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.

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