getting their Omidyar-backed media project off the ground as soon as possibly, purportedly in order to mount an aggressive push-back against what Greenwald calls the "criminalization of journalism."

The problem, of course, is that their program's in fact cyberterrorism disguised under the cloak of journalism, and is thus arguably shielded by the First Amendment protections afforded to those who speak out against U.S. power.

The next problem, obviously, is that Greenwald's patent panoply of lies is pathetically enabled by a virtually unified left-wing partisan press that has continued its work of tearing down the United States since at least 2003 and the Bush administration's enforcement of the 1991 U.N.-backed armistice against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Recall that the entire mountain of lies surrounding Greenwald, his husband David Miranda, and the latter's intelligence-running to Berlin-based activist Laura Poitras, came crashing down under the withering and dogged reporting of blogger and columnist Louise Mensch. The facts are not in dispute. It's only Greenwald et al.'s disgusting and insipid spin that has worked to obscure the true scale of criminality here. Louise has the goods, at the Telegraph UK, "David Miranda detention: Why I believe the Guardian has smeared Britain's security services," and at Unfashionista, "David Miranda – Snowden’s Mule, and physical data," where she writes:
Look, boys and girls, you hold politicians to account, hold YOUR OWN to account too. No fear no favour – stop turning a blind eye and swallowing the spin so uncritically.

Ask yourselves this damned obvious question. If the data was copied everywhere and it didn’t matter, why is Rusbridger talking about “copies in New York and Rio”?

Why is David Miranda carrying it on encrypted thumb drives?

Why is David Miranda acting as a go-between at all?

Haven’t Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenberg and the Guardian heard of Dropbox? Or P2P filesharing sites? There are a million ways to store locked data in the cloud.

Let’s review:
He was returning to their home in Rio de Janeiro when he was stopped at Heathrow and officials confiscated electronics equipment, including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.
This Guardian quote does not say “rolls of film… written notebooks” etc. It describes only electronic storage devices for data. They could have saved David Miranda “He is my partner, he is not a journalist” ‘s ticket price and expenses by, you know, storing all that in the cloud or shipping it via FedEx.

Glenn Greenwald to the New York Times:
Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden.
But Miranda and Poitras used a human mule (if indeed we believe him, I absolutely don’t, that he didn’t know what he was carrying).

Why?

Yes, I realise I’m asking journalists to ask hard questions about another journalist and they like to keep those for people outside their club. Thank goodness for blogging and Twitter – and the smashing of big media’s gatekeeping hold on information.

Ask yourselves if Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras, are actively assisting Edward Snowden in his treacherous dissemination of classified, incredibly sensitive US and UK intelligence? From where I’m sitting, it looks like an attempt to fight charges in advance – by claiming that they are journalists and everything they do is covered by the First Amendment. Hence the New York Times putting Poitras on the cover of its magazine supplement this week and Greenwald’s repeated lies about the role of his husband and the events and aftermath of the detention to British journalists, unchallenged anywhere in the UK press, until I started tweeting about it & wrote my last blog on the topic.

They hope that claiming a journalistic role will protect them when they are stealing, storing and disseminating classified intel about not just NSA snooping but America’s intelligence programmes against China, Russia and so forth. They are, in doing so, risking countless lives. So are the Guardian newspaper. As Malcom Rifkind said countering BBC bias yesterday on the Today programme, the Guardian had no right to store that stolen intelligence or to report even on GCHQ data collection (legal, not illegal, data collection). As he said, the Guardian’s angle was the GCHQ could legally penetrate comms in a deeper way than was known – and of course the Guardian let Al Qaeda and others know that, meaning that terrorists will start protecting their communications. Some terrorists are sophisticated – others, like many extremist Islamist cells, are not. The latter have been warned off by the Guardian from ways that UK spooks were tracking them.
Read it all at the link.

As Louise notes, "If Obama were Bush, the U.S. media would be all over" this --- from the failure to prevent Edward Snowden's treasonous pilfering of top-secret intelligence, to the criminal dissemination of vital data on all aspects of the U.S. national security regime, including most diabolically the release of confidential information identifying human assets in American and British governmental organizations, putting lives gravely at risk.

BONUS: There's some background on the launch from Lloyd Grove, at the Daily Beast, "Welcome to Glenn Greenwald, Inc.?"

Posted by AmPowerBlog at 9:30 PM 0 comments
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Monday, February 23, 2009

Glenn Greenwald's Hysterical Hypocrisy

Dan Riehl points his readers toward Glenn Greenwald, whose essay on the Glenn Beck survivalist episodes is the perfect primer on the contrast between the smug homosexual-progressive antiwar mandarins of the leftist elite and the silent majority of everyday Americans who truly grasp the cultural and political trainwreck of the new Democratic era. Here's Greenwald:

There is nothing inherently wrong or illegitimate with citizens expressing extreme anger towards the Government and the ruling political class ....

But this Rush-Limbaugh/Fox-News/nationalistic movement isn't driven by anything noble or principled or even really anything political. If it were, they would have been extra angry and threatening and rebellious during the Bush years instead of complicit and meek and supportive to the point of cult-like adoration. Instead, they're just basically Republican dead-enders (at least what remains of the regional/extremist GOP), grounded in tribal allegiances that are fueled by their cultural, ethnic and religious identities and by perceived threats to past prerogatives -- now spiced with legitimate economic anxiety and an African-American President who, they were continuously warned for the last two years, is a Marxist, Terrorist-sympathizing black nationalist radical who wants to re-distribute their hard-earned money to welfare queens and illegal immigrants (and is now doing exactly that) ....

In one sense, all of this drooling rage is nothing more than the familiar face of extreme right-wing paranoia, as Richard Hofstadter famously described 45 years ago:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

But it's now inflamed by declining imperial power, genuine economic crises, an exotic Other occupying the White House, and potent technology harnessed by right-wing corporations such as Fox News to broadcast and disseminate it widely and continuously. At the very least, it's worth taking note of.

Well, I'll tell you what, having written two posts on this, one in which I noted how my buddy was thinking about buying a cabin somewhere up in Montana, I can guarantee you that people who are concerned about complete social breakdown are not apocalytic conspiracists.

But note especially Greenwald's reference reference to Richard Hofstadter's, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Interestingly, Hofstadter himself backed away from his earlier theories, during his own intellectual evolution, and in fact flirted with neoconservative advocacy in the 1960s.

In "Ethnicity, Progressive Historiography and the Making of Richard Hofstadter," David Brown notes that Hofstadter, in his later work:

... promoted a "vital kind of moral consensus" that encouraged scholars to compete meritoriously in the market-place of ideas. The New Left's rejection of its historical fathers struck Hofstadter as a denial of the open contestation of interpretive techniques necessary for sustaining historical debate.
Or, as Hofstader's Wikipedia entry notes, "His friend David Herbert Donald recalled, 'he was appalled by the growing radical, even revolutionary sentiment that he sensed among his colleagues and his students. He could never share their simplistic, moralistic approach.'"

A "simplistic, moralistic approach."

Sounds like Professor Donald's describing Glenn Greenwald himself. As many readers may recall, Greenwald is prone to his own hysterical ramblings about the rise of fascism in the United States under the "evil" BushCo Halliburton corporatist state. Indeed, as Dr. Pat Santy has noted about Greenwald:

Glenn Greenwald claims that "fear of terrorism" has been "inflamed and exploited" by the Bush Administration for the purpose of gaining power:
Bush opponents must finally overcome the one weapon which has protected George Bush again and again: fear. Fear of terrorism is what the Administration has successfully inflamed and exploited for four years in order to justify its most extreme and even illegal actions undertaken in the name of fighting terrorism.
Let's discuss this from a psychiatric and psychological perspective since these are the terms used in the quote above.

This blogger is essentially arguing that-- instead of using a healthy and appropriate psychological defense called anticipation against terrorism and the Islamofascists (who most certainly want to kill us and destroy our society) - we should instead switch to a psychotic one, denial; and maintain that the only thing we have to fear is ... President Bush. The latter is a defense mechanism called displacement that I have already discussed in an earlier post.

In fact, there is a strong element of paranoia here too. And a noticeable touch of hysteria - though he thinks he can use it to describe normal people justifiably afraid of irrational fanatics not amenable to reason. The implication is that the only purpose such "fears" (judged "inappropriate" by Greenwald's) are being manipulated must be to "justify illegal actions."

The basic tenor of his fear is easy to deduce: while we are fighting this illusory enemy, Bushitler has been amassing power and will soon set himself up as a dictator and destroy our freedom. I will let you decide who we have to fear more - the President of the United States or the religious fanatics of Islam who want to obtain a nuclear weapon? Who do we have to fear more: those who are trying to prevent another 9/11 or those who would like nothing better than to do something even worse in our country?
Dr. Santy shows Greenwald to be deeply afflicted by Bush Derangement Syndrome, a term that's loosely thrown around in politcal debates, but was in fact first offered as a kind of clinical diagnosis in psychiatric medicine.

In other words, either Glenn Greenwald is sick.

In any case stay tuned ...
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 4:57 AM 3 comments
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Monday, April 14, 2008

Gleen Greenwald's Latest Partisan Screed

Out in stores tomorrow is Glenn Greenwald's new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.

Greenwald's got a self-promotional post up, which links to a number of left-wing reviews already available. One of these is Digby's, where she notes:
I've been thinking about torture all week-end which naturally led me to think about Glenn Greenwald's new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics which is being released today.

It's not that the book is about torture, but it is about the Republican psyche, in particular about their weird cult of masculinity, which is what leads to over-the-top notions of violent necessity in dealing with national security.
Frankly, I suspect that Greenwald's audience consists entirely of those on the far-left of the spectrum. I mean these are his people, assorted antiwar whackos, anti-FISA-fanatics, and irretrievable BDS sufferers.

As Megan McArdle noted last week, Greenwald's pretty much unhinged, always railing against anything and everything, which McArdle identifies as the "non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure."

If you check the Amazon link, most of the reviews are posted by these same hangers-on lefties, a fact which doesn't impart much objectivity to the recommendations. Markos Moulitsas notes, for example, "One of the smartest and most important new voices to emerge in politics in years." Well, that just makes my day!

But check out the Publisher's Weekly blurb-review at Barnes and Noble:

With this provocative book, Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer and author of A Tragic Legacyand How Would a Patriot Act, purports to expose the "rank myth-making and exploitation of cultural, gender and psychological themes" by the Republican Party. The author begins his attack by targeting John Wayne, whom he sees as a template for right-wing notions of "American courage and conservative manliness." Wayne's avoidance of military service and his string of divorces, both at odds with his public image, are emblematic in this account of a fundamental hypocrisy implicit in conservative mythologies. Greenwald goes on to argue that prominent Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney display the same hypocrisy in their public ideologies and personal lives. Shouldering much of the blame are the press and the media, including Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, Chris Matthews and even Maureen Dowd, all of whom propagate popular attitudes about virile Republicans and effeminate Democrats. Despite the antipathy the author feels for Coulter, his writing is much like hers. More a partisan screed than a reasoned argument meant to persuade undecided readers, this repetitive text frequently devolves into personal attacks and vast generalizations.
Not surprisingly, Greenwald doesn't link to Barnes and Noble.

I can tell you right now, though, from getting the gist of Greenwald's thesis from his blog posts, "personal attacks" and vast generalizations" pretty much sum up his writing.

Mind you, I'm planning on reading the book, so I can't claim authority beyond the snippets of Greenwald's thesis I've reluctantly absorbed from his online screeds.

But to refer back to Digby's review, where she praises this notion of the GOP's "weird cult of masculinity" .... well, this so-clalled "weird cult" might be the biggest myth going, something to which only the crazed BDS-types might attach significance

The same aggressive "warmongering" that Greenwald denounces (again and again) is more likely described as America's historical reverence for traditional values of discipline and sacrifice, support of nation, the willingness to see threats for what they are, and a culture of pro-military conservativism holding the armed forces as an essential element in the preservation of democratic society.

These are hard notions to grasp for those who see every GOP national-security talking point as the latest communique from a reincarnated Joseph Goebbels totalitarian propaganda machine.

I'll have more on Greenwald's fantasies in upcoming posts.
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 2:17 PM 0 comments
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Thursday, April 10, 2014

Glenn Greenwald to Return to U.S. to Accept Polk Journalism Award

Well, it's certainly something I've been waiting for. I can't say it wouldn't be amusing to see Greenwald taken into custody.

From Michael Calderone, at Puff Ho, "Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras Returning to U.S. For First Time Since Snowden Revelations" (via Mediagazer):
NEW YORK -- Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, two American journalists who have been at the forefront of reporting on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, will return to the United States on Friday for the first time since revelations of worldwide surveillance broke.

Greenwald and Poitras, currently in Berlin, will attend Friday’s Polk Awards ceremony in New York City. The two journalists are sharing the prestigious journalism award with The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill and with Barton Gellman, who has led The Washington Post’s reporting on the NSA documents. Greenwald and Poitras interviewed Snowden last June in Hong Kong as he first revealed himself.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenwald said he’s motivated to return because “certain factions in the U.S. government have deliberately intensified the threatening climate for journalists.”

“It’s just the principle that I shouldn’t allow those tactics to stop me from returning to my own country,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald suggested government officials and members of Congress have used the language of criminalization as a tactic to chill investigative journalism.

In January, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested that journalists reporting on the NSA documents were acting as Snowden’s “accomplices.” The following month, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed that Greenwald was selling stolen goods by reporting stories on the NSA documents with news organizations around the world. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) has called for Greenwald to be prosecuted.

Greenwald said the government has not informed his legal counsel whether or not he could face any potential charges, or if he's been named in any grand jury investigation tied to the NSA disclosures.
Also at the Daily Dot, "NSA reporters Greenwald and Poitras to brave U.S. return Friday." And at NYT, "Polk Award for Snowden Coverage Draws 2 to U.S."

Posted by AmPowerBlog at 11:15 PM 0 comments
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Thursday, July 8, 2010

The Definitive Glenn Greenwald Takedown

It's not as comprehensive as Christopher Badeaux's definitive takedown of Andrew Sullivan last year, but Benjamin Kerstein's epic deconstruction of the Gleen Greenwald monstrosity is classic. (Or as Mike at Cold Fury notes, "it’s as good a takedown of this malignant swine I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few.") At New Ledger, "The Paper Greenwald" (via Instapundit):

Needless to say, RTWT. Kerstein opens his essay with a sense of astonishment:
The fallout from the Gaza flotilla incident has occasioned some of the most reprehensible writing that the anti-Israel establishment – which specializes in such things – has ever produced. Beyond question, however, one of the most egregious examples of this is the work Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald, whose comically overwrought pseudo-jeremiads on the subject constitute a case study in the kind of intellectual corruption that now appears to be the inevitable result of the bigoted hatred of Israel typical of today’s American progressivism.
This passage is pretty good too, almost at the conclusion:
His lies, slanders, and apologetics for political evil are not excusable, but it is impossible not to feel some measure of pity for Glenn Greenwald. He seems to be a man torn between those aspects of himself that are acceptable to the progressive faith, i.e., his politics and his homosexuality, and those that are anathema, i.e. that he is a Jew and an American. Loyal to progressivism because of the former, he must constantly prove himself worthy of belonging to it because of the latter. As a result, he is always on trial, both before his comrades and before himself. And he required to regularly debase himself on certain subjects by going above and beyond his fellows in both the violence of his denunciations and the intensity of his hysteria, even when the results are humiliating and reveal him as a moral and intellectual bankrupt. Saddest of all, the trial never ends, and the verdict is always known beforehand.

Ultimately, however, sympathy can only go so far. Whatever his secret motivations and terrors may be, Greenwald has long since made his deal with the devil, and what it has brought him to is a testament to just how morally and intellectually corrupted progressives are capable of becoming when they follow the tenets of their creed to the very bitter end ...
Yes, bitter alright. A definitely evil.

Again, be sure to click through to the essay. Especially good is the construction of Greenwald's placement in Satan's gallery of historical accomplices, but be sure understand the nature and implications of this "paper Greenwald."

RELATED: There's a pretty good reaction to Kerstein's essay around the 'spher. See, Cold Fury, Jamie Kirchick, The Jawa Report, John Noonan, Josh Trevino, Martin Kramer, Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, and Wake up America.

And Greenwald has responded as well, in an update to a post on CNN's Middle Eastern Affairs/Hezbollah editor, Octavia Nasr. Greenwald lashes out at Kerstein as "a standard-issue, Israel-devoted neocon smear artist," and thus confirms the former's argument perfectly. And here's a added dose of Greenwald's self-superior infallibility:
I view the increasingly unhinged attacks by the worst neocon elements to be a vindication of what I'm doing. I see them as pernicious and destructive, and genuinely welcome their contempt.
Fail.
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 2:16 PM 1 comments
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Friday, February 20, 2009

Jeffrey Goldberg Eviscerates Glenn Greenwald in One Paragraph

You know, I've been highly critical of Jeffrey Goldberg in the past, but the guy's actually growing on me a bit. Indeed, he wrote some of the most interesting essays during the recent Israel-Gaza war, brutally honest and fully respectable.

His reputation is getting another boost this afternoon with this brief but devastating takedown of Glenn Greenwald, "Glenn Greenwald is Hysterical":

Not funny-hysterical, just hysterical. I think he feels badly about writing for The American Conservative, maybe because he knows that writing for a magazine founded by Pat Buchanan and animated by Buchanan's hostility to Jews and to Israel is a self-marginalizing act for any Jewish person trying to convince other Jews to leave Team AIPAC and support J Street. I don't read Greenwald very much - only when Andrew links to him - but his characterization of my politics means that he's either dishonest or ignorant. If he hasn't read what I've written about, say, the settlements, or about AIPAC, then he's not qualified to comment on my politics. If he has read these articles, then he knows that I'm not a revanchist Zionist, but falsely accuses me of being one anyway. What a putz.
Now that's some decent blogging!

**********

For reference, see Glenn Greenwald, "Jeffrey Goldberg's Gasping, Dying Smear Tactics" (have doggy bags handy while reading this post).

See also, Robert Stacy McCain, "Glenn Greenwald: 'No Anti-Semite Could Possibly Hate Me Worse Than I Hate Myself'
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 1:27 PM 2 comments
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Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Neptunus Lex: The Two Dorks, Glenn Greenwald and Joe Klein

I dislike Glenn Greenwald so much that I deeply appreciate when folks hammer him for hate-filled America-basher that he is. That said, I don't like Joe Klein all that much either, so I wasn't sure how to approach his delicate balancing act between hammering Greenwald and maintaining his own position as a pretty-hard left-wing goon.

The problem is resolved by Neptunus Lex in his post on the blow-up, "When Two Dorks Collide"

Pretty much inside blogball, but Time’s Joe Klein and Salon’s Ellison Rick Ellensberg Thomas Ryan Ellers Wilson Glenn Greenwald are having a bit of a spat. Summat to do with leaked emails and national security concerns according to Klein. Stuff and nonsense insists M. Soque Poopette.

I believe Tom Maguire may have the best analysis of this particular “who’s libbing who” dust up:

Joe Klein wastes his pixels and our time lighting into Glenn Greenwald. Whatev – Klein will never be able to move far enough left to placate his audience, as much as he tries – the Atrios/Greenwald screamers have had good success in their goal of working the refs (OK, Bush helped…). However, I *may* be burying the lead – in the email leaked by Greenwald, Klein makes no attempt to conceal his partisan rooting interest in Democratic success, which *may* have led to some awkward moments with his editors. That is pure guesswork, BTW – I can think of plenty of commentators who make no attempt to hide their party preference; I just can’t recall how Klein is marketing and positioning himself.

None of this is particularly important in the grand scheme of things even if the blogger and the hack are relatively influential in their respective corners of the dorkosphere.

There's more at the link, but I've shamelessly reposted the good stuff here.

The whole (little) debate is a Memeorandum.
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 2:29 PM 0 comments
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Monday, December 22, 2008

Screw You Glenn Greenwald

I haven't bothered a Glenn Greenwald takedown as of late, and frankly I'm not ballsy enough to do it as well as Robert Stacy McCain, "Thank you, Glenn Greenwald."

Apparently the master sockpuppet called out "The Other McCain" as a "desperate" Bush warmonger and was quickly repaid the favor with both barrels:
This is amusing. Greenwald is demanding war crimes prosecution of Bush administration officials and yet I am "desperate"? Frankly, I don't even give a damn. If I turned on the TV sometime next year to see Paul Wolfowitz in the dock at the Hague, I'd shrug in mute acceptance, and if I blogged about it, would do so in an insouciant way.

But that's never going to happen, which is why I can merrily mock Greenwald's frothing outrage. Nothing, not even a New York Times editorial, can turn this madness of the fanatical fringe into a "mainstream" project. The Democrats would never allow it, no more than they would allow Obama to withdraw too precipitously from Iraq.

The political winds have blown, and the system has encompassed that wind, directing it toward the recent resurgence of the Democratic Party, and smart Democrats know that the surest way to lose that favorable breeze would be to overplay their hand by pandering to the monstrous appetites of Greenwald and his ilk. Obama, Pelosi and Reid will all answer this idiotic demand in the only way it deserves to be answered: Fuck you, Glenn Greenwald.
I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you Robert Stacy McCain.
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 10:56 AM 0 comments
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Friday, June 27, 2008

Stand Aside: Greenwald and Olbermann Battle

I wrote about the leftosphere's split over Barack Obama's FISA vote yesterday (here).

Well the fighting's picked up some steam overnight, with Keith Olbermann reponding to Glenn Greenwald's personal blindsiding attack. The Huffington Post has the details:

A war of words has broken out between two of the progressive blogosphere's most beloved figures: MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and blogger/author Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com.

In a post yesterday, Greenwald charged that Olbermann's "blind devotion to Barack Obama" had let him to excuse and defend Obama's support of the FISA 'compromise' legislation. Greenwald noted that Olbermann has previously condemned the idea of giving immunity to telecom companies that spied on Americans, calling it a "shameless, breathless, literally textbook example of Fascism" and comparing it to the actions of the Third Reich.

"But," Greenwald wrote, "[n]ow that Barack Obama supports a law that does the same thing -- and now that Obama justifies that support by claiming that this bill is necessary to keep us Safe from the Terrorists -- everything has changed."

Last night, Olbermann invited Newsweek's Jonathan Alter onto his show to discuss Obama's support for the FISA and telecom amnesty bill (video of the segment is here). There wasn't a syllable uttered about "immunizing corporate criminals" or "textbook examples of Fascism" or the Third Reich. There wasn't a word of rational criticism of the bill either. Instead, the two media stars jointly hailed Obama's bravery and strength -- as evidenced by his "standing up to the left" in order to support this important centrist FISA compromise. [...]

Grave warning on Olbermann's show that telecom amnesty and FISA revisions were hallmarks of Bush Fascism instantaneously transformed into a celebration that Obama, by supporting the same things, was leading a courageous, centrist crusade in defense of our Constitution.

There's much more - you can read Greenwald's full post here. And Olbermann responded with a post last night on Daily Kos.

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I don't watch Olbermann, so perhaps readers here can tell me what's up with MSNBC's resident spew-master? Caught up in Obamania, one presumes.

No matter ... I can't help enjoying these folks mash each other up.

Maybe today's show of unity between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will help folks on the left patch things up before November (although Greenwald will remain angry no matter what happens - it's his rage at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure.

Related: "Keith Olbermann: 100% Hacktacular."
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 11:14 AM 0 comments
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Saturday, May 3, 2008

Arianna Huffington's Right Wing Fringe

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Glenn Greenwald has a brief review, at Firedoglake (where else?), of Arianna Huffington's new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe.

I've written on Greenwald quite a bit, but ever since Megan McArdle smacked him down mercilessly, I can't resist quoting her line hammering him as a preface:

Mr Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure...
The anger's showing again in Greenwald's introduction to Huffington's book:

Arianna Huffington's latest book -- Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe -- thoroughly documents the most influential fact in our political life: namely, that the right-wing faction which has taken over the Republican Party is radical, deeply hostile to America's core political traditions and values, and incomparably destructive. As she puts it: "they don't believe in evolution but believe in torture."

But the real value of this book is its examination of the two key culprits in the ascension of this right-wing fringe: the establishment media and the Beltway leaders of the Democratic Party. Huffington's insights are most piercing and innovative when her targets are the bloated, empty-headed media stars who have done more than anyone else to allow this fringe group to masquerade as part of the mainstream. And she pinpoints the dual afflictions which have rendered the media totally supine, when they aren't actively complicit, in the face of this falsehood-spewing, extremist movement -- the twisted notion of journalistic "balance" which means that they present every claim no matter how objectively false, along with the "self-hating" mentality of "liberal" journalists who have internalized right-wing smears and thus repeat them and seek to accommodate them...
I'm always amazed at this theme of the compliant, enabling, and slacking journalistic establishment. If these guys are so bad - "the two key culprits," the second being the Democrats - Greenwald and Huffington should just quit writing about the GOP and direct their anger at the real enemy!

Not only that, the media-enabler is a fiction of the left's mind. Both left and right take sides, as we have in many respects a partisan press, with CNN on the left and Fox on the right in television journalism, and with the New York Times on the left and the Wall Street Journal on the right in print journalism. Most of the other political news outlets follow along down partisan lines from there.

Gross generalizations are the key logical fallacy at the heart of Greenwald's work, but to Huffington's as well, if this review has any merit to it at all.

But what's really good here is Huffington's language itself, which obviously gets Greenwald aroused:

The other not-so-innocent bystanders to the Right’s takeover are the Democrats who have continued to tread far too lightly when it comes to holding the GOP’s fanatical core accountable. Time and time again, the Democratic leadership has allowed itself to get played, run over, or distracted.

The "right's takeover" and the "GOP's fanatical core"?

What is Huffington taking about?

Oh sure, we'd need to see text from the full book itself for context, but the theme of a Republican takeover's clear enough, and wrong.

President Bush won a clear majority in 2004, and he's been battling the Supreme Court on constitutional issues like habeas corpus for enemy combatants, especially on Guantanamo Bay military commissions and detainees' rights, throughout his administration.

But note too: Arianna Huffington always been one of our current era's least effective critics of the Republican Party.

She was formerly married to Michael Huffington, a Republican big-money oil heir and carpetbagger who won a seat to Congress from Santa Barbara, California, in 1992. He immediately filed to challenge Dianne Feinstein in her reelection to the U.S. Senate for the next election in 2004. He spent over $30 million in a losing bid and Arianna divorced him in 1997.

My long-running counterfactual hypothesis on Huffington holds that she'd still be married had Michael won a seat to the Senate, and he'd likely have run for the GOP presidential nomination at least once. The lesson for young senatorial aspirants with hot, power-hungry wives is to know that your sweetcakes will show you the door shortly after losing the election. Hopefully those prenups are in order!

Arianna's a Greek-born and Cambridge-educated socialite, who parlayed her broken marriage into a career as an opportunistic far left-wing columnist.

When Mayhill Fowler got in trouble for outing Barack Obama's "bitter" comments at Huffington Post last month, Arianna had okay'd the publication of the breaking story while vacationing on David Geffen's 454 foot yacht in the Bahamas.

There's more of that worker solidarity for you!

This is not a criticism of her analysis (I'll likely read the book), only some background analysis to put things in perspective.

Greenwald doesn't care - anything's gold that take a good shot at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure!

Photo Credit: "Becoming more publisher than columnist, Arianna Huffington calls Huffington Post an “Internet newspaper,” New York Times

Posted by AmPowerBlog at 8:36 PM 1 comments
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Sunday, June 16, 2013

Here's That Declan McCullagh Article at CNET Everybody Was Tweeting Earlier — #NSA

Here's the link, "NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants" (via Memeorandum).

Read it all above.

Glenn Greenwald, especially, was really tweeting this yesterday:

Posted by AmPowerBlog at 12:15 AM 0 comments
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Thursday, July 30, 2009

You Too Can Ascend to an 'Unofficial Leadership Position Within the Blogosphere'

The quoted section is from Michael Massing, speaking of Glenn Greenwald, at the New York Review, "The News About the Internet. He talks about the bloggers he's found while researching the article, and he notes that the blogosphere's online commentators aggressively reject the newspaper industry's goal of objectivity. Here he discusses Greenwald:

The bloggers I have been reading reject such reflexive attempts at "balance," and it's their willingness to dispense with such conventions that makes the blogosphere a lively and bracing place. This is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Glenn Greenwald. A lawyer and former litigator, Greenwald is a relative newcomer to blogging, having begun only in December 2005, but as Eric Boehlert notes in his well-researched but somewhat breathless Bloggers on the Bus, within six months of his debut he "had ascended to an unofficial leadership position within the blogosphere." In contrast to the short, punchy posts favored by most bloggers, Greenwald offers a single daily essay of two thousand to three thousand words. In each, he draws on extensive research, amasses a daunting array of facts, and, as Boehlert puts it, builds his case "much like an attorney does."

Greenwald initially made his mark with fierce attacks on the Bush administration's policy of warrantless surveillance, and he continues to comment on the subject with great fury. Other recent targets have included Goldman Sachs (for its influence in the Obama administration), Jeffrey Rosen (for his dismissive New Republic piece on Sonia Sotomayor), Jeffrey Goldberg (for his attacks on the Times 's Roger Cohen), the Washington Post Op-Ed page (for the many neoconservatives in residence), and the national press in general (for its insistence on using euphemisms for the word "torture"). In June he wrote:

The steadfast, ongoing refusal of our leading media institutions to refer to what the Bush administration did as "torture"—even in the face of more than 100 detainee deaths; the use of that term by a leading Bush official to describe what was done at Guantánamo; and the fact that media outlets frequently use the word "torture" to describe the exact same methods when used by other countries—reveals much about how the modern journalist thinks.

For the press, Greenwald added, "there are two sides and only two sides to every 'debate'—the Beltway Democratic establishment and the Beltway Republican establishment."

In so vigilantly watching over the press, Greenwald has performed an invaluable service. But his posts have a downside. Absorbing the full force of his arguments and dutifully following his corroborating links, I felt myself drawn into an ideological wind tunnel, with the relentless gusts of opinion and analysis gradually wearing me down. After reading his harsh denunciations of Obama's decision not to release the latest batch of torture photos, I began to lose sight of the persuasive arguments that other commentators have made in support of the President's position. As well-argued and provocative as I found many of Greenwald's postings, they often seem oblivious to the practical considerations policymakers must contend with.

That's interesting.

And keep in mind, except a brief mention of Drudge Report, Massing does not discuss the many conservative bloggers who have broken huge stories ahead of the press. Recall that Power Line and a number of top conservative blogs provided most of the reporting that led to Dan Rather's resignation as anchor at CBS evening news.

But Massing has a point about the "wind-tunneling," although I think it's better to have it than not. The mainstream press is not going to cover the tough stories with the same no-holds-barred aggressiveness. It's up to readers to sift through the baloney and make up their own minds.

Greenwald responds to Massing here, "Practicalities v. Principles: The Prime Beltway Affliction" (via Memeorandum). Greenwald's a nasty guy, and he's reviled by many across the web (see, "Greenwald’s Sock Puppets: The Worst Blog Scandal Ever?"). But he's feted by Eric Boehlert as an unofficial leader of the blogosphere. I guess good content matters, even if it's leftist partisan hackery. Folks might keep that in mind when reading about threats of excommunication from the blogosphere (as was the case in the recent flame up around these parts).
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 12:29 PM 3 comments
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Monday, May 13, 2013

Glenn Greenwald Gets His Blowback On

This was getting some attention on Twitter yesterday, at RCP, "Bill Maher vs. Glenn Greenwald on Islam's History of Violence & U.S. Aggression":


And in a hilarious surprise development, David Atkins, at Hullabaloo, took both Greenwald and Maher to task, "Greenwald and Maher are both wrong." (It's all about "fundamentalism," I guess.) And that elicited a blowback against the blowback from Digby, "No sorry David, Glenn Greenwald is not wrong."

Actually, they're both wrong themselves, and as I always say, as much as I dislike Glenn Greenwald, at least he's consistent. See, "Debating Bill Maher on Muslims, Islam and US foreign policy."

More from Barry Eisler, "Don't Worry, US Imperialism is Cost-Free."

Posted by AmPowerBlog at 7:00 AM 0 comments
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